Promoting Environmental Citizenship in Education: The Potential of the Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire to Measure Impact of Interventions

Abstract

Policy documents across the globe call for citizen engagement to fight climate change emergencies and build more sustainable societies. They also recognize the key role of formal and non-formal education in preparing citizens to address those challenges. However, there is a need to identify appropriate instruments to evaluate the impact of educational interventions on people’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, which are essential components of the action competence required to become environmental citizens and agents of change. The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential of the Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ) to evaluate different educational interventions aimed at increasing environmental citizenship. It presents three sub-studies from Spain, Belgium, and Sweden using the SCQ with varying contexts, duration, and target groups yet sharing common pedagogical features in the interventions. Pre-intervention scores indicate a common pattern of high sustainability knowingness, moderate sustainability attitudes, and lower sustainability behaviors in the three dimensions (environmental, social and economic) of sustainability consciousness, and a positive impact on sustainability behavior after the intervention. These findings are especially significant when compared to previous studies. We therefore conclude that the SCQ is useful for detecting the effects of learning interventions of varying designs and contexts that address environmental citizenship. The results are discussed in terms of key pedagogical features of the educational interventions, and the appropriateness and sensitivity of the instrument in detecting changes in the intended direction. It concludes with implications for research and practice and suggestions for future lines of work.

Educación para la Justicia Ambiental: ¿Qué Propuestas se están Realizando?

“…Así, las propuestas siguen centrándose en una formación disciplinar y las temáticas más trabajadas se relacionan con contenidos ecológicos y biológicos (biodiversidad, contaminación, etc.). Además, muchas son recurrentes (cambio climático y 3R), lo que vuelve el proceso de Enseñanza-Aprendizaje poco atractivo para los aprendices (Benayas y Marcén, 2019;Gutiérrez-Bastida, 2019;Mogensen y Mayer, 2009;Romero-Ariza et al, 2021;Sauvé, 2003).…”

“…Por otro lado, se desoyen las recomendaciones educativas (Mogensen y Mayer, 2009;Romero-Ariza et al, 2021) y siguen predominando las actividades destinadas a la educación obligatoria, incluso sabiendo que los adolescentes se muestran poco permeables a los cambios de conductas (Olsson y Gericke, 2016;Pérez-Franco et al, 2018). Sin embargo, el alumnado de las etapas educativas tempranas es el colectivo que más fácilmente puede abandonar su zona de confort, modulando las conductas insostenibles una vez reconocida la necesidad de actuar en aras de la protección ambiental (Guevara-Herrero et al, 2020;Samur, 2018;Wilson, 1996).…”

Toward the Development and Validation of a Model of Environmental Citizenship of Young Adults

“…The recently developed Environmental Citizenship Questionnaire [5], while a valuable tool in its own right, does not propose concrete structural relationships among the variables that comprise environmental citizenship, leaving the development of change models a task for future research. Other research on environmental citizenship has focused on assessing pro-environmental behavior, knowledge, and attitudes as an outcome without separately assessing environmental citizenship [13].…”

“…Environmental citizenship is a relatively new concept that has gained some interest from researchers and educators in recent years [6,[10][11][12] and there are studies being conducted that operationalize environmental citizenship in a variety of ways, many of which include measures of pro-environmental behaviors and attitudes [5,13]. There is a lack, however, of a dedicated model that could be used to understand environmental citizenship as a process, i.e., as not only a measure of environmental citizenship, but also as a means of understanding how environmental citizenship develops.…”

Key Pedagogical Features and a Common Approach to Evaluate Education for Environmental Citizenship: An International Perspective

“…Nevertheless, there is a need to better understand how this educational model might be implemented in different contexts and situations, as well as to evaluate the impact of these interventions on environmental citizenship. The Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ) has been proven to be a powerful instrument for this purpose [7].…”