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Asia-Pacific
Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 7, Issue 2, Article
7 (Dec., 2006) Haluk ÖZMEN & Orhan KARAMUSTAFAOĞLU Environmental consciousness and education relationship: Determination of how environment-based concepts are placed in Turkish science curricula
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Turkish
Educational System consists of four main periods:
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Pre-school education: Pre-school education consists of the period in which children are not old enough to attend primary school and covers six years (between the 0 to 6). Families pay a monthly fee to pre-school educational institutions.
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Primary education: Primary education institutions consist of eight-year schools in which education is uninterrupted. It constitutes the period of education of children in the 6-14 age groups and free of charge in public schools. Science lessons are implemented between 4th and 8th level.
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Secondary education (lycees): This is at least a 3-year program following the primary school education. It covers for ages of 14-17. This education is noncompulsory and free of charge.
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Higher education: The aims of higher education are to educate individuals who will contribute to the development of the country in various fields. It changes 2 or 6 years after secondary education.
Turkey
has been deploying efforts aimed to improve its educational system,
educational programs infrastructure education equipment and to recruit
qualified stuff in order to train Turks to contribute to the culture and
technology of the world. With this aim in mind, the main education plan
covering the years 1996-2010, has been changed to make education more flexible
to meet personal, national and global requirements (TMNE, 1998). Parallel to
growing population, the number of students and schools are increasing rapidly
year by year in Turkey. The aim of the current science curricula of Turkey is
similar to that of developed countries, but the implementation is still
suffering because of inadequacies in the implementation process, such as poor
teacher preparation, ineffective teaching methods, lack of teaching aids, and
crowded classrooms (Keser, Özmen and Akdeniz, 2003). The numbers of teachers,
students, and schools belonging to 2004-2005 period in Turkey are given in
Table 2.
Table 2. Current Situation in Education in 2004-2005 Periods
Levels of Education
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Number of Students
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Number of Teachers
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Number of Schools
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Pre-school
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434.711
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22.030
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16.016
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Primary school
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10.565.389
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388.025
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35.558
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Secondary school
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3.039.449
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167.949
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6.811
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Higher education
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2.073.428
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79.555
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78
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Total
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16.112.977
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657.559
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58.463
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It is
seen from the Table 2 that the number of the students constitutes nearly the
quarter of the Turkish populations which is above 70 million. If the formal
environmental education given to these students is efficient, this contributes
to gain environmental consciousness to whole population. From this point of
view, the necessity of including the environment-based concepts into the
formal education curricula, especially science curricula, is obvious. Because
environmental-based concepts are generally situated into the science
curricula, determination of how environmental-based concepts take part in the
Turkish science curricula is aimed in this study.
