Under the premise that the young generation of teenagers cannot be considered to be uniform, this study identified groups of teenagers based on their level of climate change awareness. Questionnaires answered by 760 teenagers (13-16 years old) from Germany and Austria were analyzed using a hierarchical cluster analysis. The teenagers were assigned to four groups that differed as to their cognitive, affective and conative aspects of climate change awareness. Based on the empirical results, the authors argue that there are different subgroups of young people in terms of climate change awareness, which climate change education should take into consideration.
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change Education (CCE) aim at increasing (young) people’s competencies and critical engagement. Their impact depends on innovative learning settings. In this study, we deliver scientific evidence of the success of ESD/CCE
in schools when pupils do their own research and co-operate with experts.The COP21 Agreement 2015 sets very high targets, which cannot be reached by political agreements or technological progress alone. Within this context, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and particularly
Climate Change Education (CCE), play an ever increasing role regarding a holistic societal transformation towards a sustainable world. Creating ESD/CCE learning settings and delivering scientific evidence for their success has turned into a vital challenge in order to meet the high expectations.
In this longitudinal study, based on the research project k.i.d.Z.21 ‐ Competent into the Future, we deliver scientific evidence of the success of CCE when based on transdisciplinary and/or moderate constructivist theories, and show that the impact is even higher when both approaches
are combined. The data presented derive from scientific surveys and tests, involving 343 teenagers before and after intensive collaboration with a high number of experts, including renowned climate change scientists.
Higher education institutions are obligated to facilitate students in the development of sustainability competencies, which enable them to act as “change agents” in their future profession-specific environment. Therefore, students’ study motives, prior knowledge, attitudes, and experiences regarding sustainability should be considered when designing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programmes. The present study compares first-year students in teacher training with first-year students in other study programmes and explores their study choice motives as well as sustainability-related conceptions, engagement and self-efficacy beliefs using a semi-standardised online questionnaire. Results show that the choice of study is dominated by intrinsic factors and the relevance of extrinsic factors differs by degree programmes with lower extrinsic values for the teacher training students. Regarding sustainability, we find simple and often unelaborated concepts. Teacher training students show significantly higher scores than non-teacher training students regarding the sustainability-related behavioural domain and self-efficacy beliefs. In addition, a gender gap increasing with age and with lower sustainability scores for older males could be identified but only for teacher training students. In conclusion, the results show valuable starting points as well as challenges that should be considered when designing target-oriented learning processes in (inter)disciplinary sustainability courses at higher education institutions.
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