The effect of the enviromental education program on the cognitive structures of the five years against the environment concept

The aim of this study is to reveal the effect of the environmental education program on cognitive structures of the five-year-old children, which are integrated into pre-school education program, by applying the word association test. The sample of the study is consisted from 5 year-old children attending an independent kindergarten in Kastamonu province during the academic year of 2016-2017. The control and experimental group, which was determined by purposive sampling method, consisted of 41 children. Before the study, a word association test related to the concept about "environment" was applied as a pretest to all children including the experimental and control groups and descriptive analysis was used in the analysis of the data. In order to describe the perceptions of children about the concept of environment and to reveal the relationships between the concepts, Frequency tables are formed. Concept network was prepared by using this frequency table. After 12 weeks of environmental education program was applied to the experimental group children, the same procedure was repeated in both groups. When the pre-test of the children and the last test were compared, a statistically significant difference was found between the number of words produced by the children in the experimental group (M= 27, SS= 2.51) and the number of words that the children in the control group (M= 11.5, SS= 4.96) produced in the final test (t (267)= 1.622, p= .02). The difference between means (mean difference = 15.5, 95% Confidence Interval: -1.54 to 1.98) is of medium level. (eta square = .11). According to this, it is concluded that the environmental education program carried out with the experimental group developed the cognitive structures of the children in a positive way. The findings are presented in detail and some suggestions are given in the light of these.