AcknowledgementsWe are grateful to the schools in West Bengal who provided access to their students.West Bengal 2 ABSTRACT The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is a 36-item instrument that is intended to measure six different aspects of students' perceptions of the academic quality of their programmes. It has been widely used in Western countries, and it has also been used in nonWestern countries, including China, Hong Kong, Japan and Pakistan. Nevertheless, in the latter countries, it has sometimes not been possible to identify the full range of constructs that were supposed to be measured by the original CEQ. We translated the CEQ into Bengali and administered this to 552 science students at 15 higher secondary schools in West Bengal, India. A confirmatory factor analysis found that their responses provided a poor fit to the original six-factor model of the CEQ. An exploratory factor analysis identified just four constructs, which reflected good teaching, generic skills, student support and appropriate workload. The items with salient loadings on the four factors were used to construct four scales. The students' scores on three of the four scales showed satisfactory levels of internal consistency. A factor analysis of their scores on all four scales yielded one overarching factor that could be interpreted as a measure of perceived academic quality. A reduced version of the CEQ consisting of the 30 items that constitute these four scales can be recommended as a measure of students' perceptions of the academic quality of programmes in West Bengal.

Tiblisi conference (1977) developed six objectives of Environmental Education in which 'environmental awareness' comes lowest in the hierarchy of cognitive development among the school children. This awareness acts as a motive force for the students to make their environment free from pollution and hazards. A study was conducted to find how far this awareness depends upon their sex and the pollution characteristics of the localities of their schools they read in. A sample of 1063 students completing their upper primary stage and comprising boys and girls hailed from schools situated in polluted and non polluting areas of West Bengal, India, was subjected to a test of awareness about 'environmental pollution'. It is found that pollution awareness of the students is almost independent of sex of the students and pollution characteristics in the neighbourhood of their schools but interaction of sex & school locality have some significant impact on such awareness.