How can humankind respond to the enormous challenges we are currently facing? How can educators help develop an understanding of 'one world'; and our roles as global citizens?

Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that sounds abstract; sustainable development; and turn it into reality for all the world's people.

Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations

Semantic Differential Scales

Purpose

To attempt to assess the subjective meaning of a concept to a respondent instead of assessing how much they believe in a particular concept. The scale can also show correlation between issues.

Resources

Copies of your pre-prepared scale

Teacher time

You need to devise a bi-polar rating scale using a series of adjectives that will highlight the interviewees subjective feelings towards the issue you want them to focus on (the example below is about attitudes to police constables - you could chose any issue related to sustainability)

Procedure

Ask interviewees to fill in the scale.

It is then scored by summing the ratings given to each adjective pair on a 1-7 scale. Average ratings can be computed, and comparisons between sub-groups in the sample are feasible.

Pupils can then fill in a star diagram to show their ratings on the scale.

See example of scale used to assess peoples’ attitudes to police constables

Extension

Can be used to compare what pupils feel about contrasting environments e.g. parts of the school grounds, areas of the local town or countryside.

Advantages of this methodology

  • Easy to carry out
  • Fairly easy to aggregate the results or put into diagram form
  • Gives an idea of peoples' subjective feelings about issues
  • Can be used to compare the feelings of different groups of pupils

Disadvantages of this methodology

  • Depends on honesty of those filling in scale