Analysis of climate change education in the world and Turkey and a proposal of educational model

Global climate change is not only an environmental issue that affects the century we are in, but it is also the most important environmental issue that will affect future generations. To solve this problem, the United Nations has pointed out various sanctions as well as the education sector as a solution focus, and has suggested countries to make improvements in curriculum programs by creating a comprehensive Climate Change Education program. Existing curriculum programs fail to deliver concepts related to climate and climate change in the order in which they should be, ignoring prerequisite learning units and dragging students into conceptual misconceptions. Moreover, students are not able to predict the possible impacts of climate change by linking climate change information with local and regional elements, and to develop skills in the context of Climate Change Mitigation and Climate Change Adaptation. The aim of the research is to present an alternative model proposal, called the Global Climate Change - Instructional Model, on which the aforementioned elements are based. The aim of this research is to test the development, implementation and effectiveness of the Global Climate Change - Instructional Program, which will meet the academic and cognitive expectations of middle school students. For this purpose, an instructional program has been established which includes acquisition, content, learning - teaching process and evaluation stages; and cover the topics of climate given with an interdisciplinary approach in the Social Studies and Science and Technology courses for the students at the 6th grade of middle school. The study was conducted with a total number of 52 students in Fatih Secondary School in Bartın, 26 of them being in the experimental group and 26 of them being in the control group. While Global Climate Change Instructional Program which developed by the researcher, were being taught by her to the experimental group, at the same time, the curriculum of the Ministry of Education were being taught by the classroom teacher to the control group. The practise phase of the Global Climate Change Instructional Program was completed in 12 weeks with a total of 24 lesson hours, 2 lessons per week in the fall semester of 2017-2018 academic year. The Global Climate Change Achievement Test which developed by the researcher, rubrics and in-class evaluation activities were used to collect data within the scope of the research. The efforts to develop the Global Climate Change Achievement Test were conducted with 1021 subjects in Istanbul and 150 subjects in Bartin. The Global Climate Change Achievement Test was given as pre-test, post-test and permanence test to the students in the experimental and control groups. Mann Whitney-U Test and Wilcoxon Marked Rank Test were used for statistical analysis of the data obtained from the tests. At the end of the research, it was determined that the experimental group, which applied the Global Climate Change Instructional Program by developed researcher, was more successful than the control group in which the current program was applied. According to the findings of the research, Global Climate Change Instructional Program, which prepared for the students at the 6th grade level, has led students' to get rid of misconceptions by increasing their knowledge of climate and climate change issues. Moreover, the program has led to that students anticipate possible impact on Turkey of climate change by increasing cognitive awareness of their. Based on these findings, comments and suggestions were made.