The present study examined the levels of four environmental dimensions; environmental awareness, attitudes towards recovery, attitudes towards recycling and environmental behavior among grade 12 students in Sri Lanka. A standard scale that has four environmental dimensions and personal information was used. Effects of gender, study stream, residential area and family income of students on each of the four environmental dimensions were determined by conducting Levene’s test, Kruskal Wallis H test, Dunnet’sT3 test and Mann Whiteny U test using SPSS for Windows version 26. Correlation analysis was run to reveal the associations among the four environmental dimensions. A sample of 1006 grade 12 students participated in the study. Students confirmed a moderate level of awareness, attitudes and behavior towards the environment. Girls’ levels in terms of all four dimensions were significantly higher than those of boys. The result strongly confirmed the impact of study stream on environmental awareness, attitudes and behavior of students. Awareness, attitudes and behavior towards environment of the rural students were at the highest level. However, no significant differences were observed among students from different family income groups. The observed weak correlation between environmental awareness and behavior confirmed that knowledge has not effectively transformed into environmental responsible behavior. Moreover, strong association could be observed between attitudes towards recycling and environmentally responsible behavior of the students. Observed positive correlations among four environmental dimensions indicate that students’ perceived environmental awareness and attitudes positively influence their responsible environmental behavior. These results emphasize the importance of incorporating essential environmental concepts and learning teaching strategies into the existing school curriculum to ensure students’ environmentally responsible behavior. Based on the present findings, suggestions were made for curriculum developers and educators to upgrade the existing curriculum.

Research shows that learning enjoyment in specific socio-scientific issues (SSI) plays an important role in predicting grade 10 students’ learning interest and learning enjoyment (i.e., genuine interest) in SSI subjects generally. However, it remains unexplored whether learning enjoyment also mediates a predictive effect of learning interest in a Big Science SSI of pressing contemporary global concern—COVID-19—on grade 12 high school students’ learning interest in SSI generally. The purpose of this study is to investigate how learning enjoyment may mediate the predictive effect of learning interest in the specific Big Science SSI of COVID-19 specifically on students’ learning interest in SSI subjects generally. Latent variable modeling using data collected from grade 12 students (N = 691) showed personal perceptions of learning enjoyment in SSI partially mediated the predictive effect of learning interest in the SSI of COVID-19 on learning interest in other Big Science SSI subjects. Implications for promoting among science educators and policy specialists the active development of students’ individual interests and involvement in other 21st century Big Science SSI challenges are forwarded.