Abstract
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) forms part of Target 4.7 of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the 2030 Agenda. This paper presents an effort to propose an evaluation framework of elementary school teaching materials in Taiwan for sustainable development considering three dimensions of sustainability: Environmental, social, and economic. The proposed framework comprises four levels: Lever 1, education for sustainable development; Level 2, teaching scopes; Level 3, learning indicators, and; Level 4, learning topics. This study first, through literature reviews, proposed an initial evaluation framework and then, through in-depth expert interviews, obtained a modified framework. Thereafter, the Delphi questionnaires were conducted to establish the final evaluation framework. The framework includes four teaching scopes, ten learning indicators and twenty-one learning topics. Furthermore, the weights of each scope and its associated indicators were analyzed and compared through AHP questionnaires to obtain the scoring table for sustainability teaching materials implemented in a school. Finally, the scoring table was applied to an existing elementary school to investigate its implementation of the teaching materials on sustainable development. Based on the result from the scoring table, the areas needed for improvement were identified and the improvement strategies were then proposed.
Highlights
Since the Industrial Revolution, the continuous development and activities of human beings on the earth have caused many changes in the environment: Global warming, ozone depletion, greenhouse effect, melting of polar icebergs, acid rain, climate anomalies, and water, air, and soil pollution
This study has established an evaluation framework for elementary school teaching materials for sustainable development, which consists of four teaching scopes, ten learning indicators and 21 learning topics to be used in the framework through literature reviews, expert interviews and the Delphi method
An elementary school can check if the textbooks adopted by the school cover all the Sustainable Development (SD) teaching materials and design extra teaching materials not covered in the textbooks if necessary
Summary
Since the Industrial Revolution, the continuous development and activities of human beings on the earth have caused many changes in the environment: Global warming, ozone depletion, greenhouse effect, melting of polar icebergs, acid rain, climate anomalies, and water, air, and soil pollution. It is true that for the sake of economic development, human beings have over-exploited the existing environment, resulting in constant crises or even endangering survival. They have realized such threats and have begun to face the problem and work hard to improve. Sustainable development can be thought of in terms of three dimensions, i.e., the environment, the economy and the society [8,9,10,11]. Today, these three dimensions are stated in the 2030 Agenda. All the SDGs contribute to the achievement of Goal 4
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