The decline of insect biodiversity is a current environmental issue, which is also highly relevant for education. The observed rapid decline is alarming, due to insects’ critical role for the functioning of most ecosystems (Sánchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, 2019). The decline affects humans directly through ecosystem services provided by insects, such as pollination. Despite several ongoing initiatives, we have not solved the problem of insect declines yet and urgent calls persist to educate a broad public about these declines and to engage people in taking actions that sustain insect biodiversity (Cardoso et al., 2020). Mitigating insect decline is key to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Educating about insect declines and about ways to sustain insect biodiversity is therefore highly important for environmental education and education for sustainable development.

Unfortunately, social and educational research in the field of insect conservation is limited (Knapp et al., 2021; Ruck & Mannion, 2021), despite several ongoing initiatives to support pollinating insects. Existing research does not consider the complexity of the problem and the diversity of insects sufficiently, but focus often on specific groups of pollinators such as honeybees (Schönfelder & Bogner, 2018). In particular, we lack educational research on learners’ competences to support insects, and research on how these competences develop through education. However, such research is paramount to provide evidence for the design and advancement of educational settings in formal and informal environmental education.

The framework of Action Competence couldprovide a promising way forward for educational research and for the design of approaches focusing on individual competences. The idea of Action competence origins from the fields of environmental and health education (Jensen & Schnack, 1997) and describes peoples’ ability to act toward solving controversial problems. It combines the three dimensions of action-oriented knowledge, the confidence to take actions, and the willingness to take actions. Action competence was recently applied to the issue of sustainable development (Sass et al., 2020), which fits well to sustaining insect biodiversity as an integral part for achieving a sustainable future. However, the existing action competence framework is more general in its focus and has not been applied to the specific topic of sustaining insect biodiversity before.

Therefore, the presented educational research project aims to apply this idea of action competence to the issue of sustaining insect biodiversity, and eventually investigate and foster learners’ competences to take actions. The project includes four interrelated research objectives (RO); (1) the development of a theoretical framework of action competence for insect conservation; (2) the development of research instruments to investigate the self-perceived action competence; (3) the design of an intervention to foster learners’ action competence; and (4) the investigation of changes of the self-perceived action competence through the designed intervention. The presentation at ECER will provide a short overview on the results from all four objectives, with a focus on RO (3) and (4).

The project uses Educational Design Research (Van den Akker et al., 2006) as an overarching theoretical approach to integrate all four objectives. To reach RO 1, the general concept of action competence (Sass et al., 2020) is combined with the results from an analysis of current papers and initiatives in the field of insect conservation. The resulting new framework builds the basis for the development of a corresponding quantitative scale to measure the self-perceived level of action competence to sustain insect biodiversity (RO 2). The scale asks respondents to rate their personal agreement to statements on knowledge, confidence and willingness to take specific actions on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from fully disagree (1) to fully agree (5). The reliability and the validity of the scale were piloted as part of the project and analyzed using established methods, such as assessing Cronbach’s α and performing Confirmatory Factor Analysis (Field, 2018; Hair et al., 2010). The scale was piloted with 180 students from grades 7 and 8 in Sweden (age 13-15), and the analysis showed a high reliability of the scale (Cronbach’s α = 0.964 for the full scale and Cronbach’s α > 0.89 for the subscales of knowledge, confidence, and willingness). The confirmatory factor analysis underlined the good quality of the research instrument (RMSEA=0.05; CFI=0.985; TLI=0.984). Eventually, this scale was used to assess the impact of a newly developed teaching intervention in grade 7 (age 13-14) of compulsory schools in Sweden (RO 3 & 4) in a pre-post design. The intervention builds on the new theoretical framework and aims to develop learners’ action competence for insect conservation. The initial theory-based design of the intervention builds on the approach of Sinakou et al. (2019) to design powerful learning interventions to develop action competence for sustainability. Following the idea of educational design research, the intervention is tested and adapted in a cyclic approach. A first cycle took place in 2022 with 12 school classes from grade 7. The focus of the investigation is on the development of the self-perceived action competence, but students’ attitudes towards insects are investigated as well using a semantic differential (Schönfelder & Bogner, 2017). Data analysis is ongoing until spring 2023, but results of the performed paired samples t-test from a subsample of students (n=102) are already available at time of submission.

RO 3 – Intervention: The resulting intervention includes a variety of materials and lesson plans focusing on four core topics: 1) the importance of insects, 2) insect decline and its causes, 3) actions to sustain insect biodiversity, and 4) observing insects as citizen scientists. A central part of the intervention is that students plan and conduct their own actions to help insects. A second core aspect is the use of the citizen science platform iNaturalist that provides students’ with the possibility to track insect diversity in their environment. RO 4 – Assessing changes of the self-perceived action competence and attitudes towards insects: The paired sample t-tests show a positive significant difference in the self-perceived action competence between pre-test (M = 3.143, SD = 0.611) and post-test (M = 3.771, SD = 0.715); t(101) = 10.028, p < 0.001 with a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 0.937). The biggest effects were related to the self-perceived knowledge, which was rather low in the pre-test. This indicates that students lack the relevant knowledge to take specific action, even when they are willing to do so. Students’ attitudes changed significantly as well, leading to more positive attitudes in the post-test. The biggest changes were observable in items connected to the importance of insects. All outcomes from the project (framework, scale, intervention, outcomes from the pre-post analysis) are transferable and applicable for other European countries and educational settings. The findings show that students are in need of specific knowledge on taking actions to support insects and that a corresponding teaching intervention can contribute to raise learners self-perceived levels of competence to take actions. The developed framework and scale contribute to advance educational research in the underexplored field of education about insect biodiversity decline as a relevant part of environmental and sustainability education.

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