Abstract
Recently, learning life cycle thinking (LCT) has attracted attention as a new approach of environmental education. This LCT-based environmental education is expected to make learners understand and feel the “link” between their daily lives and environmental problems through learning the life cycle of products and services, and consequently encourage people’s pro-environmental behaviors. The objective of the present study is to develop a scale for measuring this“ sense of link” which is a key to evaluate the effects of LCT-based environmental education programs. First, the present study defines the “sense of link” based on previous studies, and develop a questionnaire consisting of multiple question items to measure the “sense of link. Second, preliminary surveys using this questionnaire are conducted with 523 high school students, and a scale of the “sense of link” is proposed by refining the question items based on the collected survey data. Finally, questionnaire surveys using the proposed scale are conducted with 553 high school students, and the reliability and validity of the scale are verified using the collected survey data. The calculated Cronbach’s alpha and the factor analysis result reveal that the proposed scale has good reliability and validity.
