Norwegian Kindergarten Children’s Knowledge about the Environmental Component of Sustainable Development

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

ABSTRACT

I know that word limits in abstracts make it difficult to define terms, but “environmental sustainability” and “belonging to nature” are phenomenon measured in some way by the study and need to be defined in the abstract.

How many kindergarten staff and parents completed the questionnaires?

INTRODUCTION

The introduction needs to be reorganized in the following way:

• start with the threat presented by climate change—not enough information is presented about climate change in the introduction. This needs to be expanded.
• The UN’s plan of action
• Then link to children—since they have the greatest stake in battling climate change
• Early childhood education in Norway
• Purpose of the study

The wording in the first sentence is confusing. What about…Research has been scarce investigating the effectiveness of early childhood educational programs that focus on environmental sustainability in the context of childcare centers, kindergartens, and preschools, despite younger children potentially having the greatest stake in battling climate change.

“According to the ecopsychology theory, …” Which theory? The cited article references Ruth Wilson who has published on the subject. Maybe cite her work.

The argument in the first paragraph needs smoother transitions between concepts. The thought process between connection to nature, positive environmental attitudes, human relationship with nature, socialization, environments, etc. It is unclear how all these concepts relate in order to effectively form your argument. One point of confusion is the term ‘environment’. There’s mention of environmental component; environmental attitudes; separateness from environments, including natural environments; the environment in which they are born; environmental generational amnesia; etc. What types of environments are you referring? Urban, suburban, home, natural. I struggle with this as well. Just be clear about the type of environments to which you are referring. Otherwise, the writing is confusing.

Section 1.3 needs to explain the culture and context of Norway better since this is an international journal. In Sweden, preschoolers are outdoors all day regardless of weather. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” (This is my perspective as a very jealous person wishing that more childcare options in the US favored this tradition.) Is the same true in Norway? Does Sweden serve as a model for Norwegian childcare or vice versa? What is the childcare context of Norway? Do Norwegian children start kindergarten at 5 years old?

Line 103—"an outdoor and forest profile”—what does this mean?

Line 104—farm kindergarten—what is this? Are farm animals present? Do children care for the animals? Do children harvest vegetables?

Lines 109-110 How do the Green flag and eco-lighthouse certifications differ?

Section 1.4 needs to explain why the study is important. The purpose of the study is clear, but what is the point? You just need to explain the point of the study—climate change. This will package the introduction nicely in that you begin and end on climate change.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The Materials and Methods section needs to be organized to succinctly describe the methods used. As it’s written, the section is hard to follow. I suggest the following order:

• Ethical considerations
• Participant recruitment
• Participating kindergartens
• Pilot study—testing interview technique on 4 children
• Semi-structured interviews with 4 photos—what is nature.
• Semi-structured interviews with 8 photos—environmental impact.
• Questionnaire

2.1 Participants

In section 1.3, you outline the different types of outdoor environments—outdoor, forest, and farm profiles and certifications, but only the farm profile and normal eco-certified schools responded—but only the Green flag certification and not the eco-lighthouse. You need to connect the two sections better. Did you reach out to facilities with outdoor and forest profiles? Eco-lighthouse certification? A table featuring a proper accounting of all the types of kindergartens you reached out to would help. Not having a representative sample of Norwegian kindergartens should also be identified as a limitation of the study.

Lines 129-130—what did the pre-test or pilot study show? Did the methods change? How were these 4 children selected?

Line 136—How were the pictures selected? Do these Norwegian landscapes represent anything meaningful? You should include the photos in this section of the article instead of the appendix since only 4 photos were used. I would also include tables linking the significance of the photo to the image. For example, you mention carbon sequestration and environmental pollution—which photos demonstrate this?

How were the data from the semi-structure interview utilizing 4 photos analyzed? How did this advance the study? Why was this important?

I have the same critiques of the 8 photo interview. You need to show the photos. Explain how they were selected. Create a table linking the significance to the image. The happy smiley or sad smiley box idea is great for children. Do you have a photograph of children sorting the images into the boxes? That would be an incredible image. I’m not familiar with anyone using this method. Derr and Yilmaz (2015) used green (good) and red (bad) frames for a photovoice exercise, but I’ve not heard of the happy and sad smiley technique. If someone has used this method, then please cite. If not, then please provide more details. This method could be a significant contribution of your article.

More details about the questionnaire are needed. How was the staff member chosen? Did they receive any training about filling out the questionnaire? Were the parents given the same questionnaire? How were the questionnaires distributed to parents? Did they receive training? What questions appeared on the questionnaire?

Please explain all methods in a comprehensive enough manner so that other researchers could duplicate your study. Also, report the purpose of each method.

Since the study involved 3 different methods, the data and statistical analysis could occur at the end of each method section instead of at the end of the Materials and Methods section.

The statistical analyses section needs more details. Start the section with the statistical software utilized. Explain what each statistical method is and why you selected it. You need a table with all the variables and the results from the Pearson’s chi-square test. You also should show the histogram. What information about the data does the Poisson distribution convey?

RESULTS

Results are not presented in the order the methods were presented. This is confusing.

You should report the results of the questionnaire in a table format linking the actual question asked with the percentage of responses.

For the 4-photo interview—link the results with the photos.

The pie charts make no sense to me. In (a) why did you combine the percentages of the photos selected?

The bar charts take up a lot of page space. Can you present the results in a more concise format? Maybe a table?

How did the children develop these opinions on the environmental practices depicted in the 8-photo interview? For example, why did the children say that deforestation was bad for birds? Was this a lesson in school? From a storybook? Did you collect any information of this? This could be an area for future research.

DISCUSSION

Lines 364-365—this assertion seems like a stretch since not all types of kindergartens participated in the study.

Limitations—you need to acknowledge that the photo of the children fishing may have skewed the data. Perhaps children responded to the photo since other children were depicted engaging in a fun activity. No other photos contained people.

CONCLUSION

How can the study transform the environments of kindergartens? Are the policy implications for the Norwegian Framework plan?

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Norwegian kindergarten children’s knowledge about the environmental component of sustainable development

Thanks for letting me read this MS. It is an interesting and well written study into the perceptions of kindergarten children regarding environmental aspects of sustainability and their understanding of the concept of nature and themselves as part of nature. Most importantly, perhaps, is the documented relationship between time spent in nature with children and children’s content knowledge on environmental sustainability. However, I have some small and some more significant comments:

1. The study is fairly well grounded in the relevant research  literature, yet I feel that the introduction would be improved by including a few references to sound studies on the topic of preschool children and their relationship with nature. Some suggestions: 

Chawla, L. (2007). Childhood experiences associated with care for the natural world: A theoretical framework for empirical results. Children Youth and Environments, 17(4), 144–170.

Helldén, G., & Helldén, S. (2008). Students’ early experiences of biodiversity and education for a sustainable future. Nordic Studies in Science Education, 4(2), 123–131.

Skarstein, T. H., & Skarstein, F. (2020). Curious children and knowledgeable adults – early childhood student-teachers’ species identification skills and their views on the importance of species knowledge. International Journal of Science Education, 19

Palmer, J. A., Suggate, J., Bajd, B., Ho, R. K., Ofwono‐Orecho, J., Peries, M., Robottom, I., Tsaliki, E., & Staden, C. V. (1998). An overview of significant influences and formative experiences on the development of adults’ environmental awareness in nine countries. Environmental Education Research, 4(4), 445–464.

2. Environmental generational amnesia is a special case of shifting baselines, a well known term in biological management literature. Perhaps it would be useful to the reader to receive a little bit more information on this important topic?

3. The sentence on line 42-44 seems oddly disconnected to the rest of the text. Also, it is difficult to understand; they can reason both in an anthropocentric and biocentric manner? At the same time? Perhaps elaborate a little?

4. It would, in section 2.1, be interesting to see how the number of children in the study are distributed amongst the 8 kindergartens. That is, are most of the kids in «normal» kindergartens evenly represented from the 5 included «Normal» kindergartens, or not?

5. In line 148-149 you describe the process of how you «aquire a mutual understanding about what the term «nature» means». First of all, it sounds impossible to agree on such a complicated concept as «nature», and even more so with a child this age. Furthermore, what is actually meant by this? Did the interviewer instruct the children on what to be meant by nature, or did the interviewer adopt the child’s perceived meaning of «nature», or something in between? This paragraph needs to be rewritten and clarified. Furthermore, making «nature» synonymous with «environment» appears to me as odd. The fact that most children had not heard the term simply means that its going to be very difficult to do research on this term with these children, but replacing it with a term with, at best, overlapping meaning is not helpful. It appears to me that this might explain some of the counter-intuitive responses they gave (see below)? 

6. With regards to the pictures used to prod the perceptions on environmental sustainability and section 2.4, it would be helpful to learn more about how much scaffolding wasdone to ensure that the children understood the question and the representation of the picture.

7. Section 2.7: it would be useful for the reader to learn a bit more about the criteria you used when evaluating various statements as «correct environmental reason» and the other categories. For example, I wonder why «By logging trees we can obtain wood and warm up houses» is not a child’s environmental perception of wood as a sustainable energy source. It seems confusing to mix into the analysis concepts of anthropocentrism and biocentrism, as arguments that can be interpreted to belong to both viewpoints or perspectives can still be perceived as environmental. That is, environmentalism might very well be important within anthropocentrism and within biocentrism, but for different moral/ethical/normative reasons.

8. The discussion needs to adress to a much more thorough degree the many «surprising» findings. That is, the findings that many of the kids report that car driving, airplanes, tractor and pesticides were good for nature. The fact that so many of the children didn’t answer the actual question (is X bad for the environment) needs to be adressed. It is, in my opinion, ok to separate out the «green answers» for separate analysis (for example fig3), but it feels like you owe the reader a further treatment of the blue, pink and grey responses too. 

9. In figure 3 the figure text reads «corrected» - this, I presume, should read «correct».

10. The result that so many children identify all four pictures with the concept of «nature» is very interesting and should be explored further in the discussion. The concept of «nature» has been heavily discussed for exampe within the environmental humanities in the recent decades, and it seems far-fetched to me to link the fact that some children would label all four pictures as representations of the concept «nature» to a lack of recognizing environmental degradation. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I thank the authors for presenting a very interesting study. The three dimensions in the dataset is very cool indeed.

Generally of a very high standard; but the graphing of results is messy detracting a little from the prose; the statistics needs a little work; discussion is interesting and the limitations presented seem reasonable; curious about the structure of the interview (whether the order of the questions could influence the childs response) and the format of the questionnaires.

Statistical treatment seems apt. Though given that the data will be bounded (i.e. there are a limited number of responses with the children being bounded at zero green answers or max green answers) it may be appropriate to use logistic regression/glm with binomial errors. That said looking at figure 3, it seems clear that there is little possibility of an upper boundary effecting the results, due to proportions reported.

Was a power analysis conducted to determine a minimum sample size. Suggest that the results might be a bit underpowered (throwing up false negatives and overestimated effects of the positive due to stochastic variation around the “true”) given the correct response/time in nature base rates.

If poisson regression is used the authors should really stipulate the formula for the model in the statistical analyses section i.e. log [u] = ꞵ0 + ꞵ1schooltype + ꞵ2parent_education + etc…

Figure 1. Is messy. Get rid of the pie chart shadow. Likewise a and b seem to have colour choices that that appear to infer a relationship, whilst the questions are linked they are not directly related (i.e. a child who responds orange in 1a could believe that humans belong to nature). Suggest that this information is tabulated and collapsed into a single graph. I.e. x-axis major category do human belong to nature, minor category which of these landscapes show nature, y-axis proportion. The graph could easily be dropped as the results are reasonably described in the prose. as a group.

Figure 2. needs to be reworked. These data can be presented in a single graph. Suggest adopting a standard format, that isn’t generic excel (i.e. have a y-axis, and a figure legend within the graph to describe the colours). Minimum change would be to collapse the 8 separate graphs into a single graph with 8 major categories, 3 minor categories. The associate prose with this figure is well described.

Figure 3. x-axis should be labelled “Kindergarten”. Given that these are the results from the eight independent schools. Could be misinterpreted as 8 representing 8 kindergartens in total. Suggest that the schools are sorted correctly i.e. all eco schools 1-5 farm schools in 6-8. Better yet collapse the results for multiple schools together (all farm, and all eco into a single box each). As school isn’t a significant predictor I assume that this is presented to show heterogeneity between schools, but homogeneity for school type? This figure appears to be orphaned, as I can find no reference to it in the body of the manuscript text. That said given that the only predictor of correct responses is time spent in nature (table 2), wouldn’t it be more appropriate for this graph to have an x-axis of time in nature rather than kindergarten?

Given the range of correct “green answer” scores would it be reasonable to categorise the children to explore the responses in figures 1 & 2 based on whether the child was knowledgeable or not. This could have rather a large effect on a child’s understanding of nature. Would require restructuring the results section… i.e. statistical model first, then a breakdown of the interview responses with this additional piece of information in place. NB this is not a requirement, just thought it might be interesting.

A question to the authors regarding the coding of their dataset. Was time in nature fitted as a numerical value ranging from 1-5? This feels correct given the coefficients in table 3, and produces scores in the 0.7-2.5 range for correct answers (predict from the model). Is there any reason to suppose that the responses from the time in nature question would be linear in this fashion? Shouldn’t this be fitted as an ordinal predictor?

There should be some indication of the effect sizes/base rates for the poisson regression. This might be particularly important if the data is reanalysed with time in nature as an ordinal.

Discussion seems reasonable, though the statement that the school didn’t seem to associate maybe entirely due to a false positive.

4.1 limitations seem reasonable. Would suggest that if the interview was structured without randomisation then there is the possibility that the preceding topics might unduly influence the responses that follow (i.e. the results in figure 1a & 1b).

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Abstract

Great revision. Only one little edit—don’t end a sentence with a preposition. The sentence in lines 17-18 ends with ‘of’. Just remove ‘of’.

Introduction

Line 36—remove ‘to’; “threat to biological diversity and increase many hazards that humanity is vulnerable to, such as”

Line 39—change ‘emission’ to ‘emissions’

Lines 61-63 If you’re not going to list all of the 17 sustainable development goals, then provide a link where readers can review. I don’t think you need to state them all. It just would be good to provide a link to additional information if people want to follow through.

What’s happened to Lines 111-115. Seems like a formatting issue.

Materials and Methods

Organization is much improved.

Results

Figure 4 needs a legend as part of the chart—not just in the caption.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have done a great job meeting and incorporating the comments from reviewers, and I find that the manuscript has been significantly improved. 

On line 247, "participation" should be "Participation".

Author Response

Thanks again for your suggestions.

We changed " upon participation" into "upon Participation" at line 154. 

Thank you very much for your kind attention.