Consciência e comportamento ambiental entre universitários: uma análise comparativa em um Instituto Tecnológico de Ensino

• Autor(a) principal: Teixeira, Línnik Israel Lima
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Trabalho de conclusão de curso
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)
• Texto Completo: http://www.repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/29661
• topic: Educação ambiental; Sustentabilidade; Estudantes universitários

In the last few decades, the human action on environment has issued a global alert. The task of taking care of the environment, initially attributed to government authorities, was further assimilated by business companies and later on by common citizens. The individual commitment of a citizen involved in environment protection comes from an environmental awareness developed and reflected by a pro-environmental behavior. For this, environmental education is pointed out as a powerful tool to build collective environmental awareness, from basic to the highest education levels. Based on that, this study aimed the investigation of environmental awareness and behavior in students from a technological educational institute. This research consisted in examining the relation between environmental awareness and behavior using a questionnaire survey applied for both male and female students from several courses, semesters and environmental education levels. To achieve this purpose, we used an exploratory analysis in order to organize the theoretical framework to explain the evolution of sustainable thinking and its significance on higher education. Following that, this framework approached the relation between environmental awareness and behavior, inserting it on the context of environmental education. The research type was mainly descriptive, through quantitative methods for comparisons among average performances. Following statistical analysis of the data, two main results arose: a) concerning environmental awareness, no difference was observed among questionnaires from different courses and semesters surveyed and b) concerning environmental behavior, the highest averages for pro-environmental behavior were obtained by students from Environmental Engineering course and graduating students in general. In both scenarios, women and students with previous environmental educational of any kind obtained the highest averages in relation to the other groups. In conclusion, these results are in accordance with those from other studies and offer an opportunity for further investigations.