This symposium presents initial results of the IMP>ACT project, which aims to develop an impact assessment framework for sustainability and climate change education (SCCE). The project operates within Horizon Europe and responds to growing calls from SCCE policymakers and practitioners across Europe for approaches that support assessing their impact. IMP>ACT is a collaborative effort involving five universities and seven diverse societal partners who co-design the framework. Its ambition is to go beyond traditional output-focused evaluations such as counting the number of supported schools, trained educators, published strategic documents, or implemented activities, and to truly assess impact.

Current evaluation approaches often neglect what learners actually learn from their participation in SCCE projects or programs or as target audiences of SCCE policies, the competences of educators to facilitate this learning, and the extent to which teaching and learning deploys an action-oriented approach (Sinakou et al. 2022). IMP>ACT seeks to address these critical gaps in SCCE impact assessment and aims to contribute to the overall effectiveness of SCCE through improved feedback loops between research, policy and practice (e.g. Boeve-de Pauw, 2014). Bringing together transdisciplinary expertise from universities, policymakers, NGOs, and other SCCE actors, we employ user-centered design and a user-centered interpretation of validity (Kane, 2016).

In line with this, the aim is to develop an assessment model and an assessment methodology that provide meaningful and actionable feedback to users (Spiering & Barrera, 2021). The model encompasses as its conceptual basis action competence as the key learning outcome of SCCE (Sass et al. 2020) and action orientation (e.g. Weinberg et al. 2024) as the leading pedagogical principle that fosters this competence. The model also includes measurement instruments and indicators that allow diverse users to collect valid and reliable data concerning the action competence of learners and educators’ competences for action-oriented education. The assessment methodology provides guidelines on how these instruments can be used in monitoring and evaluation. It shows how the model can be used, what the roles of different stakeholders are in monitoring and evaluation, and how to use data and results wisely to drive improved feedback loops (e.g. Van Gasse 2024).

The project runs from the start of 2024 until the end of 2027, and in later stages the IMP>ACT assessment framework will be tested in six diverse case studies. These will examine how the framework supports the needs of users in the context of formal and non-formal SCCE. They will also represent a diversity of application contexts and user perspectives (monitoring, evaluation, quality development, accountability). The current symposium presents initial results that come from the work of several partners in different European countries.

The first paper shares insights from consultations with 29 potential users across Europe, identifying ambitions, needs, and contexts. Based on these, four user personas have been developed to guide framework refinement. The second paper presents results from a systematic literature review on measurement instruments assessing aspects of action competence, highlighting gaps and inconsistencies and proposing solutions. The third paper integrates literature review and expert consultations to propose a framework for action-oriented SCCE, identifying five key pedagogical principles that reflect SCCE’s action-focused nature and inform the assessment framework. The fourth paper describes the results of a mapping exercise on international large scale assessments such as TIMSS and PISA, focusing on the opportunities these bring for monitoring and evaluation of SCCE. It presents which data (resonating with action competence and action orientation) is collected through such already existing assessments.

We hope to inform and engage with the ECER NW30 community on these findings and the broader ambitions of the IMP>ACT project.

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