Junior Secondary School Pupils' Perception of the Relevance of Environmental Issues: Implications for Science Educators

Abstract

This study focuses on how the Ghanaian youth would want to associate with some environmental matters regarding science and technology learning using the Relevance of Science Education (ROSE) survey questionnaire; and is also aimed at providing implications for science educators. The results reported in this study are an extract from the author's thesis and also from Ghanaian data which are aspects of much larger ROSE data collected from about 40 countries. The study involved a sample of 1027 Junior Secondary School (JSS) 3 or ninth graders (551 boys and 476 girls) drawn from all the 12 districts in the Central Region of Ghana. The study draws on only one of the themes covered by the ROSE instrument and pupils were asked to indicate the extent to which they agree with 18 statements on a 4-point Likert-type scale which goes from ‘Disagree' to ‘Agree'. The responses were analysed using SPSS and Excel. Descriptive statistics was conducted on the data and an independent sample 2-tailed t-test was used to explore the statistical significance of the differences in the items' mean at p ≤ 0.05. On the average, the results suggest that the majority of pupils in the sample, irrespective of the gender shared almost similar sentiments towards environmental protection issues and to a large extent, placed the same items on top as well as at the bottom of their priorities. An interesting aspect of pupils' concerns for the environment was their optimism about the future of the globe. The study suggests the need for science educators to consider pupils' views when teaching environmental related issues. African Journal of Educational Studies in Mathematics and Sciences Vol. 5 2007: pp. 87-98