The effectiveness of the action competence teaching approach in biodiversity education – taking Actions for Insects

Widespread loss of biodiversity is a major environmental issue around the globe. Science education can play a key role in educating about biodiversity loss and conservation, helping to embed the importance of sustaining biodiversity in society. It is critical to measure the effectiveness of teaching approaches focusing on biodiversity conservation to strengthen education in this field. Therefore, this study presents a novel teaching approach to foster students' action competence for taking real-world conservation actions and assesses its effectiveness. The study focuses on insect conservation specifically, since insects are indispensable for most terrestrial ecosystems and provide key ecosystem services. The teaching approach was implemented in a Swedish lower secondary school context with students from grade 7-8 (aged 12-15). The study assesses participants' action competence for insect conservation in a mixed-methods pre- and post-study. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that the approach fostered students' self-perceived action competence in the dimensions knowledge, confidence and willingness to take actions to sustain insect biodiversity. The novel approach presented here resulted in more diversified ideas on potential conservation actions and led to student actions, demonstrating that teaching approaches based on action competence can empower students to deal with biodiversity loss.