The heterogeneous effects of an education for sustainable development intervention in schools: Evidence from a Belgian panel study

Abstract

Education for sustainable development aims at strengthening levels of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours beneficial for sustainable development which are crucial to tackle urgent sustainability-related global challenges. In this study, we present the results of a one-year panel study measuring levels of sustainable development knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours in primary and secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium). During this year, a large-scale project on sustainable development was implemented in these schools. We test whether this intervention increased pupils’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours on sustainable development. Furthermore, we look for heterogeneous effects depending on pupils’ gender and age. The results show that there is indeed an increase in levels of sustainable knowledge, attitudes and behaviours after the ESD intervention, and that there are significant differences between boys and girls on the one hand, and primary and secondary school pupils on the other. However, we find no evidence that the intervention mitigated these differences.

Keywords:

• education for sustainable development
• gender
• age
• pupils
• panel study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Knowledge is seen as what students acknowledge as important or necessary for sustainable development (Gericke et al,. 2019).

2 Standard deviation wave 1 knowledge: 0.498; attitudes: 0.571, behaviour: 0.647. Wave 2 knowledge: 0.489; attitudes: 0.546, behaviour: 0.577

Additional information

Funding

This research was part of the VALIES project, which has received funding from the Flanders Research Foundation (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, FWO) under Grant number S010317N within the Strategic Basic Research program (SBO).Research Foundation Flanders.