Environmental education in Oman: exploring the factors determining students’ self-reported environmental attitudes and behaviours toward environmental issues

Albalushi, Hana (2020) Environmental education in Oman: exploring the factors determining students’ self-reported environmental attitudes and behaviours toward environmental issues. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

The objective of this research is to consider self-reported environmental attitudes and behaviours of Omani students and identify the factors that determine them. The aim of this research is to explore the current environmental education curriculum in Oman. Specifically, this research is designed to: 1) survey Omani students’ attitudes and behaviours toward environmental issues; 2) identify school-related factors that might influence Omani students’ self-reported environmental attitudes and behaviours.
A research design of explanatory sequential mixed methodology is adopted in order to gather the information from primary and secondary sources. An instrument of 53 items was designed and tested on 212 students from four secondary schools in Oman. This was followed by 25 semi-structured interviews with students, teachers and heads from the same four secondary schools.
The data generated from the questionnaires have been analysed using two methods: 1) descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation tests; 2) principle components analysis using factor analysis. The data generated from the interviews have been analysed using thematic analysis.
Findings indicate that educational level and gender have a strong relationship with environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. There was a significant relationship between gender and environmental knowledge scores, with males receiving higher scores than females. There was a significant relationship between school educational level and environmental attitudes and behaviours scores as well, with higher levels of school education receiving slightly higher environmental attitudes and behaviours scores than those from lower levels of school education.
Environmental curriculum and school mission appear to be moderate contributors to environmental attitudes and behaviours, whereas, environmental knowledge appears to be a slight positive contributor to environmental attitudes and behaviours. Overall, the result of this study suggests that including environmental items in schools’ missions improved students’ environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviours.

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