The adolescent dip in students' sustainability consciousness—Implications for education for sustainable development

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that interest in and concern about environmental issues tends to decrease in adolescence, but less is known about adolescents' broader consciousness of sustainable development, also including economic and social issues. This study investigates students' sustainability consciousness in the transition to adolescence. This was done by surveying 2,413 Swedish students in the sixth, ninth and twelfth grades using an age-adapted questionnaire. The results unambiguously show that Swedish students' sustainability consciousness dips in adolescence, strongly indicating a need to modify the sustainability education for adolescents. Education for sustainable development is recommended as an approach to meet that need.

KEYWORDS:

• adolescents
• education for sustainable development
• sustainability attitudes
• sustainability behavior
• sustainability consciousness

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all the young people who participated in this study and their schools for letting us visit them. Thank you Teresa Berglund for letting us use the upper secondary data. We are also indebted to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the help of their staff. We are particularly grateful to Jari Appelgren, Karlstad University, for statistical advice. Last, but not least, we would like to thank the Swedish National Graduate School in Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Research (FontD).

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, project [B0589701].

Notes

1. SALSA, Skolverkets Analysverktyg för Lokala SambandsAnalyser [The National Agency for Education's analysis tool for context analysis]. http://salsa.artisan.se/

2. SIRIS, Skolverkets Internetbaserade Resultat- och kvalitetsInformationsSystem. [The National Agency for Education's online information system on results and quality]. http://siris.skolverket.se/siris/f?p=Siris:1:0

3. Web-addresses for the questionnaires:Grade six:http://www.intra.kau.se/dokument/upload/C10B9B9407a521992BNXKHX7EC04/Survey%20instrument%206th%20grade.pdf?-session=rs:C10B9B9407a52196DCKhFF628D47Grade nine:http://www.intra.kau.se/dokument/upload/C10B9B9407a521999AyJFE893282/Survey%20instrument%209th%20grade.pdf?-session=rs:C10B9B9407a52196DCKhFF628D47Grade twelve:http://www.intra.kau.se/dokument/upload/C10B9B9407f0220FC9Njh15BB799/Survey%20instrument%2012th%20grade%20webversion.pdf

4. Note that knowingness refers to recognition of the SD components rather than factual knowledge.