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Higher education is uncertain which sustainability-related education targets should be sought and monitored. Accepting that something needs to be measurable to be systematically improved, the authors explored how measures relate to potential targets. This paper aims to focus on dispositions to think critically (active open-minded thinking and fair-minded thinking in appraising reasoning) as measures and explored how they related to sustainability concern as an indicative educational target.

This research included the development and testing of research instruments (scales) that explored dispositions to critical thinking and sustainability concern. Authors researched these instruments within their own correspondence groups and tested them with university students and staff in Pakistan, the USA, Austria, India and New Zealand. The authors also asked a range of contextualising questions.

Respondents’ disposition to aspects of active, open-minded thinking and fair-minded thinking do predict their concern about facets of sustainability but their strength of religious belief was an important factor in these relationships and in their measurement.

This research demonstrates the complexity of monitoring dispositions to think critically and sustainability concern in educational systems, particularly in circumstances where the roles of religious beliefs are of interest; and suggests ways to address this complexity.

This research integrates and expands discourses on ESD and on critical thinking in diverse disciplines and cultures. It investigates measurement approaches and targets that could help higher education institutions to educate for sustainable development and to monitor their progress, in ways that are compatible with their culture and values.

Higher education likely makes significant contributions towards planetary sustainability through its research activities, but many hope that it will also have an impact via its educational roles. International accords, national strategies and institutional commitments emphasise higher education's responsibilities with respect to education for sustainability, or for sustainable development, but research is hard-pressed to identify systematic changes in the attitudes and aspirations of young people as a consequence of the current efforts of higher education. This chapter analyses the evidence for learning gains but suggests that we should be open to the possibility of learning losses. The chapter ends by exploring if teaching students the skills and dispositions to think critically, deeply and independently, better than we do at present, might not only be a better fit to the liberal traditions and abilities of higher education but also best support generations to come to decide for themselves what their contribution to sustainability could be.

The purpose of this paper is to interpret aspects of education for sustainability in relation to educational theories of the affective domain (values, attitudes and behaviours) and suggest how the use of these theories, and relevant experience, in other educational areas could benefit education for sustainability.

An analysis based on a literature review of relevant educational endeavours in affective learning.

This paper suggests that most teaching and assessment in higher education focus on cogitative skills of knowledge and understanding rather than on affective outcomes of values, attitudes and behaviours. Some areas of higher education, however, have effectively pursued affective outcomes and these use particular learning and teaching activities to do so. Key issues for consideration include assessing outcomes and evaluating courses, providing academic credit for affective outcomes, key roles for role models and designing realistic and acceptable learning outcomes in the affective domain.

Educators for sustainability could use this relevant theoretical underpinning and experience gained in other areas of education to address the impact of their own learner‐support activities.

Educators have traditionally been reluctant to pursue affective learning outcomes but often programmes of study simply fail to identify and describe their legitimate aims in these terms. This paper emphasises the application of a relevant theoretical underpinning to support educators' legitimate aspirations for affective learning outcomes. It will also help these educators to reflect on how the use of these approaches accords with the liberal traditions of higher education.

The Internet is becoming more widely used by academic institutions to support the learning and teaching activities of students and academic staff. Whilst this is a very efficient mechanism, it is, arguably, important that there are adequate controls in place to ensure that the information is not libellous, defamatory, inaccurate, illegal or inappropriate. The interactivity of the Internet, the immediacy of access to its contents and the public accessibility to much of its information, however, do provide a different operating environment and therefore different audit and control issues arise. This paper discusses the roles and concerns of a range of stakeholders and suggests that the control mechanisms might be failing, or might not be adequately policed in practice. A number of examples are provided where the manner in which controls are put in place do not operate effectively, or where there may be control loops that are open‐ended. For each of the stakeholder groups that are identified, an account is given of the use to which the Internet is put and where regulation currently exists or may be desirable.

The aim of this paper is to respond to calls for higher education institutions to address sustainability within the curriculum. Institutions that aim to graduate citizens with prescribed attributes relevant to sustainability may need to develop teaching and learning support‐programmes appropriate to the varied nature of students' worldviews.

The research described here used the NEP (Revised New Ecological Paradigm) and statistical cluster‐analysis to explore if individuals within cohorts of students could reasonably be clustered into subgroups with identified sustainability attributes relevant to the design of learner‐support programmes.

All seven programme cohorts in one institution's annual intake clustered into three subgroups with identifiable attributes.

The results are discussed in relation to how post‐compulsory education institutions can define the sustainability characteristics of their students and to the pedagogic literature that addresses diversity in student groups.

The approach may help higher education institutions better understand the needs of individual students within large groups and to develop appropriate support programmes for students with similar attributes and needs.

The purpose of this paper was to posit and test hypotheses concerned with relationships between teachers' demographics, locus of control and career stages.

A sample consisting of 416 Australian non‐executive high school teachers was gathered from 40 randomly selected high schools. Multilevel regression analysis reflecting the nested nature of the sample of teachers within schools, and allowing for testing for school effects, was employed.

The paper finds that significant gender and years of teaching experience differences were identified for a number of career stages. There were positive relationships between years of teaching experience and later career stages. A number of multilevel models relating locus of control and demographic variables to career stage were developed and are reported.

The paper shows that teachers' generalized beliefs about personal control may be related to career stages and school practices should nurture beliefs in personal control, rather than dependence on powerful others in the school setting.

Applied research indicates strong connections between dimensions of the work place, stress and job satisfaction. Yet, there is an absence of theory to provide conceptual understanding of these relationships. In 1999, Sparks and Cooper advocated using job‐specific models of stress as a way of developing a better understanding of the relationships. The current study adopted this recommendation and investigated a specific job context, specifically, naval officer trainees undergoing their sea training. The results indicate that a general model of stress is unhelpful in identifying the predictors of stress and job satisfaction in specific job contexts. Instead, the authors recommend identifying salient workplace dimensions rather than a broad‐brush approach when seeking workplace associations with stress.

This paper aims to compare the findings from a survey of a cohort of students at an Australian regional university across two time points: immediately on commencing their first semester of study and at the end of their final semester of study to determine whether, and in what ways, these students’ views concerning sustainability appear to have changed. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of the attitudes, beliefs and perceptions of undergraduate business students regarding a range of sustainability issues.

A paper-based questionnaire was delivered to approximately 250 first year and 150 third year students.

A factor analysis shows small but statistically different positive differences, which indicate that the revised curriculum has been successful in raising student awareness and achieving behaviour change.

The study focussed on Australian undergraduate university business students, which reduced generalizability of the findings.

The findings of this study can inform instructors in higher education of student attitudes towards sustainability and climate change adaption and in turn inform changes to tertiary curriculum in sustainability and climate change adaption.

The authors confirm that the research is original and that all of the data provided in this paper is real and authentic. As the paper reports on the third phase of the longitudinal study, some parts of the methodology have been previously published but differ as they reflect the third phase of the study. The results of this study have not been previously published.