The effect of informal enviromental education on primary school students' perceptions of nature

The objective of this research is to examine/study the effect of the informal environment education enriched with the extracurricular activities on the primary school 5th grade students' perceptions towards nature. In the research, the descriptive mixed research pattern included in the mixed research design was used. In the quantitative part of the study, the single group pre-test and past-test experimental design was used, ın the qualitative part the case study design was based on. The study group of the research consist of 19 students studying in the 5th grade of primary education in 2018-2019 academic year. In the research, quantitative data were obtained with "Environmental attitude scale for Primary School Students", "Love of Nature Scale",and "Scientitic field trip attitude scale"; qualitative data were also abtained about nature perception with ''Word Association Test''.In the study, the pre-test and past-test scares of the quantitative data obtained from scales were analyzed in the statistical package program, and the descriptive content analysis was performed in the analysis of the qualitative data. As a result of the research, it is determined that the primary scholl 5th grade students' perceptions of nature as a result of the informal enviromental education program consist of six main categories: living elements, inonimate elemento, emotional elements, functional elements,spatial elements and negative elements. Again, as a result of the informal enviromental education program,it was determined that there was no significant difference between the students love of nature, attitude towards the enviroment,and attitudes towards scientific field trip. Keywords:Enviromental education ,informal education ,enviromental attitude ,love of natu