The focus of this study was to identify and describe misconceptions held by pre-service science teachers and high school students regarding the ozone layer depletion. The views of the participants were investigated using a closed-form questionnaire. The analysis of the survey data indicates that many high school students and pre-service science teachers possess an array of erroneous ideas about the ozone layer damage, its causes and consequences. For a better teaching of environmental issues, this study provides some implications for both teachers and researchers of science education.
It is clearly important that teachers themselves do not, unwittingly, perpetuate erroneous ideas and it might be argued that major large-scale environmental issues should be addressed during the training of teachers. As the literatures have shown, such environmental issues also provide examples of the potential importance of children’s preconceptions, perhaps constructed from out-of-school sources, in the learning process. Global environmental problems might provide a further dimension, namely abstract issues about which information has been received from the media and other informal sources. Thus, by including this as an element of “children’s learning”, it should be possible to emphasize the difference in the causes and consequences of different global problems without a specific addition to curriculum load (Boyes et al., 1995), for example, a foreign language education class can explore ozone layer depletion and the means to alleviate this problem on a student’s daily life. From the results of this study, it is obvious that global environmental problems should be more formally embedded in to the curricula of both trainee teachers and their students.