“I Wanted a Profession That Makes a Difference”—An Online Survey of First-Year Students’ Study Choice Motives and Sustainability-Related Attributes

Anna Oberrauch,Christian Vollmer,Helga Mayr,Thorsten Kosler,Ivan Nikitin,Tanja Bügler

doi:10.3390/su13158273

Anna Oberrauch, Christian Vollmer + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158273

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Abstract

Higher education institutions are obligated to facilitate students in the development of sustainability competencies, which enable them to act as “change agents” in their future profession-specific environment. Therefore, students’ study motives, prior knowledge, attitudes, and experiences regarding sustainability should be considered when designing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programmes. The present study compares first-year students in teacher training with first-year students in other study programmes and explores their study choice motives as well as sustainability-related conceptions, engagement and self-efficacy beliefs using a semi-standardised online questionnaire. Results show that the choice of study is dominated by intrinsic factors and the relevance of extrinsic factors differs by degree programmes with lower extrinsic values for the teacher training students. Regarding sustainability, we find simple and often unelaborated concepts. Teacher training students show significantly higher scores than non-teacher training students regarding the sustainability-related behavioural domain and self-efficacy beliefs. In addition, a gender gap increasing with age and with lower sustainability scores for older males could be identified but only for teacher training students. In conclusion, the results show valuable starting points as well as challenges that should be considered when designing target-oriented learning processes in (inter)disciplinary sustainability courses at higher education institutions.

Highlights

At the international level, the UN Decade “Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) 2005–2014” [1], the follow-up programme “Global Action Programme 2015–2019” [2], the “Global Education 2030 Agenda” [3,4], and the current “ESD for 2030” programme [4]emphasise the particular importance of integrating ESD into all levels of education.Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play a key role in promoting a sustainable, future-oriented development [5]
Students at HEIs should be qualified as future decision makers; it is important to raise their awareness ofsustainable development and to support them in the development of competencies that are important in terms of sustainable development (SD), such as systems, critical, anticipatory thinking, problem-solving competence, and the ability to participate [8,9,10]
Answers to the open question posed to teacher training students were categorised according to the FIT-Choice-Model [57], modified by Brandt et al [28]

Summary

Introduction

The UN Decade “Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) 2005–2014” [1], the follow-up programme “Global Action Programme 2015–2019” [2], the “Global Education 2030 Agenda” [3,4], and the current “ESD for 2030” programme [4]emphasise the particular importance of integrating ESD into all levels of education.Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play a key role in promoting a sustainable, future-oriented development [5]. Students at HEIs should be qualified as future decision makers; it is important to raise their awareness of (un)sustainable development and to support them in the development of competencies that are important in terms of sustainable development (SD), such as systems, critical, anticipatory thinking, problem-solving competence, and the ability to participate [8,9,10]. They should be prepared to act as influential citizens and 4.0/).

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