Global Environmental Priorities of Engineering Students in Krakow Poland

Abstract

This paper reports and interprets the rankings of Rodger Bybee's 12 global-environmental issues/threats by 175 first and second year engineering students in the Technical University of Krakow, Poland. The students were divided into control and treatment groups and the treatment group was provided with an incisive description of the issues. Both groups were also compared on how they answered a set of questions concerning their sources of information about the threats. The judgements were analyzed using the probabilistic geometric modeling algorithms known as PROSCAL. The results indicate that personal experience with local environmental issues are the most important determinant for ranking global environmental threats. Some implications for increasing the impact of school learning through the use of the constructivist learning model are also discussed.