Teacher views concerning the role of primary education secondary stage social sciences in developing the environmental consciousness

The aim of the study is to determine Social Sciences teachers? effectiveness in Social Sciences courses ondeveloping environmental consciousness.The research method used in the study is the combined method in which quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were used together.?The Teacher Views Scale on Developing the Environmental Consciousness ofthe Social Sciences course? developed by the researcher was used in thequantitative part of the research. In the qualitative part, the interviewform prepared for presenting the views of teachers on the effectiveness ofraising environmental awareness of Social Sciences course was used. Thestudy group of the quantitative part of the research consists of 120 SocialSciences teachers who serves in Elazığ in 2010-2011 school year, whilequalitative part consists of 9 Social Sciences teachers who were chosen withrandom sampling method from 120 teachers.SPSS was used in calculating the validity and reliability of the scale. Inanalysing the data; frequency and percentage, arithmetic average, standarddeviation valued, one-way analysis of variance and independent groups *t*test were used. In the qualitative part, 9 Social Sciences teachers were interviewed, and descriptive analysis was used in analysis of the interviews.According to the quantitative findings of the study, Social Sciences course,for teachers? views, is found to be an effective course in developing theenvironmental awareness, and this finding corresponds to interview results.Through these interviews, it was determined that there have been someproblems in using the intended method and techniques due to some reasonssuch as time, financial impossibility and inadequacy of physical elementsand thus classical methods (such as narrative and question-answer methods)were often used. It has been concluded that there are inadequacies insubjects about environment in terms of content in Social Sciences coursebooks. Teachers stated, within this course, that they use the course book asmain source in subjects about environment and utilize especially fromcomputer, DVD, CD and slides as visual and audio tools. Teachers alsoexpressed that gains related to environment are insufficient and there arein adequacies about content.Key words: Social Sciences Course, Environment, Environmental Consciousness, Environmental Education.