Effectiveness of Teaching Environmental Concepts through Animism-Based Storytelling on Children's Environmental Knowledge and Environmental Attitude

One of the most important recent concerns in the world is the environment and its protection. Environmental education by storytelling, which is based on children's thinking mechanisms, can be considered a method for child education. This study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effectiveness of teaching environmental concepts through animism-based storytelling on children's environmental knowledge and attitude. The research is quasi-experimental, including two groups (experimental and control), a pre-test and a post-test. The statistical population includes all the first-grade elementary school students of Shazand, Markazi Province, Iran, in the academic year 2021-2022, with 17 people in each group selected by convenience sampling. The instrument was Leeming's (1995) questionnaire, which includes two subscales of environmental knowledge and environmental attitude. Data analysis was carried out using multivariate covariance analysis. The findings indicated that there is a significant difference between the environmental knowledge and attitude of the experimental group and the control group. The results indicated that presenting environmental concepts using animism-based storytelling had a significant effect on children's environmental knowledge and attitude. In conclusion, although storytelling can generally affect knowledge and attitude, animism-based storytelling has a more significant effect on children's environmental knowledge and attitude