The latest IPCC report reminds us that the urgency of climate change is ever more pressing (IPCC 2021). However, as the temperature of the globe increases, glaciers melt, and forests burn at unprecedented rates, the science that should help us navigate this complex matter gets tangled together with anecdotal observations and geopolitical tensions among powerful actors. Which leaves us questioning: is there hope in solving, or even fully understanding climate change? Furthermore, due to the ubiquity of climate change’s consequences and causes, it is an issue handled at an international level, outside our sphere of influence. However, as Latour acknowledges in “Down to Earth”, the US vote for Donald Trump had a huge impact on the global climate once the country withdrew from the Paris Agreement (Latour 2018). A common vulnerability in the face of climate change is the flipside of a common responsibility to act; and in order to do so consciously, citizens must be equipped with tools to understand and come to term with the uncertainties, the complexity of perspectives and the lack of an ultimate solution, all ingrained in climate change. Previous research has argued that educators have the specific responsibility to help future and current citizens prepare for these challenges (Bazzul 2015; Feinstein and Kirchgasler 2015; Hauge and Barwell 2017). One way to conceptualize climate change, as well as other similarly overwhelming issues, like the loss of biodiversity and plastic pollution, is by seeing them as wicked problems. Following Block, Van Poeck and Östman (2019), one can illustrate this intricacy along two dimensions: (1) the scientific uncertainties, and (2) the lack of agreement on what is at stake and therefore on what should be prioritized when considering solutions.

Handling this complexity is not a simple task. One needs to listen and take into account different perspectives, and thus respect the lived experiences of others in this context of common vulnerability and responsibility or, as Nussbaum calls it, “global interdependency” (Nussbaum 2010). In this study, I want to investigate whether young citizens believe they possess competences that are helpful to navigate wicked problems in this global interdependency; and I do so with data from the PISA 2018 Global Competence assessment. This assessment, newly introduced in 2018, aims at investigating emotional and social attitudes as well as skills and opportunities deemed necessary to “live in an interconnected and changing world” (OECD 2020).

Among the constructs that the questionnaire assesses, I select competences that I deem necessary to handle wicked problems in the face of our global interdependency and build the index “Wicked Problems competences” (WPC). I do so by choosing specific questions from the constructs: perspective, adaptability, interest, respect, global mindedness and awareness. Examples of questions are:

How well does each of the following statements below describe you?

I believe that there are two sides to every question and try to look at them both. (perspective)

I can change my behaviour to meet the needs of new situations. (adaptability)

I respect the values of people from different cultures. (respect) (OECD 2020)

The second index is instead an indicator of whether such competences are part of the curricular activities, calculated using the construct “Global Competences at school” (GCS).

My research questions are: (1) which skills and attitudes do 15 years old believe they have to face the complexity of the wicked problems we face (WPC index)? (2) how do they perceive school curricular activities are contributing to the development of these competences (GCS index)? (3) in relation to RQ1, how much of WPC can instead be traced back to the individual socioeconomic background and personal history of each student?

In the PISA 2018 Global Competence assessment, the questions are grouped according to different constructs that OECD intends to investigate. In order to build the WPC index I focus on 6 of them: perspective, adaptability, interest, respect, global mindedness and awareness. Within each group of questions, I further select only those that better capture the competences I’m interested in. I then follow 3 steps to build the separate indicators for perspective P, adaptability A, interest I, respect R, and the combined global awareness indicator GA with answers from the global mindedness and awareness sub-themes. (1) I calculate the mean across answers, (2) I normalize their values from their original scales (1-4 or 1-5) to the 0-1 interval, (3) I make sure that in all indicators 0 corresponds to the most positive stance with respect to possessing the competence, and 1 to the most negative one. The main reason for calculating these partial means is a mathematical one: as the groups have different amounts of questions, there is a need to keep their relative weights in check. However, the results of these sub-indicators are interesting in and of themselves since they show different competences within the WPC and their relative distributions. The transformations in steps 2 and 3 instead are carried out in order for the sub-indicators to be comparable and in order to make it possible then to combine them in the WPC index. Secondly, as I’m interested in the role that schools play in developing this set of capabilities I follow the same three steps on the questions of the construct “Global Competences at school”, and built its corresponding GCS index. Finally, I study these indices by examining their distribution, both visually and through some descriptive statistics, as well as by analyzing their mutual relations. In a second moment, I’m going to test the WPC as well as its sub-indices against a diverse range of socio-economic factors that are part of the PISA general questionnaire. This in order to understand how much each student’s personal background affects their attitudes and skills towards wicked problems.

The analysis is still in progress but the initial results already tell interesting tales. From the study of the indicators’ distributions, one can see an overall positive attitude from students towards possessing these competences. The distribution of all indicators are, in fact, skewed towards 0 which, I remind, is the most positive stance with respect to owning the competence. Interestingly, the most pronounced skewness is in the respect indicator, while the indicator of global awareness has a symmetric distribution signaling a tendency to answer in more moderate terms. Similarly, the skewness of the indicator of “Global Competences at school” shows that, globally, students believe their schools are addressing topics and working on skills connected to global competences. When it comes to the relation between these indicators, their respective correlation values are significant, which shows that, although the competences are different, students feel similarly about them. The strongest relations are found between perspective and adaptability with a correlation of 0.48 and between respect and interest - 0.44. The correlation values between the sub-indicators and the WPC index, against the GCS index are instead low, although still significant. In particular GCS explains only 5% of the WPC variability. There is therefore more to WPC than what pupils learn in school.

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