Marine environmental protection knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and curricular involvement of Taiwanese primary school students in senior grades.

In recent years, rapid changes in the Earth's climate and environment have influenced our lives greatly. The ocean occupies 70% of the Earth's surface and is intimately related to the regulation of climate, fostering of life, and also to social economy, as well as sports and leisure. Students in the senior years of primary education are in a phase of developing value systems. Concurrently, these students are also constantly using the Earth's resources. More importantly, they will play leading roles in the next generation. From the perspective of education, the learning status of student's cognition, attitudes, and behaviors regarding protection of the marine environment must be understood more clearly to avoid future mismanagement of marine environmental problems on the part of these students. Hence, this study uses correlative, regressive, and path statistical analysis to examine data collected from questionnaires. Results show that student knowledge of and attitudes toward marine environmental protection do not have significant influences on behaviors; however, student's marine environmental protection knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors are all within the medium to high range. Because of relatively low student curricular involvement, and because involvement has no correlation with knowledge performance, this study infers that school curricula are not the main sources of student information and attitudes regarding marine environmental protection. Rather, building student attitudes toward marine environmental protection by increasing their involvement in field trips indirectly influences behaviors that are protective of the marine environment. Such an approach is comparatively more effective and can serve as a reference for modifying the implementation methods of marine protection curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]