A Study on the Development and Evaluation of the Effectiveness of an Environmental Education Program for Young Children based on Problem-Based Learning

The purposes of this study were to develop an environmental education program for 5-year-olds based on Problem-Based Learning and to evaluate its effectiveness. The subjects of the study were 75 infants (37 in the experimental and 38 in the comparative group respectively) from four 5-year-old classes of child-care centers located in the cities of H and O, Gyeonggi-do. The experiment was conducted from April 18, 2023 to June 20, 2023. A paired t-test was conducted using the SPSS Statistics 25.0 Program to verify the effectiveness of the experimental and comparative groups in terms of knowledge on environmental conservation, attitude towards environmental conservation, environmental friendliness, and environmental sensitivity. The results of this study are as follows: First, as a result of the statistical analysis on the effect of the PBL-based environmental education program on environmental conservation knowledge of 5-year old children, the post-score has improved significantly over the pre-score with regards to the entire environmental conservation knowledge and its sub-factors. Second, the post-score of attitudes towards environmental conservation has improved significantly over the pre-score with respect to the entire environmental conservation attitude and its sub-factors. Third, the post-score of environmental sensitivity has improved significantly over the pre-score vis-à-vis all environmental sensitivity and sub-factors. Fourth, the post-score environmental friendliness has improved significantly over the pre-score with respect to the environmentally friendly attitudes and sub-factors. Based on these results, the program developed in this study has indicated its effectiveness and can be referred to as the source of primary data on early childhood environmental education methods. Therefore, the program is directly applicable to early childhood education centers.