DETERMINATION OF ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AWARENESS OF PRE-SCHOOL TEACHER CANDIDATES
Ecological footprint is a biologically fertile soil and water area needed to produce and consume the resources that an individual, community or activity consumes with current technology and resource management. The ecological footprint also refers to the sustainability relation between the rate of human consumption of earth resources and the degree of healthy or unhealthy ecosystem. It will also be easier for students to turn this information into positive attitude and behavior if they know what ecological footprints mean, what they need to do to reduce their components and ecological footprints. For this reason, this study was planned and conducted in order to determine the pre-school prospective teachers' demographic characteristics of ecological footprint awareness. The research was applied to a total of 170 teacher candidates who attended Kırıkkale University, Faculty of Education, Department of Basic Education, Division of Preschool Education in 2016-2017 academic year. The "Ecological Footprint Awareness Scale" developed by Coşkun and Sarıkaya and composed of 46 items was used in 2013 as data collection tool. Standard deviation, arithmetic mean, t test for binary groups and ANOVA for more groups were used in the analysis of the data. In the study, it was determined that the ecological footprint awareness of the teacher candidates showed significant differences according to the age, sex, monthly income level, education level of the parents, the source of information about the environment and the point of view towards the environment (p <0.05). Further studies on ecological footprint awareness can be conducted in depth and further study on a wider sample.

Keywords
Key words: Environment, ecological footprint, teacher candidates