Climate Change Awareness Levels and Factors Affecting the Awareness of Upper Secondary School Students in Central Region, Thailand

EasyChair Preprint 13768

Abstract

Climate change is a major threat to the future of today’s youth. Education is one of the factors that prepares individuals and communities in climate change mitigation and adaptation processes. However, in order to help people to comprehend the various messages around climate change, it is important to understand the level of climate change awareness of our students and factors affecting climate change awareness. This study, therefore, examine upper secondary school students’ awareness of climate change, and factors affecting the awareness. The sample group of this research was 250 students from the school in central Thailand. The climate change awareness assessment consists of two parts, 1) general information of each students including sex, education level, GPA, and academic program and 2) students’ climate change awareness which including two session, which are true-false items about an understanding of climate change, with the index of Item objective congruence ranged between 0.67-1.00, and the reliability was .70; and five rating scales items about an attitude and action of climate change with the item objective congruence ranged between 0.67 - 1.00, and the reliability was .97. The levels of climate change awareness were classified into 4 levels (very high, high, medium, and low). The number of students in each level were analyzed using descriptive statistics. For the affecting factors, the data was analyzed using Chi-Square test. The findings revealed that most of the students were at moderate level of climate change awareness (n=151, 60.4%), and follow by high level (n=92, 36.8%). Only few students were at very high (n=3, 1.2%) and low level (n=4, 1.6%). The result also showed that female students aware of climate change more than male. In addition, students’ awareness of climate change is affected by their academic program and level of achievement at a significant level of .05.

Keyphrases: Attitude, Climate change awareness, action, understanding, upper secondary school

@booklet{EasyChair:13768,
  author    = {Piyatida Supa and Chanyah Dahsah},
  title     = {Climate Change Awareness Levels and Factors Affecting the Awareness of Upper Secondary School Students in Central Region, Thailand},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 13768},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}