Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Teaching environmental disciplines to students of non-environmental specialties in higher education institutions is aimed, first of all, at forming in them a worldview basis for understanding the interconnectedness of all processes and phenomena occurring in the world around them. Thus, through the assimilation of environmental laws, postulates and axioms, students form an environmental education, which, under certain conditions, can become the basis of an environmental culture. In practice, this is implemented through teaching the basics of ecology with the presentation of specific examples, consideration of situational cases, and solving problem tasks related to the main specialization of students. The distance learning format has posed many challenges to modern natural science education, among which the main one can be considered the need to preserve experimental research that applicants conduct independently, outside of educational institutions. The aim of this work is to develop a methodology for the formation of environmental culture in students in a distance learning format. In order to increase the environmental culture level of applicants when studying environmental disciplines, it is proposed to implement three types of experiments at home: to assess the morphological composition of solid household waste, to assess the phytotoxicity of soil samples; to assess the water mineral composition impact on the organoleptic properties of beverages. These experiments meet the safety criteria, results reproducibility criteria, ease of implementation and availability of necessary materials. 25 % of the surveyed applicants, after conducting an experiment on assessing the morphological composition of solid household waste, refused disposable plastic bags for shopping and purchased and use reusable shopping bags; 22 % began to realistically estimate the required amount of vegetables, fruits and greens needed in the coming week in order to reduce the share of this type of waste; 15 % of applicants purchased a reusable water bottle instead of PET water bottles that they bought daily; 21 % of applicants who periodically or permanently live in the private sector began to monitor which hazardous components of household chemicals get into wastewater and gradually began to use organic detergents. The data obtained indicate an increase in the level of environmental culture precisely after the implementation of home experiments when studying environmental disciplines in the distance learning format.
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7168292829