The degree of environmental awareness among fourth-year class teacher students in the College of Education at Damascus University

Abstract

The research aimed to identify the degree of environmental awareness among classroom teacher students at the College of Education at the University of Damascus, and the differences between the students’ opinions according to the variables of gender and academic specialization in the secondary school certificate. The researcher relied on the descriptive approach and used a questionnaire to collect information and data, which included four aspects of environmental awareness (pollution, Public cleanliness, rationalization, preservation of vegetation) and setting a number of items for each axis. The number of members of the original community reached 1,150 male and female students, and an available sample of 115 male and female students was chosen randomly, representing 10% of the original community for the academic year 2021/2022.

The results showed the following:

Conservation and cleanliness came in a high degree of awareness and ranked first and second, while preserving vegetation and pollution came in a medium degree of awareness and ranked third and fourth, and the overall score was high.

In pollution: food contamination came in a high degree of awareness and ranked first, while the rest of the other elements came in a medium degree of awareness, as air pollution came in second place, noise came in third place, and water pollution and smoking ranked fifth and last.

In rationalization: four elements ranked highly: water rationalization, energy rationalization, food rationalization, and fuel rationalization. In return for one item, rationalizing internal resources, there was a moderate level of awareness. In first place was rationalization of fuel, in second place was rationalization of water, in third place was rationalization of energy, in fourth place was rationalization of food, and finally in fifth place was rationalization of internal resources.

In cleanliness: three elements came with a high level of awareness, personal hygiene, street cleanliness, and public parks cleanliness, compared to two elements with a moderate degree, which are: neighborhood cleanliness, public institutions cleanliness, which came in first place, neighborhood cleanliness came in fourth place, and personal cleanliness came in third place/ Household cleanliness came in the fifth and last place, followed by cleanliness of public parks.

In preserving vegetation: protecting public parks and preventing tree felling

came in second place, while protecting public parks came in first place, and preventing tree cutting came in fifth place, compared to three elements that came in a moderate degree: urban sprawl in second place, and burning. Forests ranked fourth, soil degradation ranked fifth, yet the overall score for environmental awareness was high.

There were statistically significant differences between the average scores of environmental awareness among sample members according to the gender variable in favor of females, while there were no statistically significant differences between males and females in rationalization.

There are no statistically significant differences between the average degrees of environmental awareness among the sample members according to the variable of specialization in pollution, rationalization, and cleanliness. While there are statistically significant differences between the average scores of environmental awareness among the sample members according to the specialization variable in favor of literary specialization