Sustainable Development among Students in China: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Nora Tang and Version 1 by An Qi.

Education is critical to achieving the world’s sustainable development (SD). Assessment or measurement is a means to help an education system to accelerate integrating SD content. To have a perception of the gap in relation to the SD action goals, a basic understanding of current students’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviors (KAB) needs to be established. 

  • sustainability-literacy assessment
  • sustainable development goals
  • education for sustainable development

1. Introduction

Long-term sustainable development (SD) has increasingly become a key issue worldwide regarding future environmental, political, social and economic development. Despite the huge progress made by many societies, challenges such as poverty, biodiversity loss and climate change still exist, leaving many areas where actions can be taken. For individuals, the current generation needs to develop new capacities regarding SD. Despite the divergence in the usage of different concepts—such as abilities, competencies, and consciousness—generally speaking, an individual’s SD qualities are the knowledge, mindset and skills that allow individuals to become deeply committed to building a sustainable future and assisting in making informed and effective decisions to this end [1]. A change in individuals’ knowledge, attitudes and behavior (KAB) is essential to accomplish SD [2].
Students take on an extraordinarily crucial role, since they are the primary objects of formal education and change agents of SD through actions and decision making. The past two decades have witnessed increasing recognition and political agreement over the role of education as a major agent to transform the current society into a more sustainable, equitable and socially just one. Education for sustainable development (ESD) is not only one of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), but is also a means to reach other SDGs. Goal 4 in the SDGs, in particular, targets the role of ESD in this respect. The development of adequate knowledge, right attitudes and proficient skills is an important dimension of ESD. With regard to this, many activities are underway related to the ESD policies [3]. In May 2021, the UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development was held in Berlin (online). The conference stressed that, in response to various challenges in the field of SD, ESD supports efforts to equip learners with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes needed to contribute to a more sustainable world [4]. Although ESD policies and practices are abundant, the monitoring and evaluation of ESD achievements are still weak. UNESCO suggested that it is important to accelerate the improvement of monitoring and evaluation, to provide evidence to support investments in ESD and accelerate the process of ESD.
Measuring people’s knowledge, awareness or behavior should always be a first step in the development or evaluation of any kind of program or intervention [5]. To have a perception of the gap in relation to the SD action goals, a basic understanding of current students’ KAB needs to be established. Identifying indicators to monitor KAB that are needed to promote SD is challenging work. An important reason for the difficulty in assessment is that there are very few relevant student-assessment surveys and it is difficult to develop survey items that are culturally relevant but not culturally biased [6]. To our knowledge, there is limited research in China concerning the KAB of students concerning SD, especially considering all three content dimensions, which are environmental sustainability, social sustainability and economic sustainability (which is interpreted as the planet, people and prosperity content domain in the SDGs). Typically, studies that delve into the field have a focus on the environmental dimension, which addresses more narrow frameworks such as sustainable consumption [7], pro-environmental behaviors [8], etc. In recent years, a few studies have moved on from the environmental dimension to the integrated concept of SD which incorporates the environmental, economic and social dimensions [5,9][5][9]. There is still a need for studies focusing on students’ psychometric constructs within the broader context of SD, including all the environmental, social and economic dimensions.
This study focuses on an important issue, which is describing Chinese students’ sustainability literacy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate and evaluate Chinese primary- and secondary-school students’ KAB regarding the environmental, social and economic dimensions of SD.

2. History and Development

It is difficult to study SD without an account of the UN’s SD framework. The UN’s goals and targets will still stimulate action over the next ten years and are of critical importance for humanity and the planet [10]. In addition, “sustainability literacy” is the combination of knowledge, attitudes and behavior, which is closely related to the UN’s SDGs and is also the result of ESD. The 17 SDGs put forward more specific requirements for future development, which means SD has changed from a concept to measurable indicators [11]. In this case, the content of ESD has become specific, and it is necessary to establish comparable indicators to monitor and evaluate the achievements of ESD. Regarding the assessment of KAB related to SD, there are scales or surveys measuring students’ competences that are based on UNESCO documents [12,13,14,15][12][13][14][15].
Understanding global issues (such as peace, poverty, migration, globalization and climate change), events and institutions is essential for developing sustainability literacy [16]. The knowledge system of sustainability literacy includes relevant knowledge of social, environmental and economic sustainability. To help learners prepare for the uncertainty of the future, they should be helped to acquire relevant knowledge. A lack of knowledge or having the wrong knowledge may limit pro-SD behaviors. Studies have shown that publics have limited knowledge about SD and its goals. A study conducted by GlobeScan (2016) found that only 28% of people across 13 countries, including India, the UK, and Germany, expressed that they have some or a lot of awareness of SDGs [17]. While, in China, awareness of the SDGs is lower than that of the Millennium Development Goals in 2007 [17]. Guan et al. (2019) surveyed more than 4000 residents in five cities in China; the results also indicated that knowledge about the SDGs was scarce [18]. However, on the other hand, the public’s growing awareness of SD is being proven by the fact that youth show higher knowledge than the public average [19]. However, the knowledge varies by area. Michalos et al. (2015) revealed that students’ knowledge of the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability appears to be stronger than that of the economic dimensions [20].
Knowledge is not the only factor affecting students’ sustainability ability, affective factors also affect their daily behavior decisions [21]. Attitudes can help individuals adapt to the environment faster. Attitudes may change over time, and susceptibility to attitude change is greater during adolescence [22]. Therefore, attitudes can be cultivated through education; changing attitudes or forming supportive attitudes are important content of ESD. Many international policies and national practices have been implemented to promote students’ sustainable attitudes, such as the UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives [23]. It is not only because attitudes can be changed through education that it is essential to accomplish SD [2]. Students’ supportive attitudes vary in different aspects of SD content [24]. Liu et al. (2020) found that students of a vocational college in China had the most-favorable attitudes towards the educational dimension and the least-favorable attitudes towards the social dimension [25]. There are also some gender differences in attitudes toward SD. Male students hold stronger anthropocentric values while biocentric values are more common among female students [25,26][25][26]. Some empirical studies revealed positive associations between sustainability knowingness and sustainability attitudes [27]. Liang et al. (2018) found that a high level of environmental knowledge was required if environmental attitude is to be strong [28]. However, attitudes are not necessarily related to objective knowledge. A gap between knowledge and attitudes implies that a better-informed public is not necessarily a public that holds supportive attitudes [18].
In addition to knowledge and attitudes, behavior has received the most attention from researchers. Behavior is critical, as only changes in behavior can lead to the achievement of SDGs, and the ultimate goal of ESD is to empower students to make sustainable decisions. Previous studies were inconclusive about the factors robustly associated with behaviors regarding SD or some aspects of SD. The relationship between knowingness/knowledge, attitudes and behavior differs between studies. For example, the correlation between environmental knowledge and behavioral intention was extremely weak for Taiwanese university students [8]. Michalos et al. (2015) indicated that the correlation between sustainability-related levels of knowledge and choices favorable to sustainability is likely to increase with exposure to ESD [20]. Strengthening the knowledge base itself contributes to the adoption of more sustainable choices and actions. However, sustainability behavior may only be related to knowingness (knowledge) and attitudes in limited content dimensions [8[8][29],29], and the correlation between attitude and behavior may be enhanced when attitudes are directed to specific sustainable behavior [30,31][30][31].
For the content domain, environmental sustainability has received the most attention. Although SD policies have been implemented all over the world for decades, people still consider that SD is closely related to the environment or nature resources. There is a dearth of study on students’ KAB beyond environmental aspects of sustainability, which view SD as a holistic concept.

References

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