This article presents and evaluates a model made for climate change education – the bicycle model. The model was created based on an extensive literature review, from which, essential aspects of climate change education were drawn out. The bicycle model is a representation of holistic climate change education and emphasizes the importance of the following aspects: knowledge, thinking skills, values, identity, worldview, action, motivation, participation, future orientation, hope and other emotions, and operational barriers. In this study, the model is also evaluated by climate education researchers and educators. The evaluation was done through documented group discussions and an electronic questionnaire. The findings suggest that the model is useful in developing climate change education policy, research and practice. The findings also give insight into expert's perceptions on climate education. Finally, the article discusses how this model could be developed further.

With increased focus on sustainability and socioscientific issues, dealing with issues related to citizenship is now seen as an important element of science education. However, in order to make the world a better place, mere understanding about socioscientific issues is not enough. Action must also be taken. In this study, 35 international gifted students—potential scientists—aged 15–19 were interviewed to investigate what they were doing to make the world a better place. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis with focus on students’ actions toward a better world, their rationalizations for such actions, and the role of science in the rationalizations. The analysis shows that students consciously take a wide range of actions, and that they see citizenship as a process of constant self-development. The three categories created to highlight the variation in the ways students take action were personally responsible actions, participatory actions, and preparing for future. Although many students saw that science and scientists play a big role in solving especially the environmental problems, most of them also discussed the structural causes for problems, as well as the interplay of social, economic, and political forces. The results indicate that citizenship science education should take the variety of students’ actions into consideration, give students the possibility to take individual and participatory action, as well as give students opportunities to get to know and discuss the ways a career in science or engineering can contribute to saving the world.

A 44-item questionnaire was created to examine pre-service teachers’ knowledge and perceptions of the impact of mitigative climate change actions and how willing they are to undertake these actions. Responses (N = 224) were collected from pre-service teachers at the University of Eastern Finland. The findings show that pre-service teachers have a very low level of knowledge of the impact of different mitigative climate change actions. Furthermore, the students tend to overestimate the carbon footprint of low-impact actions and underestimate the carbon footprint of high-impact actions and they are unable to make a clear distinction between low- and high-impact actions, though the impact of the high-impact actions may be many times greater than those of low-impact actions. In general, pre-service teachers were willing to take low-impact actions, somewhat willing to take mid-impact actions, but reluctant to take the highest-impact actions. Knowledge of the impact of actions did not correlate with willingness to act, possibly due to low levels of knowledge. Some correlation between confidence in knowledge and willingness to act was found. This article discusses the importance of considering confidence in knowledge in future research examining the relationship between knowledge and action. The implications of the findings on teacher education and environmental education are also discussed.

This study uses qualitative content analysis to examine 355 open-ended questions, presented by 16–19 –year-old international students, to find out what students want to learn about climate change. The study finds that students have a high level of consideration toward scientific, societal, and ethical aspects of climate change and that students' questions are multidisciplinary and complex in nature. Most important, the findings show that students ask questions on the same themes that researchers say should be addressed in multidisciplinary climate change education. Based on the findings, this article suggests that climate change education could be developed by adopting guided inquiry.

Non-formal education has been suggested as becoming more and more important in the last decades. As the aims of non-formal education are broad and diverse, a large variety of non-formal learning activities is available. One of the emerging fields in many countries, among them Finland and Germany, has been the establishment of non-formal laboratory learning environments. These laboratories were established in universities and research institutes to aim at enriching opportunities for primary and secondary school students to do more and more intense practical work, e.g. in chemistry. The primary rationale of these laboratories, in the beginning, was mainly to raise students’ interest in the fields of science and engineering, possibly inspiring them to pursue a career in these fields. However, recently the movement has started offering more programs aiming at all learners, but especially those students who are sometimes neglected in traditional science education in the formal sector. A focus on all learners is suggested to help raise students’ level of scientific literacy when connecting practical science learning with the societal and environmental perspectives of science. Chemistry learning connected to sustainability issues offers many contemporary topics that are often not yet part of the chemistry formal curriculum but can easily form contexts for non-formal learning. Because of its flexible character, non-formal education can help implementing aspects of sustainability into chemistry education and also can take a gander at the growing heterogeneity of today's students. This paper derives a joint perspective from two non-formal chemistry education initiatives from Finland and Germany focusing education for sustainability for both talented and educationally disadvantaged students in the foreground of a more general perspective on non-formal and sustainability education in chemistry.