Surveying Environmental Knowledge and Attitude of Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Grade Students in Rural and Urban Area (Case Study: Qazvin City)

Document Type : Original Article

Abstract

Environmental degradation, increasing loss of natural resources and growing trend of various environmental pollution shows the critical status of environment. Lack of human awareness about the importance of environment makes this situation more critical. Children and teens are the major capital of a community. The attention rate of the officials in upgrading the level of environmental knowledge of this group could be a basis to estimate the environmental progress in different fields. This research was done by determining the effective socio- economic and individual parameters on the level of environmental knowledge and attitude of urban and rural secondary school students. Statistical society of this study was all sixth, seventh and eighth grade students of two educational regions of Qazvin and villages which were covered by these two educational regions. Using stratified random sampling, 721 students were tested by the questionnaire. Collected data were analyzed by SPSS using ANOVA and T test. The results showed significant differences between urban and rural student’s environmental knowledge and no significant difference between urban and rural students’ environmental attitude.
From 16 different individual and socio-economic parameters which were tested in this research; gender and type of school were effective on both environmental knowledge and attitude of urban and rural communities while the effects of the other parameters were different between these two communities and some other parameters had no effects. The results of this research could be useful in future decision making to increase environmental knowledge and attitude of the students. 

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