Analysis of preschool textbooks in terms of attention to environmental components

Education is the most effective mechanism for society to deal with the greatest challenge of this century; That is, environmental pollution. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the attention to environmental education in preschool textbooks.

All Guilan preschool education textbooks were selected as the statistical population of the research and considering the nature of the present study, the entire statistical population was considered as the sample. The Study tools was a content analysis research checklist, including Wisconsin standards of environmental education. Accordingly, in the preschool textbooks, the sub-components related to each of the five key components of the above standards were extracted and each component was formulated into five sub-components.

After coding and counting the frequency of each of the sub-components, using descriptive statistics (frequency, relative frequency and cumulative frequency), the most attention was paid to the field of question and analysis skills (84.72%); then, personal and civil responsibility (6.38%); the skill of action and decision making (5%); the knowledge of natural processes and systems (2.77%); and, finally, the skill of studying environmental issues have allocated the least amount of attention (1.11%).

Since the attention to the criterias of environmental education in the content of preschool curriculum was not optimal and satisfactory, which is considered as a disadvantage of these books. Therefore, duo to the importance of teaching these issues in preschool education as Basic course in child learning, it is suggested that educational content planners focus more on textbook compilation, revision and incorporation of environmental education indicators and standards into textbooks.