Investigating student's environmental attitude and knowledge in the University of Zanjan

Some of the environmental problems are due to wrong behavior of human beings. Attitude and knowledge are effective on human being's behaviors. University graduates are playing important role in the management of society and it is essential to study their attitudes and knowledge about the environment and enhance their environmental culture. The aim of this descriptive-survey study was to investigate the attitude and knowledge of the students in the University of Zanjan about environment.
The target population consisted all the students of the University of Zanjan in the 1st semester of 2013-2014 (N=8944). According to the Krejci and Morgan formula, a sample size of 370 students was selected using a randomized multi-stage sampling method. Content and construct validity of the instrument was approved by a panel of experts, and its reliability was confirmed by conducting pretest and Cornbrash's alpha coefficient calculated as 0.78 and 0.73 for combined scales of attitude and knowledge.
Findings: The results showed that majority of students (71.8%) have favorable environmental attitude and majority of them (78.2%) have a moderate level of knowledge about environment issues. Age, number of course units, and information using had a meaningful relationship with the level students’ attitude and knowledge. There are also positive meaningful relationship between attitude and knowledge of students in the Faculty of Science and Humanities, but this relationship was negative meaningful between the students of the Faculty of Agriculture.
Increasing knowledge of the majority of students due to their favorable attitudes could have a significant effect on their behavior.