The Effects of the Ecological Transformation Education Program on the Ecological Literacy of Elementary School Students

This study aimed to investigate how ecological transformation education affects the ecological literacy of elementary school students. To achieve this, an educational program was developed and implemented to empirically measure its impact on students’ ecological understanding and attitudinal changes. The program’s effectiveness was assessed by analyzing pre- and post-intervention shifts in cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains of ecological literacy. The program was designed based on the 2022 revised national curriculum and a review of existing research related to ecological transformation education. Fifty sixth-grade students from two classes at G Elementary School in Gyeonggi Province were recruited. The experimental group participated in a 12-session ecological transformation education program developed by the researcher, while the control group followed the regular school curriculum. To measure changes in ecological literacy, an assessment tool for elementary students developed by Ha Young (2024) was utilized. The tool’s reliability was verified through pre-test data, and a post-test was conducted. Paired-sample t-tests were used to analyze changes within the experimental group, and independent-sample t-tests were conducted to compare the experimental and control groups. To enhance the reliability of the study, qualitative data from student portfolios and post-program interviews were also collected and analyzed alongside the quantitative results. This study concludes that the ecological transformation education program significantly improved the overall ecological literacy of elementary students. While there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups in the pre-test, the post-test results showed that the experimental group scored significantly higher than the control group. These findings are important as they demonstrate that ecological transformation education is effective in enhancing all three domains—cognitive, affective, and behavioral—of elementary students’ ecological literacy. These findings suggest that ecological transformation education is effective in enhancing all three domains—cognitive, affective, and behavioral—of elementary students’ ecological literacy.