Factors Affecting Zanjan Elementary Teachers' Attitude toward Integrating Agriculture and Environment Education in Students’ Curriculum

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

          Integrating issues related to agriculture and environment (AE) in the curriculum of elementary school provide real life learning experiences to students and form a positive attitude in respect to AE. Elementary teachers' decision and readiness to teach non-required topics like AE are influenced by their personal attitude and ministry of education policy. The purpose of this descriptive- correlational study was to investigate effective factors on the teachers' attitude toward integrating AE in the curriculum. The statistical population consists all 4359 elementary teachers in Zanjan city which 343 of them were selected based on Krejcie and Morgan sampling table and applying randomized stratified sampling method. The validity of research tool was verified by a panel of related experts. A pilot study was conducted and calculated ordinal coefficient theta was at the appropriate level (equals with 0.75). The finding revealed that 78.4% of respondents had a positive attitude toward integrating AE in the curriculum. There were no meaningful correlation between teachers' attitude with their age, education attained, and total teaching experience. But, there was a positive correlation between teachers' attitude and their teaching experience in rural area.   Mann-Whitney test applied revealed that teachers with agricultural work experience hold more positive attitude in comparison with teachers of nonagricultural work experience. Also male teachers hold a more positive attitude in comparison with female teachers. Logistic regression revealed that three variables of age, having previous agriculture work experience and teaching experience in the rural area explained 30.8 percent of probability of teachers’ attitude

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References

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