Construct of Youth Environmental Citizenship among International Large-Scale Educational Studies †

: Environmental citizenship has become an integral element of civic and citizenship education curricula, both globally and at the European level. Previous analysis provided important evidence that environmental-citizenship education practice in Nordic schools has a signiﬁcant positive association with heightened attitudes and magniﬁed behaviours among students toward environmental actions now and in the future. This paper starts with critiques on the strengths and limitations of ICCS 2016 data measures of youth environmental citizenship, and then it provides an overview of measures applied in a few other large-scale international studies such as PISA 2015 and PISA 2018. At the end, we present a measurement proposal on environmental citizenship through combining the measures from these studies.


Introduction
Environmental citizenship has become an integral element of civic and citizenship education curricula, both globally and at the European level [1,2]. Previous analysis [3,4] provided results of measures using students' concerns, values, engagement, and intended future participation on environmental issues to construct environmental citizenship and its relation to student home socioeconomic background, gender, and migrant status. The results show that there are both similarities and small variations in elements of student environmental citizenship among the Nordic countries and in comparison with their European and international peers. Nordic students stand out as concerned environmental citizens while they rank somehow lower than their European and international peers in engagement, values, and intended participation of environmental citizenship. We find that student environmental citizenship is socially divided in all Nordic countries as it differs significantly between students from different socioeconomic strata and genders. Although not all differences of student environmental citizenship by migrant status are statistically significant among the Nordic countries, we find some significant influence of migrant status interaction with socioeconomic status and genders.
We follow a recent and comprehensive definition of environmental citizenship by the European Network for Environmental Citizenship (ENEC, 2017-2022): Environmental citizenship is the responsible pro-environmental behavior of citizens who act and participate in society as agents of change in the private and public sphere on a local, national, and global scale, through individual and collective actions, in the direction of solving contemporary environmental problems, preventing the creation of new environmental problems, and achieving sustainability and developing a healthy relationship with nature (http://enec-cost.eu/our-approach/) (assessed on 16 March 2022 ENEC, 2018) [5].
The ENEC definition of Environmental citizenship includes elements of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values. These elements are also compatible with the UNESCO definition of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), "Education for Sustainable Development Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) empowers learners with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to take informed decisions and make responsible actions for environmental integrity, economic viability and a just society." [6].

Existing Data and Measures of Environmental Citizenship
We present the variables of interest measuring student concerns, values, attitudes, behaviors and intended behaviors related to environmental issues from existing data of ICCS 2016 in Table 1 and PISA 2016 and PISA 2018 in Table 2. Table 1 shows students' responses to the measurement items in percentages of Europe comparing with those of international. The preliminary results in Table 1 indicate an overall similarity between European students and students of the world. In Table 2, without data analysis, we only present the measures of variables relevant for environmental citizenship existing in PISA 2015 and PISA 2018 studies, to serve the purpose of our conference presentation of proposing a measurement of environmental citizenship.

Items of Interest in PISA 2018 Response Alternatives
Students' responses to questions "How easy do you think it would be for you to perform the following tasks on your own?" (ST196)

Discussion and Conclusions
There have been studies that explore concepts and measures relevant to environmental education; in this paper we have categorised environmental-related questions formulated in the ICCS 2016 and PISA studies into several environmental citizenship attributes. First, the ICCS study appears to focus on students' concerns, values and future intentions in/outside of school engagement that are interpreted as environmental citizenship attributes. Second, the PISA studies seem to focus on knowledge, skills, engagement, dialogue, social media participation, and habit formation that are interpreted as environmental citizenship attributes. Nonetheless, existing studies such as teachers' understanding of sustainable development and student attitudes and consciousness towards the environment, school education and student learning for environmental citizenship, and a collective effort in conceptualization of environmental citizenship [7] also explore concepts and contribute to measures of environmental citizenship. However, the concepts and measures of envi-ronmental citizenship are rather fragmented geographically and socio-culturally, as well as across different scientific disciplines at different analytical levels. Hence, this array of studies may also contribute to a current lack of comprehensive measurement and perhaps enable researchers to assess and compare youth environmental citizenship across systems and national borders. This preliminary analysis of the ICCS and PISA studies has led to our proposing a new measurement including eight items measuring students' concerns, values, and future intentions in/outside of school engagement, and knowledge, skills, dialogue, social media participation and habit formation that are conducive to pro-environmental movements and change.