Abstract

The environmental education is based on the assumption that accurate knowledge and attitude could be linked to real action, but those have no effect on changing the behavior. To effect the change in behavior, we need to consider the reflective thinking which can make people change their behavior. The strategies to accelerate the reflective thinking are five steps of the reflective thinking process and the interaction through the discussion of students. And also, it is more proper if the contents are based on the real experiences of the students. Thus, this study tried to know whether the improvement of reflective thinking was able to affect to the environmental behavior. The environment education program was applied to the 60 elementary school 6th grade students in Gyeonggi-do and the survey methods were presented in the general experimental curriculum. To study 6th subjects (energy, harmful chemical material, heavy metal and agricultural chemicals, food additive, environmental friendly consumption, and recycle) was developed. This study shows the effect of the program on the environment knowledge, the environment behavior, the level of reflective-thinking and communication ability.

Keywords

• reflective thinking;
• environment education;
• elementary school students