The development level of ecological culture among pharmaceutical students in the experimental training conditions in Peter the Great Botanical Garden of the BIN RAS

Environmental education in botanical gardens that deals with the conservation and study of plant biodiversity and environmental protection can be successfully integrated into any level of education. A successful option for such integration can be considered an environmental project launched in 2021 for pharmaceutical students in Peter the Great Botanical Garden of the Komarov Botanical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences. The paper describes an experiment to identify the nature of the leading motives and the direction of student’s behavior in environmentally significant situations using the value-normative methodology of G.E. Zalessky. Experimental data allowed us to determine the preliminary typology of the level of environmental culture of pharmaceutical students before the start of the project. The results of the experiment show that the students of Murmansk Medical College developed a slightly higher level of ecological culture than the students of Saint Petersburg Pharmaceutical College (24% and 16%, respectively). However, at the same time 33% of the students of Murmansk Medical College showed a low level of ecological culture, which is almost twice higher than the students of Saint Petersburg Pharmaceutical College (16%). According to the indicator of a high level of ecological culture, pharmaceutical students of both experimental groups approach the results of O.I. Saltykova among schoolchildren and significantly exceed the results of students of other specialties.