The study of elementary school teacher's environmental risk perception and teaching behavior model in central area of Taiwan

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In this study, theory of planned behavior was used as main theoretical model and joined with three important variables (perception, response efficacy and action) generated from according to the literature review to form the study structure. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate elementary school teacher's environmental risk perception, teaching behavior patterns and the mutual effects among different behavior concepts. Besides, environment risk experts and the senior elementary teachers were interviewed in order to understand the present situation in environment risk teaching and the problems and solutions encountered by teacher when practicing environment risk teaching. A stratified random sampling was used in this study. A total of 539 elementary school teachers in central Taiwan were sampled to carry on the questionnaires, and 327 effective samples questionnaires were obtained and analyzed. The effective recovery rate was 60.7%. The Cronbach α were 0.924 for Elementary school teacher's environment risk perception behavior model and 0.934 for Elementary school teacher's environment risk teaching behavior model. The SPSS 12.0 and LISREL 8.70 statistics software were used for statistical analysis. The key conclusions were presented as follows: 1. The overall elementary school teacher's environment risk perception behavior well fitted the model (GFI=0.91, SRMR=0.048, RMSEA=0.057, CFI=0.98). The perception, subjective norm and self efficiency proportionately positively and significantly influenced behavior intention. Self efficiency positively and significantly influenced behavior. Behavior intention positively and significantly influenced behavior and action. Behavior positively and significantly influenced action. The behavior intention explanation strength reached to 68%, 45% for the behavior explanation strength, and 59% for the action explanation strength. 2. The overall elementary school teacher's environment risk teaching behavior well fitted the model (GFI=0.93, SRMR=0.039, RMSEA=0.057, CFI=0.98). The perception, subject norm and self efficiency positively and significantly influenced behavior intention. Perception and self efficiency positively and significantly influenced behavior. Behavior intention positively and significantly influenced behavior and action. The behavior intention explanation strength in this study reached to 52%, 63% for the behavior explanation strength, and 29 % for the action explanation strength. 3. The difficulties that elementary teachers’ encountered when carried on environment risk teaching were as followed (1) the class surplus time is insufficient (66.3%), (2) environment risk teaching material is not easy to obtain (55.9%), (3) the time to prepare for teaching environment risk is insufficient (49.4%). The important sources for environment risk information were (1) television, broadcast and network (89.4%), (2) books, newspapers and magazines (83.0 %). 4. The national policy and goal was lack for environment risk educational, and has not been promoted for environment risk teaching with all efforts. Therefore, the environment risk teaching has not carried out in all levels of schools. Even though, there are still a few colleges offering the related curriculum for students to take as elective comses. Some elementary teachers have also used their spare time to carry on environment risk teaching.