Abstract
As the gravity of the issue of the global warming surfaced, environmental protection and energy conservation have become one of the most serious issues that global society faces. At the status quo, there are criticisms for not effectively educating the students although the problem is very severe. In middle school, for instance, only 10% of the school offer environmental education while only $20{\sim}30%$ of the high school offer it. As witnessed by these examples, we can infer that there are not well-structured, effective environmental education for teenagers. Recently, NIE(Newspaper-In-Education) has been used as effective means for some fields of middle and/ or high school education. If so, it also could be used for environmental education. The researches, however, on the topic of NIE on environmental education are very rare. In this study, the effect of NIE on environmental education was empirically tested. Our basic assumption is that NIE will cause differences in environmental perception; the cognition and concern. And environment education through NIE will cause the high level of cognition, concern, and practice regarding environment issue. Using simple experimental design and regression analysis, we tested the effect of NIE on cognition, and, concern of environment issue, and then, on the practice of environment-improving action. The "cognition level" did not show significant difference between the experimental group(which was exposed to NIE) and control group(which was not exposed to NIE). The "concern level" for environment showed significant difference. Finally, the "practice level" showed highly significant difference between the experimental and the control group. According to regression analysis, "concern" and "NIE"(dummy variable) was turned out to be statistically significant variables for practice of environment improving action. Therefore, we came up with the conclusion that NIE, which provides the most up-to-date information regarding the environmental status, can serve as the good supplementary mechanism for the effective environment education in the present Korean middle school curriculum system. The statistical result also suggests that each individual school needs to employ and extend NIE method in its environment education curriculum.