Investigation on evaluation framework of elementary school teaching materials for sustainable development

Abstract

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) forms part of Target 4.7 of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the 2030 Agenda. This paper presents an effort to propose an evaluation framework of elementary school teaching materials in Taiwan for sustainable development considering three dimensions of sustainability: Environmental, social, and economic. The proposed framework comprises four levels: Lever 1, education for sustainable development; Level 2, teaching scopes; Level 3, learning indicators, and; Level 4, learning topics. This study first, through literature reviews, proposed an initial evaluation framework and then, through in-depth expert interviews, obtained a modified framework. Thereafter, the Delphi questionnaires were conducted to establish the final evaluation framework. The framework includes four teaching scopes, ten learning indicators and twenty-one learning topics. Furthermore, the weights of each scope and its associated indicators were analyzed and compared through AHP questionnaires to obtain the scoring table for sustainability teaching materials implemented in a school. Finally, the scoring table was applied to an existing elementary school to investigate its implementation of the teaching materials on sustainable development. Based on the result from the scoring table, the areas needed for improvement were identified and the improvement strategies were then proposed.