• Energy Research

Anchored in the thirteenth of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), climate change is one of the key content areas in education for sustainable development. This evaluation study describes a school project that introduces students to scientific work and, more specifically, to scientific research methods in climate research. Using a pre-post design, the evaluation uses a scale measuring epistemological beliefs, as well as two other scales addressing the relevance of climate change in society and career prospects in the field of climate research. The quantitative questionnaire data indicate an increase in future career aspirations in the field of climate research. The qualitative interview data reveal positive changes in the understanding of science and show that an understanding of the nature of science can be promoted.

Virtual field trips (VFTs) are a way to overcome travel restrictions and continue to explore distant spaces, foreign issues, and learning opportunities. The intent of this article is to show how VFTs are used in learning geography in the context of education for sustainable development (ESD). The goal is to develop a didactic approach to the use of virtual fieldwork in ESD with geography teachers in pre-service and in-service teacher training at two universities. This article has the following aims. The first is to explain what a VFT is from a theoretical and technical perspective, which raises questions about forms and tools. The second is to explain how a remote intercultural seminar was conceived and implemented to create virtual fieldwork. The third is to present the methodology on which this experimentation is based and to explore the opportunities and limitations of VFTs. The last is to present and discuss the results.

Extant research into the efficacy of—especially interdisciplinary—higher education for sustainable development (HESD) is limited. A need exists to investigate students’ development of sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. Furthermore, universities have experienced difficulties implementing interdisciplinary HESD because of organisational barriers due to monodisciplinary structures, as well as educators’ and students’ reservations. This study introduces an interdisciplinary approach to HESD and investigates its efficacy regarding students’ development of sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours at a university in Germany. The approach applies a series of lectures by different sustainability experts accompanied by several tutorials that support students’ interdisciplinary learning and teamwork towards an interdisciplinary sustainability product. Tutors were trained in interdisciplinary teaching methods, as well as interdisciplinary communication and conflict management, beforehand. Before participating in the interdisciplinary course, the students had a moderate level of sustainability knowledge and behaviour, and a high level of sustainability attitudes. The results from the pre–post-test analysis indicate an increase in students’ sustainability knowledge and behaviours, and no change in students’ sustainability attitudes. If typical barriers to interdisciplinarity are mitigated, interdisciplinary HESD can facilitate students’ development.

Systems thinking is one of the skills necessary for sustainable behavior, especially regarding sustainable consumption. Students are faced with complexity and uncertainty while taking part in it and other daily life aspects. There is a need to foster their competence in this field. From a classroom point of view, the mystery method is an example for implementing education for sustainable consumption and working with complex and uncertain content. With the mystery method students construct an influence diagram, which consists of concepts and requires several skills, especially in decision-making. Using these diagrams as a form of assessment is desirable but also very difficult, because of the mentioned complexity and uncertainty that is part of the task itself. The study presented here tackles this problem by creating an expert based reference diagram that has been constructed with the help of educational data mining. The result shows that it is possible to derive such a reference even if parts remain ambiguous due to the inherent complexity. The reference may now be used to assess students’ systems thinking abilities, which will be undertaken in future research. Beside this, the reference can be used as a reflective tool in lessons, so students can compare their own content knowledge and discuss differences to the experts’ reference.