Cognitive structures of university students about environmental education, climate change and consumption

We attempted to identify the cognitive structures of university students about environmental concepts. The results of this study on word-association tests indicates that these tests can be used as an effective technique to determine the knowledge levels of students, their cognitive structures, and to examine students’ conceptual transformation. The most interesting finding was about university student’s opinions about Americans food consumption, over-consumption of goods and their negative impacts on the environment. We found that the university students who participated this study were aware of the negative impacts on the world caused by their living habits. These findings suggest that people with high environmental awareness can behave better than those with a low environmental awareness. The findings also indicate that it is necessary to take into account how university students conceptualize global warming and consumer consumption, which are the contemporary subjects of our global world. The word association test is an open-ended test that assesses students' conceptual linking ability and also their accuracy in retrieving relevant knowledge. The word association test can measure learning performance just as well as traditional assessment methods. Apart from providing numerical scores for learning performance, the word association test can also provide teachers with useful qualitative evidence on students’ progress with their learning as well as their understanding of concepts. The technical procedures of setting, carrying out and scoring the tests are reasonably easy to handle. On the basis of the evidence shown, we suggest that the word association test should become part of the regular testing of environmental conceptual learning in schools. Based on the results, the following recommendations can be made:

First, university students can be provided with better training in environmental education when their instructors focus on the cognitive structures about environmental concepts.
Second, such studies should be taken into account to better train students from primary school through university levels.
Finally, further studies should focus on different ways to improve university students’ cognitive structures about environmental concepts. This technique can be particularly employed by academicians to evaluate students’ conceptual level of knowledge about the content of environmental sciences and environmental education courses.