Investigation of primary school candidates’ views on biodiversity

Abstract

Students' knowledge of environmental issues and biodiversity will affect their perspectives on the environment. The concrete steps to become a conscious individual will play an important role. In order to gain this awareness, students should be educated from the elementary school years. Therefore, primary school teachers have a big duty. The aim of the study is to determining difference the opinions of primary school teacher candidates about biodiversity. For this purpose, Attitudes and Thoughts on Decreasing Biodiversity Scale developed by Soysal (2012) was used in the study conducted according to quantitative research model. The scale was applied to a total of 319 primary school teachers of 1st , 2 nd, 3rd and 4th grades in the provinces of Nevşehir and Kırşehir. SPSS 22 software was used to analyse the data. With the analysis of the obtained data, it was concluded that the attitudes of the prospective teachers did not show a significant difference in terms of school, age and class, but showed a significant difference in terms of gender. The views of primary school teacher candidates in terms of various variables. The results yielded a significant difference with regard to gender variable. The views of female teacher candidates are higher than male teacher candidates. In line with the obtained results, it is suggested that the curriculum for undergraduate students be arranged in a way that enables them to have positive attitudes towards biodiversity and to have knowledge about biodiversity. In addition, activities that will enable teachers to enrich their lessons can be organized both in the curriculum and in-class applications in order to raise awareness about biodiversity starting from basic education.