Environmental Literacy Differences Based on Gender Identity and Race: A Social Justice Concern

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Paper is well writen and well referenced.  The references are for the most part current.  The idea is very timely and I did like the conclusions.  The indication has valuable information for the teaching of environmental standards.  Overall a very good and interesting papaer.

On line 104, there is a .4 that is out of place and needs to be explained or removed.

On line 122 there is a .11 and needs to be explained or removed.

Author Response

Thank you for the comments. The two specific comments were citations which I missed when I was putting brackets around the citation number.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The topic is important but this manuscript has significant problems with statistical analysis and many inconsistencies due to confusion and illogical interpretation of the results. Therefore, I have several comments:

1. “resulting in 2,562 participants (about 25% of the student population)” (page 1, line 19) but later in the manuscript“we had 2,550 respondents in our study” (page 5, line 232). Is it 2,562 or 2,550 participants? 

2. “comparing environmental literacy summary scores of BIPOC and white students revealed that white respondents have a significantly higher score at 39% compared to an average score of 35% for BIPOC students (F=6.268, p < 0.001).” (page 1, lines 20-22) but later in the manuscript “we found that White respondents had the highest environmental literacy but that was not statistically different from Asian, native Hawaiian, mixed race, and other (Figure 1)” (page 6, 265-267). Is it statistically significant or not? Interpretation of Figure 1 is a complete confusion “Figure 1. Environmental literacy by race. The number in parentheses on the x-axis represents the number of individuals in each group. A small letter “a” is significantly different from “b” and they are both significantly different from “c”. While columns with multiple letters do not differ from the other columns with those letters (p<0.05).” (pages 6 and 7, lines 281-284)

3. The third (“Environmental literacy will affect a person’s concern about the environment.”) and fourth (“Environmental literacy will affect how empowered people are to make change.”) hypotheses were not statistically tested.

4. There is no validity and reliability data for the test.

5. The use of ANOVA tests is questionable because you have groups with very different sample sizes. The sample size for each group should be at least 15. The greater the differences in sample sizes between the groups, the lower the statistical power of an ANOVA.

6. “We used a two-sample paired t-test assuming unequal variance to examine broad differences between white and all others with an alpha value of 0.05.” (page 6, lines 261-264) – Why paired t-test? Two-sample paired t-test should be performed when two observations are made on each observational unit.

Author Response

The topic is important but this manuscript has significant problems with statistical analysis and many inconsistencies due to confusion and illogical interpretation of the results. Therefore, I have several comments:

1. “resulting in 2,562participants (about 25% of the student population)” (page 1, line 19) but later in the manuscript“we had 2,550 respondents in our study” (page 5, line 232). Is it 2,562 or 2,550 participants? 

Thank you for the detailed comments. I believe that my response to your comments have improved the paper. We ended with 2,560 participants in the study. This has been corrected throughout.

2. “comparing environmental literacy summary scores of BIPOC and white students revealed that white respondents have a significantly higher score at 39% compared to an average score of 35% for BIPOC students (F=6.268, p < 0.001).” (page 1, lines 20-22) but later in the manuscript“we found that White respondents had the highest environmental literacy but that was not statistically different from Asian, native Hawaiian, mixed race, and other (Figure 1)” (page 6, 265-267). Is it statistically significant or not? Interpretation of Figure 1 is a complete confusion “Figure 1. Environmental literacy by race. The number in parentheses on the x-axis represents the number of individuals in each group. A small letter “a” is significantly different from “b” and they are both significantly different from “c”. While columns with multiple letters do not differ from the other columns with those letters (p<0.05).” (pages 6 and 7, lines 281-284)

This confusion comes from multiple levels of analysis. I have edited the abstract to focus on the ANOVA analysis that differentiates between white, black, American Indian, Asian, native Hawaiian, and mixed race respondents. This letter format for showing the difference in a post-hoc test is a standard illustration (see below for a published example).

 

3. The third (“Environmental literacy will affect a person’s concern about the environment.”) and fourth (“Environmental literacy will affect how empowered people are to make change.”) hypotheses were not statistically tested.

I reanalyzed this and wrote a paragraph on these results.

“Participants with a higher environmental literacy score (40 % or greater) significantly thought that they could make a difference with their conservation efforts more than lower scoring participants (Higher Environmental Literacy mean = 3.857; Lower Environmental Literacy mean = 3.723; t stat = 3.2707; p = 0.0005). These same participants have a greater concern that humans are harming the environment (Higher Environmental Literacy mean = 4.2248; Lower Environmental Literacy mean = 3.9821; t stat = 6.3523; p < 0.0001).”

I also added the following statement to the discussion:

“We found that people with a higher environmental literacy score had more concern for the environmental and felt more empowered to make a difference.”

4. There is no validity and reliability data for the test.

The data has “face validity” in that they are objectively measuring the construct of interest. There are limitations in that our questionnaire is short and may not capture all important domains of knowledge. I did complete  a regression analysis between the number of sustainability classes taken and the environmental literacy and there is a strongly significant positive relationship (P<0.001) with the higher number of sustainability classes resulting in a higher environmental literacy score. Also, these are standard test questions the would assess environmental literacy in a classroom setting.

5. The use of ANOVA tests is questionable because you have groups with very different sample sizes. The sample size for each group should be at least 15. The greater the differences in sample sizes between the groups, the lower the statistical power of an ANOVA.

We realize the difficulty in analyzing groups with different numbers of observations. Our choice was between removing American Indian and Native Hawaiian participants from our study. We decided to leave them in and just be clear about the number of respondents for all of the tests. The post hoc test also takes number of participants into consideration which is why American Indians are not differentiated from any group except for white respondents that have the highest environmental literacy.

6. “We used a two-sample pairedt-test assuming unequal variance to examine broad differences between white and all others with an alpha value of 0.05.” (page 6, lines 261-264) – Why paired t-test? Two-sample paired t-test should be performed when two observations are made on each observational unit.

 I was mistaken in writing this. I removed “paired” from the description.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article is very interesting, but I think that the discussion of the salient issues is superficial.  First, you cannot discuss issues related to environmental literacy without referring to the Belgrade Charter and Chapter 36 of Agenda 21.  In framing the issues, please pay more attention to the role of environmental literacy in creating awareness, sensitivity and concern and the 'noise' in the real world, i.e. issues of poverty/deprivation that become priority issues for coloured folks.  The issue of social and economic vulnerability is critical.  Conducting linear studies between variables can give rise to misleading conclusions.  You have answered the questions: What?  However, the how and the why answers will be anyone's guess.  To my mind, the article should pay more attention to literacy and how poverty as a form of vulnerability relates to this concept. Poverty itself is an environmental pollutant (Indira Gandhi). IPCC Assessment Report 6 on climate change provides more current information.  Additionally, read the first three chapters of 'Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987.

Author Response

I have included a paragraph in the introduction about the origins of concern about environmental education with the Belgrade Charter, Tbilisi conference, and Chapter 36 of Agenda 21.

“The Belgrade Charter in 1975, the Tbilisi Intergovernmental Conference on Environ-mental Education in 1977, and Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs highlight the importance of environmental education and that the world population should be aware of and concerned about the environmental issues that affect their lives.”

I added this part in the discussion:

“Stapp et al. [30] first published on the concept of environmental education, provided a definition for the term, and argued for its importance. Fang et al. [31] expand on this concept and discuss the importance of the human species education in the environment because we depend on this environment for our existence. Environmental literacy is a basic measure of this understanding of environment and our work demonstrates that in this Midwestern university in the United States, we are far from an environmentally literate population. Almost 50 years after the Belgrade Charter that emphasized the importance of environmental education we can see that we still have much work to be done in this basic education. The World Commission on Environment and Development [32] laid out the need for sustainable development along with the well accepted definition of that term. It also catalogued some of the environmental issues exasperated by poverty and growth and those environmental issues seem even more dire today. The IPCC Climate Change 2023 [33] report states that human activities have unequivocally caused global warming of 1.1 °C by 2011-2020 compared to the 1850-1900 baseline. Furthermore, it declares with high confidence that from 3.3 to 3.6 billion people are highly vulnerable to climate change. These clear scientific statements of the anthropogenic warming along with the vulnerability to our livelihoods makes it clear that we need to be more intentional with environmental education than ever before.”

 

We have not measured any metrics on poverty as this was not a focus of our study, so we cannot address the issue of poverty as an environmental pollutant.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The new version of the manuscript is slightly improved and it is a bit less confusing. Also, the authors added some results for the third and fourth hypotheses. However, the results of statistical analyses are still insufficiently reported (e.g., no reliability measures for the test, no effect size measures for ANOVA and t-tests, etc.) and interpretations are not comprehensive. The authors might benefit from reading books, such as:

- Loewenthal, K. M., & Lewis, C. A. (2021). An introduction to psychological tests and scales (third edition). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315561387

- Muijs, D. (2022). Doing quantitative research in education with IBM SPSS Statistics (third edition). Sage. https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/doing-quantitative-research-in-education-with-ibm-spss-statistics/book259738

Author Response

Thank you for the comments on the statistical analysis. We have added Dr. Virgil Sheets from our Psychology department to this publication. He is familiar with this data set and was co-author on two other papers from this data. He conducted analysis that produced Cronbach’s α and Cohen’s d. We added statistics in a parenthetical note in the first paragraph in the results as you see below.

“With 2,560 respondents in 2019, we found that White respondents had the highest environmental literacy but that was not statistically different from Asian, native Hawaiian, mixed race, and other (R² = 0.017; F = 6.250; p < 0.001; Cronbach’s α = 0.67: Figure 1). Blacks (t stat = 6.807; p < 0.001; Cohen’s d = 0.345) and American Indians (t stat = 3.158; p = 0.006; Cohen’s d = 0.508) had a significantly lower environmental literacy than those other groups.”

“Whites think that it is more important to conserve energy than all other ethnicities (white mean = 4.171; All other mean = 4.055; t stat = 2.6195; p = 0.0089; d = 0.122). Whites are more concerned that human behavior might permanently harm the environment than all others (White mean = 4.1436; All other mean = 4.0318; t stat = 2.5634; p = 0.0105; d = 0.116).”

“Participants with a higher environmental literacy score (40 % or greater) signifi-cantly thought that they could make a difference with their conservation efforts more than lower scoring participants (Higher Environmental Literacy mean = 3.857; Lower Environmental Literacy mean = 3.723; t stat = 3.2707; p = 0.0005; d = 0.130). These same participants have a greater concern that humans are harming the environment (High-er Environmental Literacy mean = 4.2248; Lower Environmental Literacy mean = 3.9821; t stat = 6.3523; p < 0.0001; d = 0.252).“

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think that this is an improved version that should be published.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I think that the language is fine. However, the Editor may want a particular style of writing, hence my earlier comment on minor editing.

Author Response

Thank you for the supportive review. I will discuss with the editor if they want any changes to the writing style.

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript is improved. Dr. Virgil Sheets added Cronbach’s α and Cohen’s d results.

Author Response

I appreciate Dr. Sheets help with including these statistical tests and agree that it has improved the paper. I edited the manuscript to improve the language and clarity.