Effects of environmental illiteracy and environmental awareness among middle school students on environmental behavior Erkan Arı 1 • Veysel Yılmaz 2 Received: 28 December 2015 / Accepted: 6 June 2016 / Published online: 11 June 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract This study proposes and employs a structural model to examine the effects of environmental literacy, environmental awareness, environmental attitudes, and environ- mental behavior among middle school students in Eskis ¸ehir on their purchase of envi- ronmentally friendly products. In the proposed structural model, environmental illiteracy and environmental awareness were the exogenous latent variables, while pro-environ- mental attitude, pro-environmental behavior, and the purchase of environmentally friendly products were the endogenous latent variables. The latent variable of environmental illiteracy did not have a statistically significant effect on environmental attitudes and purchase of environmentally friendly products, whereas environmental awareness had a positive effect on pro-environmental attitudes and the purchase of environmentally friendly products. These findings indicate that students with environmental awareness also develop positive attitudes toward the environment, and the presence of a positive attitude toward the environment leads them to display pro-environmental behaviors and adopt a positive attitude toward environmentally friendly products. Keywords Environmental awareness Á Environmental behavior Á Environmental attitudes Á Purchase of environmentally friendly products & Erkan Arı erkan.ari@dpu.edu.tr Veysel Yılmaz vyilmaz@ogu.edu.tr 1 Department of Econometrics, Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Dumlupınar University, Kutahya, Turkey 2 Department of Statistics, Faculty of Sciences and Literature, Eskis ¸ehir Osmangazi University, Eskisehir, Turkey 123 Environ Dev Sustain (2017) 19:1779–1793 DOI 10.1007/s10668-016-9826-3