Pixel International Conferences

The environmental issues become more serious everyday. Development of an environmental literacy citizen is the way to solve environmental problem efficiently and sustainability. Environmental education has an essential role as a tool for developing environmental literacy both formal and informal context. Since environmental literacy consists of two dimensions, environmental knowledge and environmental ethics, measuring environmental literacy has remained elusive. Multiple choice tests and rating scale questionnaires are commonly used, but both instrument were limited reliability since multiple choice test are encouraged for guessing, and rating scale frequently people avoid choosing the extremes options on the scale. This study developed a two-tier diagnostic test as an instrument that aimed to accurately measures two dimensions of environmental literacy. The test consists of 22 items of environmental knowledge and 10 items of environmental ethics. The instrument was evaluated by three experts and tested with 121 middle school students. The test reliability is .667.  The finding revealed that the students were at the moderate level of environmental literacy (16.82 out of 32), environmental knowledge (9.62 out of 22), and environmental ethics (7.20 out of 10).  The statistical analysis of Pearson’s correlation between knowledge and ethics suggested a weak positive correlation (.378).

Keyword: Environmental literacy, Two-tier diagnostic test, Environmental knowledge, environmental ethics.

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