Human interventions in nature often reduce the quality of the environment, which directly or indirectly affects the quality of life of people. About 50 years ago the concept of environmental literacy was created and later environmental education, whose main goal is the development of people with appropriate environmental knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Knowledge about what kind of impact humans have on the environment and what changes are occurring in the nature, thus also represents an important part of the environmental literacy of individuals and strongly interdisciplinary links environmental education with science education. With this study I wanted to explore the topic of the environmental issues, particularly the impact of humans on the environment. The first part presents the theoretical part, which clarifies the environmental literacy and its importance, the development and the impact on education in schools. In the second part I focused on making a good knowledge test, which I used as an instrument for the study “Seventh grade primary school students' knowledge about environmental topics”. The results showed average knowledge of students regarding the topic of environment. The best results were shown in tasks requiring only the knowledge of contents and the fewest points on average were shown in tasks of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The students were more successful in the tasks about the man polluting air, water and soil, than in the tasks regarding the man changing the ecosystems. With the analysis and the determination of measurement characteristics (validity, reliability, sensitivity and objectivity), as well as the attractiveness of the answers that were given in the exam, difficulty and discriminativity of individual tasks, our goal was to create a good and suitable knowledge test. In the second, empirical part I analyzed the curriculum from 1st to 7th grade of primary school. The study involved 62 pupils from selected school in the central area of Slovenia.
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