Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

c. Page numbers depend on type and size of the font, margin and line-spacing
used.
d. Curriculum is in a tabular format for some countries, while very few tables
are used by others. For example, Bangladesh presented the curriculum in a
tabular format; Bhutan included few tables. Using tables increases the page
numbers.
Additional procedures for normalising the data were attempted. It was not possible
to use the highest frequency (number of times the concept or the sub-category
was coded) as the normalising factor, given that the volume of documents coded
varied significantly across countries. The numbers could have been transformed
or normalised to lie between 0 and 1, with 0 denoting no citations and 1 denoting
full coverage; but this way of normalisation was not optimal. Attempts were also
made to establish the ‘ideal ESD/GCED content’ based on the SDG document
(United Nations, 2015) and to measure policy coherence between the curricular
content and the ideal content, following the method used by a study aimed at
measuring policy coherence among the multilateral environmental agreements
and the Millennium Development Goals (Duraiappah and Bhardwaj, 2007). We,
however, came to the conclusion that it would not make sense to establish a
universal or deal ESD/GCED content, as the curricular content should be context
specific and culturally and locally relevant.
For the purpose of this regional synthesis report, the data for each subcategory
were thus normalised by the total number of excerpts coded for each
country (see Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2 and Appendix II). The weighting used is
mathematically simplistic, given that a benchmark – from which we can infer high
prevalence, zero prevalence (complete absence) or some level between the two
– is dependent on the total number of excerpts coded for each country. It must
be acknowledged, however, that using a weightage (calculated as percentage of
excerpts coded under a sub-category out of all excerpts coded for all documents
for a country) provided a good base point for comparison across sub-categories
within a country as well as across countries. Although the weighting used is
simple, it is useful in illuminating the prevalence of concepts embedded in SDG
4.7 across 22 countries.
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Appendices