Determining visually impaired middle school students' perspectives toward environment and their mental models with regard to environmental problems

This study aimed at investigating whether visually impaired middle school students' perspectives in terms of ecocentric, anthropocentric and antipathetic attitudes toward environment differentiate with respect to demographic variables, and identifying their mental models towards environmental problems. A mixed research method was adoped which contains both qualitative and quantitative approaches. 87 visually impaired students (33 female and 50 male) who were studying at middle school of Ministry of National Education during 2015-2016 academic period in two different cities participated in the study. As data collection tools, "Environmental Attitudes Scale" was used to determine students' environmental perspectives in addition to interviews and the independent word association test which both aimed to investigate their mental models related to environmental issues. While for qualitative data gathered from the participants was used content analysis as one of the descriptive one, for quantitative data, one-way ANOVA and independent t-test as one of the parametric analysis were carried out using SPSS 22 statistic packet software. These results indicated that the environmental perspectives of visually impaired students differentiate only for family income in terms of ecocentric, anthropocentric and antipathetic attitudes, but not for the rest variables. On the other hand, it is revealed that visually impaired students realize environment, environmental issues and, the effect and cause of environmental problems as well as the solution ways of current problems. However, they only associate these issues and problems with their immediate surround, in other words, have inadequacies about considering them on a global scale. It is also observed that the students mentally focus on 7 different environmental problems and identified these issues with their sense organs: sight, touch, hearing, smell. In the context of the sources of environmental problems, visually impaired students attributed the causes of current problems to human-induced factors; they also identified natural disasters as one of the reasons of environmental problems. It is suggested for teachers to keep visually impaired students more in touch with nature to improve their ecocentric attitudes toward environment and to reflect their attitudes to behavior.