Assessment of secondary school students’ awareness, knowledge and attitudes to environmental pollution issues in the mining regions of South Africa: implications for instruction and learning

Abstract

In this paper, we compared the levels of awareness, knowledge and attitudes (AKA) about environmental pollution of secondary school students from two South African provinces. The purpose was to determine the levels of AKA between students living under different environmental conditions. These two groups were students from a coal-mining province (Mpumalanga) and those from a non-coal-mining province (Gauteng). Participants were 753 purposively selected students from Grades 8 to 12 from the two the provinces thus: 423 from Mpumalanga province and 330 from Gauteng province. Their ages ranged from 13 to 23 years (M = 16.1; SD = 1.75). They responded to a 36-item awareness, knowledge and attitude questionnaire (r = 0.77) on issues relating to environmental pollution. Data were analysed through computing descriptive statistics followed by unpaired t-tests. Statistically significant differences were established between students from the two provinces with regards to all the environmental variables tested, where students from Mpumalanga province had higher mean scores than their counterparts from Gauteng. Students from both provinces identified newspapers as the most important source of information on environmental pollution.

Keywords:

• environmental attitudes
• environmental awareness
• environmental pollution
• environmental knowledge
• sources of environmental information

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa, for financial support in conducting this study; and to the reviewers for their critical comments and suggestions, which have significantly improved the quality of this paper.