Exploring IEA ICCS 2016 Data to Measure Progress towards UN SDG Target 4.7

• In Event: Young people’s perceptions of issues related to global citizenship, environmental sustainability, diversity and civic engagement since 2009. Results from ICCS.

Proposal

The contribution will analyse and explore data from the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS), for which results were published at the end of 2017 (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Losito, Agrusti & Friedman, 2018), with respect to its potential for monitoring specific aspects of U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Target 4.7. The target calls UN member countries to ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote, among others, sustainable development and lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, a culture of peace and non‐violence, and an appreciation of cultural diversity by 2030. As an education target, Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are seen as the main tools.
Monitoring for Target 4.7 includes one global and five thematic indicators. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics’ Global Alliance for Monitoring Learning (GAML) task force for 4.7 sees ICCS as the main monitoring tool for thematic indicator 4.7.4, i.e. “The percentage of students by age group (or education level) showing adequate understanding of issues relating to global citizenship and sustainability”.
Using data from all 24 countries and education systems participating in ICCS 2016 (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Losito, & Agrusti, 2016), the contribution addresses four areas: 1) descriptions of the relationship between student performance in civic knowledge and student, teacher and school characteristics; 2) associations between student, teacher and school characteristics with student attitudes relative to GCED- and ESD-related themes; 3) analyses of the relationship between student performance in civic knowledge and student attitudes relative to GCED- and ESD-related themes; 4) descriptions of teacher training in selected GCED- and ESD-related themes and its association with teacher and school characteristics.
For the analysis, a series of specific indicators in thematic indicator 4.7.4 were matched with the variables available in the ICCS 2016 dataset. ICCS 2016 was not explicitly designed to monitor SDG’s targets at the outset but the variables used to operationalize indicators can still be considered to be suitable proxies to the concepts included in the SDG targets. Three types of analyses are used: estimation of country averages, bivariate and multivariate regression models. In all cases, these analyses considered the ICCS complex sample design and complex assessment design (Schulz, Carstens, Losito & Fraillon, 2018). All analyses were performed using Stata (StataCorp, 2017).
In terms of result, it was possible to match practically all the specific indicators included in this project with variables included in the ICCS 2016 dataset. This in itself provides evidence of a good fit between the concepts evaluated in ICCS 2016 and those referenced in SDG Target 4.7, particularly in its thematic indicator 4.7.4. In principle, the results of this exercise suggest that ICCS 2016 could be a useful tool to monitor progress towards Target 4.7 in the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework, especially with the additional data from ICCS 2009 as well as prospective data from the recently launched ICCS 2022 as well as presumably those from a subsequent cycle before the 2030.

Authors

• Andres Sandoval-Hernandez, University of Bath

• Daniel Andres Miranda-Fuenzalida, Universidad Católica de Chile

• Ralph Carstens, International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)