Suchergebnisse

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how competences for sustainable development and research interrelate within a context of competence-based higher education. Specific focus is oriented towards strengthening research competences for sustainability.


Design/methodology/approach
Following a hermeneutic–interpretive methodology, this paper builds upon a critical literature review to demarcate the theoretical framework and an in-depth analysis of a case study exploring the interrelations between both types of competences.


Findings
The paper discusses current issues in the integration of competences and explores the contribution of research-based methods to acquire competences for sustainable development. The analysis shows that research skills are often mentioned to contribute to this acquisition, though from a general perspective, or from the sidelines of the learning process. A holistic view on how both concepts are linked is missing.


Research limitations/implications
First, the complex nature of competences and their integration in higher education could lead to difficulties in interpreting and analysing them. Second, the analysis is based on a single-case study, limiting possibilities to generalise the results. Third, this study is not looking at curriculum practices in these fields.


Practical implications
There is a need to holistically (re-)frame research competences within the concepts of education for sustainable development and, to a wider extent, sustainable development.


Social implications
Framing research competences within the concept of sustainable development enables a thorough and "conscious", rather than coincidental, acquisition of competences for sustainable development.


Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in the fact that there is little literature about the interrelations between competences for sustainable development and research competences.

Environmental values (EV) are regarded as significant precursors for environmental 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 Flanders, Guatemala, and Vietnam participated. The results show that EV and EB can be measured through a partially invariant model; children from the different groups differ in their EV and EB. Furthermore, the results show that the effect of EV on EB is different across cultural contexts. These results have implications for (among others) environmental education initiatives that aim for behavior change. Such initiatives need to take into account the target group, which—as illustrated by the results—shows different pathways toward reaching EB. Practitioners would therefore benefit from a culture-specific approach to designing environmental education.

This article reports on the results of a collaborative action research project (2010–12) in which 10 development organizations (nine Dutch and one Belgian), together with their southern partners, explored different actor-focused Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) approaches with the aim of dealing more effectively with complex processes of social change. A major challenge that organizations were trying to address during this action research pertained to the demonstration of observable results in complex contexts where such results are not always easy to measure or to quantify and where causal links between cause and effect cannot always be predicted. Drawing from recent literature, the article presents an analytic framework to assess the effectiveness of a PME approach in dealing with complex social change. This framework is then used to explore how actor-focused PME approaches can help international development programmes to manage complex processes of social change by stimulating processes of real-time results-based learning.

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) compares results of a classical analytical approach to quantifying such differences (independent samples t tests) with one of measurement and structural invariance across genders. The essential difference between the two is that whereas the latter controls for differential item functioning across gender, the first does not. The results show that whereas gender differences in utilization values occur when applying a classic analytical approach, they do not occur through the invariance approach. These results suggest that other studies that demonstrated gender differences might be explained by differential item functioning rather than reflect genuine differences, and might thus represent methodological artifacts.