 Global Threats to Sustainability: Evolving Perspectives of Latvian Students (2016–2022)Ireta Čekse () and
Reinis Alksnis
Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 24, 1-17 Abstract: In an increasingly interconnected world facing global challenges such as climate change and social inequality, citizenship education plays a critical role in preparing young people for responsible democratic participation and sustainability. This study aims to develop a model to explain factors influencing Latvian students’ perceptions of global threats, comparing data from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)’s International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) cycles in 2016 and 2022, to assess how these opinions have evolved and their implications for promoting sustainability through civic education. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to test the latent factor structure modeling the students’ perceptions of environmental and economic threats to the world’s future. A multi-group structural equation model is constructed and used with the corresponding descriptive statistics to analyze various background factor effects on students’ sustainability concerns. The results of the study indicate that citizenship knowledge, as well as various student-level background factors, have an impact on environmental and economic sustainability concerns among 13-year-old students. In some instances, these effects are mediated by students’ civic knowledge level, while in other instances, they are directly attributed to the background factors. The findings show that there may have been some shift in students’ perceptions of sustainability threats, and the role of civic education may have changed in this respect. Furthermore, the varying levels of knowledge across various levels of background factors may suggest that content in lessons must be differentiated according to the needs of groups to support their understanding of the importance of sustainability. Keywords: sustainability; environmental sustainability; economics sustainability; International Civic and Citizenship Study; ICCS 2016; ICCS 2022; impact of globalization; students; citizenship education (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:24:p:11126-:d:1547026 Access Statistics for this article Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu More articles in Sustainability from MDPI |
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