Environmental Education has been emphasized as it growing serious to solve the environmental problem is seriously threatening the human life itself.
The aim of environmental Education is to cultivate the human nature, attitude and behavior which are needed to solve its environmental problem.
This aim is similar to that of STS education, movement which emphasizes the problem related to the students' daily activities and social experience.
Therefore, this research develops and apply STS program on 'Environment' of the first-year high school students, investigate what kind of influence STS program has on the students' attitude and inquiring ability on the environment.
The object of this study was 208 commercial high school girls, They were divided into two groups, experiment and control group. Experiment group applied the developed STS program and control group took the traditional lecture-centered class.
In order to investigate the attitude on environmental problem, evaluating tools which were developed by Hyun Kyung Woo and Young Ran Jung were used with several questions added. Tools for examining researching ability were the questions adopted content of learning. Science teachers and educational graduated students have examined the validity. The results were analyzed by SAS statistic package.
The results of this study are as follows.
1. STS program showed meaningful effect on the students' attitude change on the environmental problem.(P < .001)
STS program was more effective in changing the students' actions as well as the their perception than the traditional class.
This program also showed meaningful relationship among the total points of perception level, performance level, and attitude on the environmental program (r = .4249, P < .001)
2. STS program developed inquiring ability more effectively than the traditional class (P <.001)
3. No relationship was found between the attitude and the inquiring ability on the environmental problem.