Elementary School Students’ Understanding of the Relationship Between Environmental, Social, and Economic Aspects Through Biology Education

Abstract

Elementary school students’ understanding of the interrelationship between environmental, social, and economic aspects serves as a crucial foundation for fostering early awareness of sustainability. This study aims to analyze the effect of a contextual-based biology education approach on improving students’ understanding across five key aspects: environmental understanding, social understanding, economic understanding, analytical ability of interconnection, and sustainability awareness. The research employed a quantitative method using a quasi-experimental design of the Nonequivalent Control Group Design type. The subjects consisted of 22 fifth-grade students divided into two groups: experimental and control. Instruments included tests, questionnaires, and observation sheets. Data were analyzed using normality tests, homogeneity tests, independent samples t-tests, linear regression, and multicollinearity tests. The results indicate that the contextual learning approach has a significant effect on all student understanding variables, with the majority of students in the experimental group achieving high scores, particularly in environmental understanding and sustainability awareness. The t-test showed a significant difference between the experimental and control groups, while the regression analysis revealed a positive relationship between variable X and all Y variables. These findings support the effectiveness of contextual approaches as a holistic learning strategy in elementary education.