Turkish high school students awareness about carbon footprint and the effects of teaching on fostering awareness

Abstract

Carbon emissions which are one of the most important human sourced causes of global clim ate change continue to rise rapidly despite all efforts to minimize these emissions. Carbon footprint (CF) education is significant in terms of changing the present situation. The aim of this study is to determine the awareness of high school students about the CF issue which takes place in the 9th grade level teaching program and to determine the effects of students' awareness on teaching. Hence, a research-based exploratory m ixed study design was conducted with 140 9th and 10th high school students. A special data collection instrument was developed for CF. Qualitative data that was collected was firstly subjected to the document analysis method. Then, an SPSS program was utilized in order to ascertain the percentage of students in different grade levels who were aware of the problem and to determine quantitatively the differences between them. As a result, it was found that the awareness of the students about the problems involving household and transportation components of CF were higher when compared to their awareness about lifestyles. However, the students do not hold a holistic approach about the relationship between CF and global climate change. When this case is evaluated, it appears that teaching of the concept of CF and the objectives related to that concept in the program were not achieved. A reevaluation of the teaching program and enrichment of teaching methods are crucial for teaching his issue. Besides, the test utilized in this study might also contribute to the enrichment of teaching by using it as a course material in CF teaching.