Elementary School and High School Students’ Environmental Worldviews: NEP Scale Application

Abstract. Attitudes towards environment represent the ways individuals perceive the world around them. Such attitudes are worth exploring because they frequently determine the behavior that either increases or decreases the quality of the environment. The aim of the paper is to investigate elementary and high school students’ environmental worldviews and to determine the dimensionality of the NEP Scale on our sample. In addition, the aim of the paper is point to potential differences betweeen boys and girls as well as students with different school achievements. The environmental worldviews were analyzed using the NEP Scale (New Environmental/Ecological Paradigm). The research encompassed 402 students of age 13-15. The results show that our respondents demonstrate a slight tendency towards pro-environmentalism. Three factors were obtained using factor analysis: Environmental Crisis, (Anti) anthropocentrism, and (Anti) exemptionalism. The difference between the boys and girls became manifest in the third factor. According to the research results, girls are more inclined to believe that people, regardless of their aptitude to develop science and technology, cannot be exempt from the natural environment and cannot influence natural processes. School achievement is in positive correlation with the Environmental Crisis factor. The research results indicate that decision-makers in education, researchers, and practitioners have to deal with a serious task – they have to find the ways how to increase the impact of the regular, everyday school life on students’ attitudes towards the environment