| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 生命科學系在職進修碩士班 === 102 === Environmental education is one of the major subjects in the Grade 1-9 Curriculum Guidelines, in which animal ethics being an important topic. However, the current curriculum provides neither guiding principles nor planning suggestions to the animal ethics course, thereby reduces the teachers’ willingness to teach the course.
This study utilized the one-group pretest-posttest design to understand seventh graders’ information sources of animal ethics and their existing cognitive, affective, and behavioral attitudes toward animal ethics. The study also aimed to evaluate the impacts of an animal ethics course on the aforementioned attitudes toward animal ethics. Fifty-five seventh graders from a junior high school in Da-An District, Taipei City participated in the study. An animal ethics questionnaire designed by the researcher was administered to students before and after the implementation of the researcher-developed animal ethics course to assess their attitude change toward animal ethics in cognition, emotion, and behavior. Quantitative data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, independent-sample t-test, one-way ANOVA, paired-sample t-test, and Pearson product-moment correlation. In addition, students’ written responses on class worksheets were reviewed and analyzed to support the quantitative data.
The results indicated that: (1)The main information sources of animal ethics for seventh graders’ were from TV, computer, and other mass media, (2)Background variables such as gender, eating habits, and experiences of having companion animals and animal care made no significant difference in seventh graders’ affective attitude toward animal ethics. However, the latter three variables had significant impacts on cognitive and behavioral attitudes toward animal ethics, (3)Prior to the implementation of the animal ethics course, seventh graders’ cognitive, affective, and behavioral attitudes toward animal ethics were in the moderate level of acceptance. After taking the course, all three post-test attitudes were significantly higher than their counterparts in pre-test, and (4)There was a significant positive correlation among seventh grader’s cognitive, affective, and behavioral attitudes toward animal ethics.
The study results suggest that the researcher-developed animal ethics course could effectively enhance seventh graders’ cognitive, affective, and behavioral attitudes toward animal ethics. The course may also be integrated into the environmental education materials for the technology and life science curriculum in junior high school. The researcher recommends that teachers who are interested in promoting animal ethics in class utilize this course as the underlying structure and combine the internal and external educational resources for planning and implementing the syllabus. In addition, mass media may be further explored for its impact on students’ attitudes toward animal ethics to provide a better understanding of the factors influencing these attitudes through a qualitative research.
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