The Influence And Educational Intervention Study Of Empathy With Nature On Children’s Pro-environmental Attitude In Senior Class

The environmental attitude of preschool children refers to the positive or negative value judgment and tendency on environment-friendly or destructive behaviors.Empathy with nature contains dispositional empathy with nature and induced empathy with nature,dispositional empathy with nature is a stable psychological tendency to perceive and understand the natural emotion,induced empathy with nature refers to guide the children to perspective-taking struggling animals and manipulate views to arouse children’emotion.Related studies have shown that empathy with nature is closely related to the pro-environmental attitude and behavior of adults.This study applied the contact in the group of preschool children to explore the relationship between empathy with nature and pro-environmental attitude of preschool children.First of all,this study compiled the"Preschool Children’s Environmental Attitude Questionnaire"according to the previous studies and China’s national conditions.The questionnaire is a single factor model and contains a total of 11 items.The reliability and validity test of the questionnaire selected 218 middle and senior class children from a preschool in Dali as the research object.The analysis results showed that the questionnaire had good reliability level,α=0.740,and the questionnaire had good content validity and structure validity.Therefore,the questionnaire can be used as an effective tool to measure preschool children’s environmental attitude.Secondly,to explore the relationship between preschool children’environmental attitude and empathy with nature,this study first have used the questionnaire to measure 138 children’s environmental attitude,and used the self-report method and empathy continuum scoring to measure their general empathy and empathy with nature.Finally,the correlation analysis and regression analysis showing that the empathy with nature(r=0.463,P<0.001)and general empathy(r=0.352,P<0.001)are respectively significant correlation with preschool children’s environmental attitude,and compared with general empathy,the empathy with nature can better predict their environmental attitude(?R~2=0.088).In addition,there were significant age differences in preschool children’s environmental attitude and empathy with nature,rather than gender differences.Again,we conducted an intervention study and selected two senior classes as intervention group(N=23)and the control group(N=23)to further investigate whether children’s attitude toward the environment could be influenced by an inducing empathy with nature task.The results showed that the total score of environmental attitude in the experimental group(M=16.83,SD=2.462)was significantly higher than that in the control group(M=14.17,SD=3.185),P<0.01,d=0.932.Finally,based on the above findings,this study for the preschoolers environmental education put forward the corresponding education advice,in the hope of educators can grasp the age characteristics and law of development,from the perspective of empathy with nature to develop positive environmental attitude,and promote the sustainable development of the environment,and the all-round development of children.