Ecological concepts are not a recent matter; international organizations have already increased their efforts to provide better environmental education and ecological consciousness, although despite these efforts, a lack of attitudes and concepts were detected in the northeast of Spain. We evaluated the acquisition of concepts related to environmental education in the students as proposed by current legislation, as well as their relation to different parameters, such as geographical location, type of school, and gender. The result suggests that the students achieve a meaningful learning of the concepts proposed by legislation and that acquisition of this knowledge is related to gender and geographical location, but not to the type of secondary school.

Since the early sixties, national and international organizations have increased their efforts to provide better environmental education and ecological consciousness, although despite these efforts, a lack of attitudes and concepts was detected among students from secondary education of Spain. This lack of attitudes among students may be due to deficient concepts passed on from their teachers. Within this framework, the objective of this study is to evaluate the ecological consciousness level possessed by the teachers. The results of this study show that over 97% of the teachers possess enough knowledge on ecological consciousness concepts related to the syllabus from secondary education. It is essential to facilitate the evolution of society and its future generations, those on which the future and the development of nature and the world depend.

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Nowadays lacks in environmental education were detected even living in times of global change. In this research, the acquisition of knowledge related to environmental consciousness in secondary school students in northeast Spain is examined. A questionnaire for each secondary course was made with different kind of questions: specific of the course and of the previous knowledge. After a statistical analysis, with R programming language, a unilateral hypothesis contrast where the mean responses of the students answered correctly at the beginning and the end of the different courses of secondary education, were contrasted. After analysis, the results shows that the mean responses answered correctly at the end of the course is greater than the mean at the beginning of course in most cases studied, except two groups. The findings of this study indicate that the education of our students conclude with a meaningful learning as indicated but we should not neglect the non-formal education received by students in order to have people environmentally conscious.RESUMENActualmente se han detectado carencias en la educación ambiental aun estando viviendo momentos de cambio global. En el presente estudio de investigación, se examina la adquisición de los conocimientos relacionados con la concienciación ecológica en los alumnos de educación secundaria en el nordeste de España. Se realizó un cuestionario para cada curso con diferentes tipos de preguntas: específicas de curso y conocimientos previos. Tras un análisis estadístico, con el lenguaje y entorno de programación para análisis estadístico R, se realizó un contraste de medias unilateral donde se contrastó la media de respuestas respondidas correctamente de los alumnos de los diferentes cursos de educación secundaria, a final y a inicio de curso, de dicho cuestionario. Tras el análisis de los resultados se observa que la media de respuestas respondidas correctamente a final de curso es mayor que la media al inicio de curso en la mayoría de casos estudiados a excepción de dos grupos. Las conclusiones de este estudio indican que la educación que reciben nuestros alumnos concluye en un aprendizaje significativo tal y como se indica aunque no debemos descuidar la formación no formal que reciben los alumnos para así tener ciudadanos concienciados con el medio ambiente. Contacto principal: meritxell.notari@alu.umh.es