Jelle Boeve-de Pauw

• PhD
• Universitair Docent at Utrecht University

Sustainable development is a prominent issue on the agendas of citizens, policymakers, practitioners, and scholars alike. Conceptual frameworks have been suggested to guide teaching-learning processes in order to prepare future generations for sustainability challenges. One such framework is action competence in sustainable development (ACiSD) as a...

The Anthropocene, characterized by human behavior acting as a formidable force of nature, casts the question what it means to be human, in new light. Consequently, discussions on quality education need revisiting. Drawing from the literature on quality education in general, we investigate consequences for teaching and learning. We then zoom in on e...

There is a need for valid and reliable instruments to assess learning outcomes in education for sustainable development (ESD). Measurement invariance (MI) needs to be established before results of these instruments can be validly compared between groups. Despite its importance, establishing MI is an often overlooked validation step. To provide an e...

This chapter highlights the challenges faced by schools in implementing a whole school approach (WSA) for education for sustainable development (ESD) and suggests a potential reason for these challenges. While much of the current ESD research has focused on curricula and pedagogy, the chapter argues that an effective organizational context is cruci...

Science education is increasingly integrating a focus on socio-scientific issues. Policy makers and scholars also suggest education for sustainable development (ESD) is important for tackling current and future sustainability issues. ESD may foster students' action competence in sustainable development (ACiSD; knowledgeability, willingness, capacit...

Scientific research on the relationship between nature and health/wellbeing has increased dramatically in recent years. Contact with nature during childhood, both within formal and informal learning contexts, has diverse demonstrated positive effects on young people. In this chapter, we present the results of an interdisciplinary systematic literat...

The awareness that many problems in our society are interdisciplinary in nature and require the integration of multiple STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) concepts to solve them has given rise to a new instructional approach, called “integrated STEM education”. Integrated STEM education aims to remove the barriers from the STEM fi...

Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (iSTEM) education is a promising approach to attracting more qualified and better motivated students to STEM fields. In this study, we respond to one of the salient challenges facing integrated STEM educational research, namely investigating its educational impact. We developed a large-sca...

Informal learning environments (ILEs) like Fablabs and Makerspaces have potential to facilitate development of STEM skills. However, these environments might be difficult for teachers to adopt in their teaching because of teaching approaches grounded in constructionism where the role of the teacher changes from a transmissive instructor to an activ...

STEM presents a challenge to education at large. The enrollment numbers in higher education STEM tracks are ever-decreasing numbers all around the globe. More so, young people’s interest in and attitudes towards STEM seem to be free falling. Educational interventions that can help boost the attractiveness of STEM are therefore needed, and diverse s...

In effectiveness literature, voices are rising to embrace learning contents beyond mathematics, science, and language. Meanwhile, international policy documents such as the United Nations 2019 Climate Action Summit Report point at the importance of action for sustainable development for establishing acceptable life conditions for current and future...

This longitudinal quantitative study investigated teachers’ development of self-efficacy and teaching practices relating to education for sustainable development (ESD) in four compulsory schools in a Swedish municipality. The teachers participated in a professional development program over three school years designed to support them in implementing...

This study revisits the seminal question of the effectiveness of education for sustainable development (ESD) by using a novel longitudinal approach. Scholarly attention in the past decade has been increasingly directed towards the concept of action competence for sustainability. However, little is still known about the effects of ESD as a teaching...

This study builds on a research-practitioner partnership embedded within an education for sustainable development (ESD) project and aims to explore the major potential challenges (i.e., disciplinary boundaries set by subject specialization, especially in secondary education) and success factors (i.e., teacher co-learning experiences in ESD) associa...

Policy documents across the globe call for citizen engagement to fight climate change emergencies and build more sustainable societies. They also recognize the key role of formal and non-formal education in preparing citizens to address those challenges. However, there is a need to identify appropriate instruments to evaluate the impact of educatio...

Based on the concept of action competence, the current study introduces an integrated framework of Professional Action Competence in Education for Sustainable Development (PACesd) described by three defining features: willingness, knowledge of pedagogical approaches, and self-efficacy. To validate this framework, we developed a questionnaire measur...

A key theme in the science education literature concerns the reluctance of students to participate in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Self-determination theory (SDT) states that social factors in an educational setting, such as teachers’ motivating style, can influence students’ motivation and engagement. This paper invest...

The “leaky pipeline” with regard to students’ engagement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) has triggered extensive research to understand and prevent students dropping out from STEM. To boost enrolment and interest in STEM fields, integrated STEM (iSTEM) education could be harnessed by providing students with relevant chal...

Taking its primary interest in active environmental citizenship, this paper aims at evaluating a case of an educational intervention designed to foster environmental citizenship among undergraduate students at a technological university. The study employs a survey methodology implementing a recently validated environmental citizenship questionnaire...

Simple Summary Animal Welfare Attitudes (AWA) can be defined as the attitudes of humans towards the welfare of animals. Although AWA has been previously associated with demographic factors as gender, one of the main limitations is that few studies applied robust psychometric questionnaire scales. Moreover, some evidence of cross-cultural variations...

Holistic and pluralistic instructional beliefs and instructional practices in Education for Sustainable Development are often considered of high importance to foster students' competences. This mixed-method study describes the development and the validation of the Holism-Pluralism in Education for Sustainable Development questionnaire (HPESD-Q) to...

Action competence consists of the knowledge, willingness, and self-efficacy for contributing to a controversial issue such as sustainable development. As such, action competence in sustainable development (ACiSD) is a desired outcome of education for sustainable development (ESD). Still, the scarce instruments for measuring ACiSD that have been dev...

Dit rapport beschrijft de resultaten van het TIMSS 2019 onderzoek voor Vlaanderen.

Young students have raised their voices in debates on what action for sustainable development (SD) is necessary. Nevertheless, research that gives voice to 10 to 13-year-olds while looking into SD issues in all their complexity of interrelated environmental, social, and socioeconomic perspectives, is scarce. This study aims to give voice to these y...

This study aims to identify the characteristics of the school facilitating ESD-effectiveness. Via a literature study we synthesized different notions of educational management in relation to education for sustainable development. The ERIC and GreenFILE databases were searched in combination with strategies such as citation chasing, leading to a tot...

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is promoted as one important component in the endeavor toward sustainable development. Goal 4 in the Sustainable Development Goals (UN in Sustainable development goals—17 goals to transform our world, 2017) in particular targets the role of ESD in this respect. The importance of cultural specificity in ES...

Our rapidly changing society needs highly-qualified STEM professionals (experts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to develop solutions to the problems it is facing. Many of the students who graduate from a STEM programme in secondary education, however, opt out of STEM when enrolling in higher education, often due to a loss of i...

The concept of Action Competence (AC) has been interpreted in different ways in various domains of the educational sciences. Given the rising scholarly attention to AC, these diverse interpretations are problematic because they hinder a common understanding of the concept among scholars. We unravel the interpretation of AC as a competence of people...

This study contributes to an operationalization of the concept of action competence for sustainability through the theoretical development and empirical validation of a new 12-item Likert-scale questionnaire: the Self-Perceived Action Competence for Sustainability Questionnaire, SPACS-Q. Other scales in environmental and sustainability education (E...

This chapter examines the relationship between knowledge and Environmental Citizenship. Knowledge has been attributed to have an essential role in influencing pro-environmental behaviour and as such in the development of Environmental Citizenship. We argue that the ‘right’ kind of environmental knowledge is a necessary precondition for pro-environm...

This chapter explores the concept of non-formal education and its potential for fostering Environmental Citizenship. Non-formal education emphasises learning beyond the formal framework of the education system. Whether this takes place at school or outside the playground, or through activities that are not subject to the school curriculum, non-form...

This open access book is about the development of a common understanding of environmental citizenship. It conceptualizes and frames environmental citizenship taking an educational perspective. Organized in four complementary parts, the book first explains the political, economic and societal dimensions of the concept. Next, it examines environmenta...

Policymakers have pinpointed the importance of living in a more sustainable society. Education for Sustainable Development aims at developing future citizens competent to take actions in order to cope with Sustainable Development issues. The instructional design that teachers apply in class play a crucial role in students’ learning. This study is a...

In this paper, we explore how students’ engagement varies in different STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) learning environments. More specifically, we focus on the significance of a learning environment applying an integrated STEM (iSTEM) approach and the significance of STEM learning environments’ student-centredness. Moreover, w...

This paper explores how three major factors in education for sustainable development (ESD) practice view the concept of sustainable development (SD). These are (a) international policy documents which shaped ESD, (b) the academic discourse in the field of ESD and (c) students and teachers. SD is a complex concept, and it can be interpreted in sever...

In recent decades, the Taiwanese government has worked actively to implement the concept of a sustainable Taiwan. As an important step in their strategy, the Ministry of Education has decided to promote the Green School Partnership Project in Taiwan (GPPT). However, academic research and critical reflection on the effects of this environmental and...

We present findings of a mixed method evaluation study of the EcoSchool program in the Czech Republic. The innovativeness of this study is its specific focus on implementation strategies rather than learning outcomes. Using data from 148 students and 65 teachers from 54 different schools involved in the program, we investigated perceptions about th...

We present findings of a mixed method evaluation study of the EcoSchool program in the Czech Republic. The innovativeness of this study is its specific focus on implementation strategies rather than learning outcomes. Using data from 148 students and 65 teachers from 54 different schools involved in the program, we investigated perceptions about th...

The Motivation Toward the Environment Scale (MTES), developed in Canada, measures people’s self-determined motivation for doing something for the environment. Answering the call by its original developers, this study further validated the MTES within a sample of 779 Dutch-speaking senior secondary school students, aged 17 to 19, in the north of Bel...

In this paper, the concept of sustainability consciousness, an individual's experience and awareness of sustainable development, is introduced. Based on UNESCO's definition of sustainable development, a sustainability consciousness questionnaire (SCQ) is theoretically and empirically developed. Using the data of 638 respondents from Sweden aged 18–...

The Need for STEM Professionals We are increasingly exposed to complex societal and technological problems. Qualified Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals are needed to solve these problems and cope with contemporary demands such as sustainable energy and efficient healthcare [1]. It is not surprising then that the...

The shortage of graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), has led to numerous attempts to increase students’ interest in STEM. One emerging approach that has the potential to improve students’ motivation for STEM is integrated STEM education. Nonetheless, the implementation of this new instructional strategy is not strai...

Recent policy and academic voices in the field of Education for Sustainable Development put forward the importance of a holistic approach to the concept of Sustainable Development. We investigated the personal understanding of 'sustainable Development’ of scholars involved in teacher training programs and in the academic field of Education for Sust...

Educational field trips are common practice in environmental education and education for sustainable development, well recognised by researchers for their potential to achieve cognitive and affective educational outcomes. One of the factors that influences learning during field trips is their novelty. The current study focuses on the interplay betw...

De wereldwijde trend naar een meer geïntegreerde benadering van schoolse vakken, is er één die ook Vlaanderen niet aan zich wil laten voorbijgaan. Zo wilden we met het initiatief STEM@school onderzoeken op welke manier de STEM-disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering en Mathematics, de zogenaamde bètavakken) geïntegreerd kunnen worden aangebra...

A key theme in science education research concerns the decline in young peoples’ interest in science and the need for professionals in hard science. Goal Congruity Theory posits that an important aspect of the decision whether to pursue hard science for study or as a career is the perception that hard science careers do not fulfil social (working w...

We present the results of a study that focuses in on issues of validity of the motivation towards the environment scale (MTES) in the context of Flanders (the Flemish-speaking community in Belgium). The instrument was developed almost two decades ago in Canada, and is designed to measure the self-determined motivation of people for performing pro-e...

We present results from a large-scale study performed in Flanders, focusing on the effectiveness of the eco-schools project. We surveyed 2152 students and 1374 teachers in 101 primary and secondary schools that are actively engaged in the eco-schools program at different stages (including control schools), focusing on their environmental values, kn...

Perhaps the most important issue in our time is how to sustain our planet’s resources, while developing wealth and well-being for a growing population. This monumental task has been defined in the concept of sustainable development (SD). During the last few decades the world communities have agreed upon addressing SD through international treaties....

Natuur- en milieueducatie voor duurzame ontwikkeling... Bij natuur- en milieueducatie of NME staan de relaties tussen natuur, milieu en maatschappij centraal. Een goede invalshoek om aan educatie voor duurzame ontwikkeling of EDO te werken. EDO leert 'denken over' en 'werken aan' een leefbare wereld, nu en in de toekomst, hier en elders op de plan...

Increasingly, researchers are focusing on the study of environmental values of young people. Indeed, it is today’s youth who will be the decision makers in the future. Attention has turned to explaining individual differences in this construct, and many authors have illustrated gender differences. The current study (N = 1,285, 10- to 12-year-olds)...

The study examines the effectiveness of eco-schools concerning their students’ environmental values and environmental behaviour, and includes 1287 children from 59 schools (38 eco-schools and 21 control schools) in Flanders. Controlling for effects of gender and socio-economic status, analyses show that eco-schools have no effect on the environment...

The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) is a popular measure of environmental concern and pro-environmental orientation of adults, which has recently been modified for use with children. For this paper, we have collected questionnaires from 1586 children from three different countries and continents (i.e. Zimbabwe, Belgium and Vietnam). In this paper we...

Environmental values (EV) are regarded as significant precursors forenvironmental behavior (EB) by many scholars. The present study addresses the issue of the invariance of EV (tapped by the two-dimensional model of ecological values), and their effect on EB, across cultural contexts. In all, a total of 1,833 ten- to thirteen-year-old children from...

Eco‐schools aim to improve the environment through direct and indirect effects. Direct effects are those that result from the implementation of an environmental management system. Indirect effects are educational gains. The current study examines the effectiveness of eco‐schools concerning three student outcomes: (1) environmental knowledge, (2) en...

There is a growing interest among scholars in instruments based on environmental worldview. Several studies have used instruments of this kind to compare groups of children or to assess the impact of environmental education initiatives (EEIs) on children’s environmental worldview. When using scales of this nature, it is important to control for fac...

The overall aim of the research presented in this book is to gain more insight in the environmental values (EV) of children. EV are, across disciplines, regarded as an essential precondition of environmental behavior. A better understanding of what explains variation in EV and what they can tell us about the environmental behavior of children – the...

The environmental attitudes of young people are a growing topic of interest for social scientists. Most research that aims to explain differences in (youth) environmental attitudes focuses on the individual as the level of measurement. There is, however, a growing body of evidence that illustrates that the context within which that individual opera...

The environmental agenda is gaining momentum as an international policy issue. This is reflected in an increase in environmental education research focussing on children’s awareness and attitudes toward the environment. In this study, we focused on this issue from a school effectiveness perspective and evaluated (a) which student characteristics pr...

The authors report on the implementation process of environmental education (EE) in two Flemish (Belgian) teacher education colleges. One college had a long history of cross-curricular education, whereas the other college did not. Initially the implementation processes in the two insti-tutions stagnated because of personal and organizational obstru...