Education for sustainable development (ESD) gained significant momentum by adopting the Sustainable Development goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (2015). Global acceptance of ESD as an educational priority boosted ESD programs and related international collaborations worldwide. In Hungary the nationwide program of the Sustainability Thematic Week (STW) is announced by the Ministry of Human Capacities each year since 2016 with topics related to the different SDGs. A complex research program linked to the national STW was launched in 2020 to examine Hungarian primary and secondary school students’ environmental awareness. In 2022, PontVelem Ltd., the organizer of the STW and coordinator of the linked research program, initiated and supported a research resting on international cooperation in order to investigate environmental awareness and its shaping factors based on representative samples in three central European countries (Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia).

How pedagogical approach in ESD shapes environmental attitudes, pro-environmental behaviour and action competences is recently gaining more and more interest (Chen & Liu 2020, Sass et al. 2020). Action-oriented and transformative pedagogy promote students to become active participants by understanding and deliberating the causes and effects empower their capability of deliberating the causes and effects, and facilitate to construct visions for finding ellaborated strategies to overcome environmental issues. How specific pedagogical methods (Eames et al. 2006, Lozano et al. 2022) or different pedagogical approaches (Boeve-de Pauw et al. 2015) fit best to these requirements are subject of numerous studies, and still remains a potential fruitful field of environmental education research.

Our research investigates a) how teaching approach (holistic approach to content and pluralistic approach to teaching) in secondary school students is interconnected with their environmental attitudes, pro-environmental behaviour and action competences; b) does the pattern of this interconnectedness differ within the different countries represented in our study.

A representative survey using CAWI methodology (Cocco & Tuzzi 2013) was conducted in three Central European countries. The questionnaire was adapted from earlier questionnaires applied in the STW linked research program in Hungary (see Berze et al. 2022; Mónus et al. 2022) and in several environmental education related research in the Czech Republic (Cincera et al. 2022). 6500 respondents from the 11th class of secondary schools (age of 16-18 years) fulfilled the survey (N= 1666 in Czech Republic, N= 1392 in Slovakia, and N= 3442 in Hungary). In Hungary and the Czech Republic, a two-stage random sampling procedure was used to first select schools using PPS (Probability Proportional to Size) procedure and then to randomly select a class within the sampled schools to fill in the questionnaire. In Slovakia, all secondary schools received a link to the questionnaire, and the participating class within schools was also randomly selected. The deviation of the samples from the distribution of the population was corrected by multivariate weighting (criteria: region, school type, school owner). The survey contained 124 questions on the students’ environmental attitudes, pro-environmental behaviour, action competences, teaching approach perceived in their classes, and on their demographic and socioeconomic background. The relevant scales in the presentewd study were the children’s NEP scale (Manoli et al. 2007), adapted versions of the preservation, the utilization and the nature appreciation scales (Cincera et al. 2022) of the 2-MEV scale (Bogner 2018), an adapted version of the self-perceived action competence scale (Olsson et al. 2020), and finally two scales to measure the teaching approach (holistic approach to content and pluralistic approach to teaching; Boeve-de Pauw et al. 2015). The research was performed according to the APA Ethical Principles and considered the national laws in each country. All questionnaires were anonym, could be started by participants after agreeing an informed consent, and the subsequent identification of participants were not feasible based on the answers. The research was organized by Alapértékek Nonprofit Ltd. in partnership with PontVelem Nonprofit Ltd. (as the organizer of the Hungarian STW), and was supported by the Hungarian Ministry of Human Resources, the National Office for Vocational and Adult Education, the Blue Planet Foundation and the Alliance for Fundamental Rights (Hungary). The fieldwork was conducted by Hungarian polling company Forsense.

Cronbach’s alpha reliabilities of the scales used ranged from 0.59 to 0.86 in the different national samples. Based on the preliminary analyses teaching approach slightly correlated both to environmental attitude and self-perceived action competence (rSp=0.08 – 0.15), and action competence moderately correlated to preservation and appreciation of nature (rSp=0.31 – 0.39), while holistic and pluralistic teaching approaches correlated to a higher extent (rSp=0.51). Further more sophisticated analyses are in progress to assess the effect of demographic variables, school type and country effect on these correlations. Considering national differences in teaching approaches and their respected effects on attitudes and action competences may allow us to draw some relevant consequences on ESD policies.

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