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Gender, age and subject matter: impact on teachers’ ecological values

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Abstract

By means of environmental education, teachers are supposed to intervene in pupils’ awareness and concern of environmental issues. Teachers’ environmental attitudes, however, have rarely been studied. We analysed 367 German pre- and in-service teachers’ environmental attitudes for their structure and socio-economic correlates within the frame of a European project. Thus, we retrieved for adults the two-dimensional model of ecological values (2-MEV) presented for adolescents by Bogner and Wiseman (Sci Educ Int 15(1):27–48, 2004). For the two domains, Preservation and Utilisation, the psychometric structure was confirmed and discriminative correlations with age, gender and teaching subject were unveiled. Further research is needed to deduce the implications for teaching practice.

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Notes

  1. Blaikie (1992) applied the Ecological World View Scale.

  2. Ewert and Baker (2001) applied the NEP Scale in studies from 1993 and 1995.

  3. A Holm correction for the accumulation of the alpha level does not change the results.

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Correspondence to Franz X. Bogner.

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Oerke, B., Bogner, F.X. Gender, age and subject matter: impact on teachers’ ecological values. Environmentalist 30, 111–122 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-009-9250-4

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