Environmental literacy level in engineering students in Environmental Sciences from the Technological Institute of Sonora

Abstract

Due to the environmental crisis, the need arises in the higher educational institutions like the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (ITSON), have an Institutional Environmental Plan and provide education to degree and postgraduate related with the environment, to form graduates with greater environmental awareness. The objective of this study is to determine the level of environmental literacy and the degree of relationship between the environmental components (attitude, behavior and knowledge) in Engineering students in Environmental Sciences (ICA) at ITSON, through an instrument designed by the Environmental Education Center in Wisconsin (WCEE), USA. The study was performed in 2011, with 119 ICA students who were studying Environmental Engineering Science in the second, fourth, sixth and eighth semester of the academic year from January to May 2011 in the Campus ITSON Náinari. The capture and data analysis was supported by the program Excel and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17. After data analysis, it was determined the level of environmental literacy of ICA students. The mean score was 126.15 (70.08%), this indicates that the level of environmental literacy of the students is level C, which corresponds to an acceptable level of literacy, but in the lower level of this range that is 70 to 79%. In the analysis of the correlation between the environmental components, was found no significant relationship because all its results denoted weak positive or negative relationships. In the analysis of the gender variable was obtained that women had a slightly higher level of environmental literacy than men, with a score of 127.50 (70.83%), which corresponds to an acceptable level, while men were 124.95 (69.41%), which indicates an unacceptable level of literacy. Regarding the analysis of the semester variable, the semester with better environmental literacy proved to be the sixth semester with a score of 132.00 (73.33%), which corresponds to a level of literacy within the acceptable.