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High School Students' Attitudes towards Sustainable Development: An Exploratory Investigation  

Kwon, Hyuksoo (Kongju National University)
Publication Information
대한공업교육학회지 / v.40, no.1, 2015 , pp. 163-179 More about this Journal
Abstract
Sustainable development brings many potential advantages to the society and environment. As such, many educational communities have concentrated on incorporating this concept into their educational programs for the K-12 classrooms. The K-12 technology educators have also exerted efforts to infuse the sustainable development concept into the K-12 national-curriculum level. The purpose of this study was to investigate the high school students' attitudes towards sustainable development. The study participants were 1,073 high school students from six high schools in Gyeonggi province. A self-reported instrument was used to obtain the students' demographic information and to come up with an attitudinal scale towards sustainable development. This study employed statistical ways of exploring the attitudinal level of the South Korean high school students and of describing the subcategories of the sustainable development. The findings described the high school students' attitudes towards sustainable development with regard to three components: (1) cognition of sustainable development; (2) practices in pursuit of sustainable development; and (3) perception of the education for sustainable development. The exploratory factor analysis supported three perspectives of the students' attitudes towards sustainable development. Also, the qualitative data collected and analyzed from the students' responses to the open-ended question posed to them indicated two domains of the students' cognition of and practices in pursuit of sustainable development. These findings were made on the bases of several recommendations regarding the research on and implementation of Education for Sustainable Development(ESD).
Keywords
High school students; sustainable development; technology education;
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