Environmental citizenship has become an integral element of civic and citizenship education curricula, both globally and at the European level (Council of Europe, 2018; Gericke et al., 2020). Previous analysis (Cheah & Huang, 2019) provided important evidence that environmental citizenship education practice in Nordic schools has a significant positive association with heightened attitudes and magnified behaviors among students toward environmental actions now and in the future. This paper presents an analysis of students’ concerns, values, engagement, and intended future participation on environmental issues in relation to their home socioeconomic background, gender, and migrant status. Analyzing ICCS 2016 data of four Nordic countries, we first present descriptions of student responses to all questions related to environmental issues and in comparison between Nordic countries and European and international averages. Then, we construct a composite score of student environmental citizenship for investigating its relationship with student background factors such as gender, migrant status, and home socioeconomic status through comparing means between student groups with different background characteristics. Eventually, we apply factorial ANOVA analysis method to examine the effect sizes of student background factors and the interactions between them on youth environmental citizenship in the four countries. 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 the concerned environmental citizens while they are 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 statuses and genders.

Cheah, S. L, & Huang L. (2019). Environmental Citizenship in a Nordic and citizenship education context. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, 3(1). https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/nordiccie/article/view/3268/3383 Council of Europe. (2018). Reference framework of competences for democratic cultures. Council of Europe Publishing. Gericke, N., Huang, L., Knippels, M. C., Christodoulou, A., Van Dam, F., & Gasparovic, S. (2020). Environmental Citizenship in Secondary Formal Education: The Importance of Curriculum and Subject Teachers. In Hadjichambis A. et al. (Eds.), Conceptualizing Environmental Citizenship for 21st Century Education. Environmental Discourses in Science Education, vol 4. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20249-1_13