Preservice teachers' beliefs about early childhood environmental education: a questionnaire development

The study aimed to develop a valid and reliable instrument for measuring pre-service early childhood teachers’ beliefs about integration of environmental education (EE) into early childhood education (ECE). With this purpose, we adopted Palmer’s model of EE (Palmer, 1998) relying on three interrelated approaches education about, in and for the environment. In the study, purposeful sampling method was used and data were collected from 332 voluntary pre-service early childhood teachers (including 199 juniors, 133 seniors). During this process, essential permissions were taken from the universities. Furthermore, it was stated that the participants could give up at any time during data collection. They weren’t required to provide any information which could reveal their identity. Beliefs about Integration of Environmental Education into Early Childhood Education (BIECE) Questionnaire was developed for this study is formed of two sections. The first includes demographic information (e.g, gender) and the second involves 18 Likert Type (where 1 corresponds to strongly disagree and 5 corresponds to strongly agree) items. The reliability coefficient of the instrument was calculated as .91 and explanatory factor analyses revealed three factors: Contributions of integration of EE into ECE for children’s development and learning (6 items, =.871), contributions of integration of EE into ECE for children’s gaining environmental knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors (7 items, =.922) and requirements for learning environment for the integration of EE into ECE (5 items, .745). If this scale is adopted (e.g, by revising some of the items), it can also be used with in-service early childhood teachers to explore their beliefs about early childhood EE. Furthermore, the results obtained via this instrument would suggest worthwhile implications for teacher educators, education policy makers and curriculum developers