The Effect of Environmental Education Activities for the Developing Environment and Occupational Health in School

Abstract

activities to improve these concepts should be studied. There were two main purposes of this research:1) to examine the effect of the developed environmental education activities program which will improve occupational health and school safety on knowledge of environmental development, occupational health, environmental ethics and environmental volunteers and 2) to compare these averagescores between different genders and educational levels. This quasi experiment: one group pretest-posttest design was used for this study. 45 environmental leader students of Phuwiangwittayakhom school, Thailand and in academic year, 2018 were recruited to this study using purposive sampling. The instruments included:1) the developed environmental education activities program which will improve occupational health and school safety,2) tests on knowledge of Environmental development and occupational health, and3) questionnaires about environmental related ethics and environmental volunteers. Percentage, mean, standard deviation, and One–Way MANOVA, One–Way MANCOVA) and Univariate tests were used for data analyzing.

Results of the research showed that 1) average scores on knowledge of environmental development, occupational health, environmental ethics and environmental volunteers at posttest were significantly improved when compared to those at pretest (p<0.05);  2) Comparing between genders, there was statistically significant difference only the average score of environmental volunteers (p<0.05),whereas, there was no significant difference between  the  average scores of knowledge about environmental development and occupational health in the school andenvironmental ethics (p>0.05); 3) comparing between educational levels or different grades, there was no significant difference between the average scores of knowledge on environmental development and occupational health in the school, Also, environmental ethics and environmental volunteers of different students’ grade level (p>0.05).

In conclusion, the developed activities program can improve knowledge of environmental development, occupational health, environmental ethics and environmental volunteers for the whole group; however, it may be considered to apply this program for the different genders, and educational levels. Therefore, three recommendations were proposed: 1) schools should apply this of the developed environmental education activities program which will improve occupational health and school safety as extracurricular activities for leader students or environmental related student clubs because this program has specific contents and different periods, 2) teachers should consider and assign appropriate activities for female or male students, 3)  comparing between grades point averages and students’ roles in school and these outcome variables should be studied for the future research.