Abstract:
Contemporary Sri Lanka face (a number) of sustainability issues.
Providing an appropriate education to the educational community and the general
public is one of the more effective strategies to help solve these problems. Education
for Sustainable development (ESD)-enriches education forms, the foundation for
these initiatives. Compared with other countries, Sri Lanka is far behind in focusing
on the ESD initiatives and is facing a challenge with the task of embedding ESD at
national, school, and subject levels. This study attempts to investigate how students
at junior secondary level demonstrate their understanding, attitudes and behaviours
concerning different aspect of sustainable development and to examine as to how
these impacts on the important for future development of ESD in Sri Lanka general
Education.
The study follows a survey research method. 397 Grade-9 students
in Secondary schools from the 12 educational zones in the Northern Province of Sri
Lanka are taken as the survey sample. Schools have been selected by using the
stratified random sampling method. The Questionnaire was adopted based on
Michalos et al. (2011)
The results reveal that students perceived fair to strong
understanding on the different aspect of Sustainable Development (SD) (mean =
1.97). The result indicate that students have positive attitudes (mean = 1.99) and
favorable behaviour (mean = 1.79) concerning different aspects of SD. Moreover,
there are significant gender differences in the knowledge as a feature of SD (t =
2.678; p < 0.05). However, no significant gender differences in the behavior (t =
1.467; p > 0.05) and attitudes (t = 1.197; p > 0.05). There are significant differences
in School Type (F= 5.630; p > 0.05) and education zone (F = 3.2987; p > 0.05) on
knowledge as a feature of SD whilst, there are no significant differences in school
type and education zone on behaviour and attitudes.
