Examination of sustainability awareness of 6th gradestudents and their teachers' opinions

The purpose of this study is to examine the sustainability awareness of 6th grade students and to determine teachers' opinions. For this purpose, 6 science teachers and 277 sixth grade students working in Kastamonu province in the 2023-2024 academic year were included in the study. Semi-structured interviews and the "Awareness Scale for Sustainable Living" were used as data collection tools within the scope of the study. The awareness of the teachers towards sustainability and the practices with which they tried to bring sustainability awareness to the students were tried to be determined with the semi-structured interview. The "Awareness Scale for Sustainable Living" was applied to the sixth grade students who were educated with the same teacher. The scale is a 3-point Likert scale consisting of 20 items and includes three sub-dimensions as environment, social and economic. The interviews were recorded using a voice recorder and then transcribed and turned into written documents. The written documents were coded by the researcher. According to the results obtained from the research; it is seen that teachers define the concept of sustainability differently, they mostly find the subject of sustainability insufficient in the science course curriculum, especially the subject being the last unit, the few achievements, being a new achievement and the lack of applied methods/techniques. Teachers stated that they mostly use brainstorming, plain narration and videos in their lessons in order to provide sustainability awareness. As a result of the survey applied to the students; it was determined that the students have knowledge about the subject, their awareness does not change according to gender but it is related to the students' success level. Moreover, it was determined that the sustainability perceptions of successful students create more significant differences in terms of science success compared to other students.