Studying the status of the existing environmental content of sciences textbooks in the general education course

Environmental education is a lesson for life. This means that environmental lessons must become practical in the social and individual behavior and daily life. What is noteworthy is the role of education system in teaching the environmental behavior through the textbooks from the early days of formal education. Thus, the purpose of this study is to check the content of textbooks general education with a focus on environmental problems and protecting the environment.   For this purpose, an eight volume textbook of experimental science of general educational courses for 8 grades were examined through content analysis in 2013 and 2014. In this study, using content analysis which has seven main components of environmental problems (air, water, soil and noise), protection of natural resources, waste separation and recycling, the role of human in the environment and 93 sub-component have been examined. The reliability of these tools was obtained to be 90.1% by experts. The findings indicated that the highest and the lowest attention to environmental issues in basic science textbooks have been payed to grade seven and grade three, respectively. In general, human role in environment received the highest attention and noise pollution received the lowest attention in the basic science textbooks.