«Outdoor recreation activities participation and Environmental sensitivity of Primary students at Imathia Scholl’s»

The purpose of the present study was the investigation of Primary School students’ Environmental Awareness and its correlation with the frequency of participation in outdoor recreation activities. The sample consisted of 209 Primary School students, in the age of 11 to 12 years old, of Imathia’s Prefecture. The evaluation of students’ awareness with respect to environmental issues was done with Zafeiroudi and Hatzigeorgiadis’s (2013) scales: “Scale of perceived environmental information”, “Scale of cognitive beliefs about environment” and “Scale of affective beliefs about environment”. Additionally, the participants were asked about the frequency of their participation in outdoor recreation activities. The analysis of variance revealed statistically significant differences, not only in perceived environmental information and in cognitive beliefs about environment, but also in environmental responsibility, with the students with systematical participation in outdoor recreation activities scoring higher than those with frequent, partial, rare or no participation at all. On the other hand, the results indicated that the increase of student’s participation in such activities doesn’t affect their beliefs about environment. This fact troubles us about the effectiveness of participation in outdoor recreation activities with reference to environmentalism and how they can be enriched in Environmental Education programs.