Elementary school teachers' perceptions of the status of environmental education in elementary schools in eastern Taiwan, The Republic of China

The propose of this study was to investigate the status of environmental education (EE) in elementary schools in eastern Taiwan as perceived by elementary school teachers.;A questionnaire was developed by the researcher and administered to 686 teachers who were selected from 84 elementary schools in Ilan, Hualien, and Taitung counties in eastern Taiwan through the stratified random sampling method. Among the returned questionnaires, 494 (72%) were complete. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were established.;The major findings of this study were: (1) Approximately one-third of the respondents had attended inservice programs. Workshop and lecture were the most often used methodologies in the inservice programs which teachers attended. More than one-half of the inservice programs dealt with EE content knowledge. Few of them were related to EE teaching methods. (2) EE should be a required part of the elementary school curricula and EE content should be incorporated into all school subjects. (3) Outdoor education, audio-visual presentations, and inquiry (discovery) approaches were perceived by the teachers as the most important instructional strategies for effective EE teaching. (4) Most of the teachers perceived the ten specific EE teaching materials or resources as important in supporting EE teaching, for example, audio-visual equipment; outdoor open areas; on-campus outdoor site resources; newspapers, magazines, and journals; museums, zoos, and parks; teacher's guide; laboratory facilities; and field equipment. (5) Teachers expressed positive attitudes toward teaching EE. (6) If possible, EE and environmental studies should be listed as required courses in teacher preparation programs. (7) The major difficulties which teachers perceived concerning the implementation of EE were the lack of appropriate instructional materials; appropriate indoor facilities; inservice opportunities; preparation time; funding; and, outdoor facilities and learning sites.