Fatma Gulcin Demirci

This study examines early childhood learning outcomes across thirty-eight OECD countries during the critical 2019-2023 period, analyzing progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 4 targets while exposing fundamental gaps in equity measurement frameworks. Drawing on SDG 4 indicator data for early-grade proficiency in reading and mathematics, the analysis employs mixed methods combining quantitative descriptive statistics with critical policy analysis to address three research questions examining cross-national performance patterns, temporal trajectories through the pandemic period, and equity monitoring limitations. The findings reveal substantial variation in early-grade proficiency outcomes, with a twenty-eight percentage point gap between highest and lowest performing countries demonstrating that national policy choices produce measurably different outcomes for young learners. Temporal analysis identifies three distinct trajectory patterns: approximately one-quarter of countries demonstrated sustained improvement despite pandemic disruption, half maintained stable performance, and one-quarter experienced notable declines persisting through 2023.

This study examines the relationship between national open educational resource (OER) policies and Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) outcomes across 187 countries between 2015 and 2024, with particular attention to the moderating role of artificial intelligence (AI) readiness. Despite widespread optimism about digital technologies as catalysts for universal education, systematic evidence linking formal OER policy frameworks to measurable improvements in educational access and completion remains limited. The analysis employs fixed effects and difference-in-differences estimation strategies using an unbalanced panel dataset comprising 435 country-year observations. The research investigates how OER policies associate with primary completion rates and out-of-school rates while testing whether these relationships depend on countries’ technological and institutional capacity for advanced technology deployment. The findings reveal that AI readiness demonstrates consistent positive associations with educational outcomes, with a ten-point increase in the readiness index corresponding to approximately 0.46 percentage point improvements in primary completion rates and 0.31 percentage point reductions in out-of-school rates across fixed effects specifications. The difference-in-differences analysis indicates that OER-adopting countries experienced completion rate increases averaging 0.52 percentage points relative to non-adopting countries in the post-2020 period, though this estimate remains statistically imprecise (p equals 0.440), preventing definitive causal conclusions. Interaction effects between policies and readiness yield consistently positive coefficients across specifications, but these associations similarly fail to achieve conventional significance thresholds given sample size constraints and limited within-country variation. While the directional patterns align with theoretical expectations that policy effectiveness depends on digital capacity, the evidence should be characterized as suggestive rather than conclusive. These findings represent preliminary assessment of policies in early implementation stages. Most frameworks were adopted between 2019 and 2022, providing observation windows of two to five years before data collection ended in 2024. This timeline proves insufficient for educational system transformations to fully materialize in aggregate indicators, as primary education cycles span six to eight years and implementation processes operate gradually through sequential stages of content development, teacher training, and institutional adaptation. The analysis captures policy impacts during formation rather than at equilibrium, establishing baseline patterns that require extended longitudinal observation for definitive evaluation. High-income countries demonstrate interaction coefficients between policies and readiness that approach marginal statistical significance (p less than 0.10), while low-income subsamples show coefficients near zero with wide confidence intervals. These patterns suggest that OER frameworks function as complementary interventions whose effectiveness depends critically on enabling infrastructure including digital connectivity, governance quality, technical workforce capacity, and innovation ecosystems. The results carry important implications for how countries sequence educational technology reforms and how international development organizations design technical assistance programs. The evidence cautions against uniform policy recommendations across diverse contexts, indicating that countries at different stages of digital development require fundamentally different strategies that coordinate policy adoption with foundational capacity building. However, the modest short-term effects and statistical imprecision observed here should not be interpreted as evidence of policy ineffectiveness, but rather as confirmation that immediate transformation is unlikely given implementation complexities and temporal constraints. The study contributes systematic cross-national evidence on aggregate policy associations while highlighting the conditional nature of educational technology effectiveness and establishing the need for continued longitudinal research as policies mature beyond the early implementation phase captured in this analysis.

As global environmental crises escalate, understanding how individual lifestyle factors affect sustainability outcomes is essential for informing effective interventions with measurable economic and environmental benefits. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 499 participants across urban, suburban, and rural areas. Participants completed measures for 19 variables categorized under six domains: ‎demographics, diet and consumption, transportation and energy use, environmental behaviors, resource usage, and social/physical activities. ‎Transportation mode emerged as the strongest predictor of sustainability. Participants who primarily walked scored significantly higher, with ‎‎84.6% classified as high sustainability performers, compared to only 20% of car users. Diet type also significantly influenced ratings: plant-based diet adherents scored 4.37 on average, with 80.2% rated highly sustainable, versus 2.26 and 28.5% for those consuming animal-based diets. Environmental awareness exhibited a threshold effect; participants with awareness levels 4-5 showed 88% high sustainability, ‎whereas those at levels 1-3 averaged 28%. Six key behaviors, never using plastic, walking, a plant-based diet, limited clothing purchases, ‎renewable energy use, and composting, were associated with average sustainability ratings above 4.3. High-sustainability individuals used ‎‎39.2% less electricity and 36.0% less water than their lower-rated counterparts, representing substantial resource cost savings. Suburban ‎residents demonstrated the highest sustainability rates (67.9%), surpassing urban (47.4%) and rural (46.4%) populations. These findings ‎identify priority areas for promoting sustainable lifestyles and highlight the economic benefits of targeted behavioral interventions through ‎reduced resource consumption and associated cost savings‎.

Amaç: Bu çalışma, COVID-19 küresel salgını nedeniyle açık alanlara ve doğaya erişimleri azalan okul öncesi dönem çocuklarının doğaya karşı bakış açılarının ortaya konması ve doğa temelli eğitim etkinliklerine katılan çocukların gözlemlerinin aktarılması amacı taşımaktadır. Yöntem ve Araçlar: Bu araştırma bir durum çalışmasıdır. Araştırmada durum çalışmasına ilişkin ayrıntılı veri toplayabilmek için yarı yapılandırılmış görüşme tekniği ve katılımcı gözlem kullanılmıştır. Araştırmada İstanbul ilinde yer alan özel bir anaokuluna devam eden 20 çocukla görüşme yapılmıştır. Görüşme sonrası doğa temelli eğitim etkinliklerine katılan çocuklar, programa alındıklarında 6 hafta katılımcı gözlem tekniği ile gözlemlenmişlerdir. Araştırmada elde edilen veriler, yarı yapılandırılmış görüşme sorularının derlenmesi ile betimsel analiz yöntemi kullanılarak analiz edilmiştir. Sonuçlar: Çocuklar doğayı daha çok hayvanlar ve bitkiler üzerinden tanımlamaya çalışmışlardır. Bazı çocukların yaşadıkları bölgedeki yeşil alanlara erişimlerinin sınırlı olması ve yapılandırılmamış ortamlara erişimlerinin az olması dikkat çekicidir. Doğa ile ilgili sevmediği bir şey konusunda çocukların, hayvanlar kategorisinde biyofobik cevaplar verdikleri görülmüştür. Çocukların dışarı çıkma faaliyetleri ve doğa ile ilişkili faaliyetlerinin farklılaştığı görülmektedir. Gözlemler sonucunda küçük çocukların doğa temelli eğitim deneyimlerinin doğaya karşı bakış açılarını geliştirebileceği söylenebilir.