Developing an environmental knowledge and attitude instrument to measure students' environmental literacy in the Australian and Korean secondary school science contexts

This study aims to develop the Environmental Literacy Test for Secondary School Questionnaire (ELTSQ) to assess secondary Australian and Korean students' environmental literacy (EL) in science classrooms. To construct the environmental knowledge (EK) questionnaire in the ELTSQ, environmental education (EE)-related content outcomes in the science curriculum/syllabus were selected and analysed using Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (RBT). The analysis found that most of the EE content outcomes were grouped under Understand/ Conceptual categories in both Australia's New South Wales state (NSW) and Korea. No Create category in the cognitive process dimension was found. The Environmental Attitude (EA) questionnaire in the ELTSQ was prepared based on collecting items from the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) questionnaire and existing attitudes questionnaires. The ELTSQ was distributed to a total of 380 Korean secondary students. The EK and EA scales showed high Cronbach alpha reliability. All mean percentage of correct answer/responses in EK and EA scale are all-around 50 %. The t-test results revealed that there was a significant difference between students in Years 7-8 and Years 9-10 in the EK scale, but no significant school-year differences in the EA. For the correlation between EK and EA, they were significantly and highly correlated with each other. In conclusion, the developed ELTSQ has shown the ability to measure Korean secondary school students' EK and EA in science contexts. Summary