The Impact of a General Elective Course on Sustainability of the Environmental Citizenship of Undergraduate Students †
1
Research Unit Edubron, Department of Training and Education Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Antwerp, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium
2
Freudenthal Institute, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands
3
Civil Society and Sustainability Research Group, Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology, 44249 Kaunas, Lithuania
4
Department of Environmental Science and Agriculture, Faculty of Education, Beit Berl College, Kfar Saba 44905, Israel
5
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), 8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
Presented at the 2nd International Conference of International Researchers of the Education for Environmental Citizenship 2022, 10–11 March 2022. Available online: https://enec-cost.eu/ireec22/ .
Environ. Sci. Proc. 2022, 14(1), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/environsciproc2022014019
Published: 4 April 2022
(This article belongs to the Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference of International Researchers of the Education for Environmental Citizenship 2022)
Abstract
:The aim is to evaluate the effect of a sustainable development-oriented course on the environmental citizenship attributes of undergraduate students at a technical university. We discuss the pedagogical and didactic aspects of the course and its linkages to sustainable development education, define the elements of the educational intervention, and present the case study from Kaunas University of Technology. The presentation discusses results from a randomized pre-group –post-group quasi-experimental survey. The results prove the positive effect of the studied educational intervention on the environmental citizenship of undergraduate students.
1. Rationale
University students are a crucial audience for environmental citizenship education [1] due to their anticipated roles within citizenry and work environments. Taking a primary interest in active environmental citizenship, we aim to evaluate an educational intervention designed to foster environmental citizenship among undergraduate students at a technological university in Lithuania. We explore the impact of a unique undergraduate sustainable development course on students by implementing a recently developed instrument for measuring the dimensions of environmental citizenship [2]. The instrument is comprised of items measuring past, present, and future actions as environmental citizens and agents of change, as well as the knowledge, conceptions, skills, attitudes, and values for environmental citizenship.
2. Research Question
The group of researchers implemented a quasi-experimental survey design to answer questions about the reliability and validity of the environmental citizenship questionnaire, about the environmental citizenship characteristics of first-year undergraduate students in a large technical Lithuanian university, as well as the impact of the designed educational intervention. These questions are answered, and the survey results are discussed in detail in a separate article [3]. This abstract from the iREEC 2022 conference presentation will further discuss the following research question:
What is the impact of students’ participation in a general elective course ‘Sustainable Development’ on their environmental citizenship?
The research question was answered while testing a general overall hypothesis: the general elective course focusing explicitly on sustainable development (by implementing it via learner-oriented pedagogical methods identified as effective in developing sustainable development competences) will foster increased environmental citizenship in participating students.
3. Methodology
Using a randomized pre-group/post-group quasi-experimental survey design, we explore the students’ environmental citizenship before and after the intervention course ‘Sustainable Development’, compared to students in a general elective course ‘Media Philosophy’. Students were divided into two main groups (experimental vs. control) and then randomly assigned to either a pre- or post-intervention survey, resulting in four groups with unique respondent membership. Each of the nine subscales of the environmental citizenship questionnaire showed excellent reliability (alpha values ranging between 0.830 and 0.930); the entire instrument also had excellent internal consistency (0.929).
4. Findings
ANOVA showed that, when comparing the four groups for each of the EC scales, no main effects were present (all p > 0.05), suggesting no effect of the intervention on the subscales. However, when the four groups were compared based on the overall EC construct (overall mean of all items of all scales), the results indicate meaningful and significant differences (p = 0.016). Two-by-two post hoc analyses showed, as expected, no differences between the pre-intervention group and the pre-control group, and between the pre-control group and the post control group (all p > 0.05). However, as hypothesized, the post-intervention group displayed significantly higher EC than the pre-intervention group (p = 0.007), and significantly higher EC than the post-control group (p = 0.025). Cohen’s d shows a medium effect size for both estimates (both d = 0.52).
5. Conclusions
The results support that participation in the ‘Sustainable Development’ course induced positive changes in the students’ environmental citizenship. The presentation at iREEC2022 will also highlight the specific pedagogical design of the ‘Sustainable Development’ course and relate it to the learning outcomes that we observed in our study. As such, our paper provides a timely contribution, shedding light on how specific pedagogical approaches in higher education can foster environmental citizenship.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H.; methodology, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; software, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; validation, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H.; formal analysis, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; investigation, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; resources, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; data curation, J.B.-d.P., A.T. and R.H; writing—original draft preparation, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; writing—review and editing, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; visualization, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; supervision, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H; project administration, A.T.; funding acquisition, J.B.-d.P., A.T., D.G. and R.H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement
The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Institute of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities at Kaunas University of Technology (protocol no. V19-1253-7-1, 27 August 2020).
Informed Consent Statement
Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
Data Availability Statement
A publicly archived dataset with a questionnaire is available through LiDA: https://hdl.handle.net/21.12137/RZJ0FL (accessed on 22 December 2021).
Acknowledgments
This study is partly based on work from Cost Action ENEC (European Network for Environmental Citizenship) (CA16229), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The authors also want to thank the lecturers and the students of the “Sustainable Development” and the “Media Philosophy” courses at Kaunas University of Technology, for supporting or taking part in the investigation.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
References
- Hadjichambis, A.C.; Reis, P.; Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, D.; Činčera, J.; Boeve-de Pauw, J.; Gericke, N.; Knippels, M.-C. (Eds.) Conceptualizing Environmental Citizenship for 21st Century Education; Environmental Discourses in Science Education; Springer International Publishing: Cham, Switzerland, 2020; p. 261. ISBN 978-3-030-20248-4. [Google Scholar]
- Hadjichambis, A.C.; Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, D. Environmental Citizenship Questionnaire (ECQ): The Development and Validation of an Evaluation Instrument for Secondary School Students. Sustainability 2020, 12, 821. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [Green Version]
- Telešienė, A.; Boeve-de Pauw, J.; Goldman, D.; Hansmann, R. Evaluating an Educational Intervention Designed to Foster Environmental Citizenship among Undergraduate University Students. Sustainability 2021, 13, 8219. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. |
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Share and Cite
MDPI and ACS Style
Boeve-de Pauw, J.; Telešienė, A.; Goldman, D.; Hansmann, R. The Impact of a General Elective Course on Sustainability of the Environmental Citizenship of Undergraduate Students. Environ. Sci. Proc. 2022, 14, 19. https://doi.org/10.3390/environsciproc2022014019
AMA Style
Boeve-de Pauw J, Telešienė A, Goldman D, Hansmann R. The Impact of a General Elective Course on Sustainability of the Environmental Citizenship of Undergraduate Students. Environmental Sciences Proceedings. 2022; 14(1):19. https://doi.org/10.3390/environsciproc2022014019
Chicago/Turabian StyleBoeve-de Pauw, Jelle, Audronė Telešienė, Daphne Goldman, and Ralph Hansmann. 2022. "The Impact of a General Elective Course on Sustainability of the Environmental Citizenship of Undergraduate Students" Environmental Sciences Proceedings 14, no. 1: 19. https://doi.org/10.3390/environsciproc2022014019
