Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to compare and describe high school students' view of the environment in Japan and Germany and to give an insight into frameworks of thinking hidden in their view. A total of 308 students at upper secondary level in Japan and Germany were tested for their understanding of the environment concept by five forms of test ; free association test (FA), free definition test (FD), aspectizing test (AT), semantic differential test (SD) and multiple-choice test (MC). In this paper we will focus on the FA, SD and MC results alone. The following findings were obtained ; (1) Awareness of the environment in Japanese schools is relatively low, (2) However, both samples pay some attention to global environmental problems, (3) German students regard changes of the environment as critical for human beings and have a deeper understanding about protecting the environment, (4) Japanese students have a more optimistic view about changes in the environment, and regard the environment as rather durable. The results suggest the hypothesis that differences of awareness, attitude and behavior with respect to the environment are partly due to differences in general frameworks of thinking existing in the two countries.
