Monitoring SDG 4: Global citizenship education
Data for indicator 4.7.4 on global citizenship education draw on the 2016 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) and are reported for 23 upper-middle- and high-income countries.
The percentage of students with adequate understanding, based on one cognitive component (consisting of four civic knowledge content domains: society and systems, principles, participation, and identities) and seven non-cognitive components (global-local, multiculturalism, gender equality, peace, freedom, social justice, sustainable development), ranges from around 40% in the Dominican Republic, Latvia and the Netherlands to almost 70% in Croatia, the Republic of Korea and Sweden.
The 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) collected information on cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions of ‘global competence’ that overlapped partly with the notion of global citizenship addressed by indicator 4.7.4, although UIS did not include it in its reporting because, unlike ICCS, this PISA module is not expected to be regularly repeated. On average, some four in five students in OECD countries reported that their school curriculum covered global issues. Gathering information on both learning opportunities and outcomes makes it possible to examine their relationship. Consistently across countries, student awareness, agency and self-efficacy regarding global issues were higher when the number of related learning activities was higher, even after accounting for socioeconomic effects. These positive effects remained small overall, though, and almost half of all learners, on average, failed to demonstrate minimum ‘global competence’. On many measures, there was a large gap between students with low and high socioeconomic status, not just in aspects of knowledge or cognitive performance, but also regarding perceptions of agency, awareness, interest and practical action. Such education cannot succeed if it is perceived as only of concern for the better off.