Development of an innovative method for analyzing the presence of environmental sustainability themes and an ecological paradigm in science content standards

• We developed a method to analyze content standards.
• The method was developed to determine the prevalence of environmental sustainability themes and ecological paradigm in content standards.
• We describe an iterative process for fine-tuning the effectiveness of the method.
• The findings suggested that the method could be used for analyzing content standards with expert coders.

An iterative process for developing a method for analyzing Florida's K-12 Next Generation Sunshine State Standards science content was described. For this study, the researchers developed an innovative approach for analyzing the presence of environmental sustainability themes and an ecological paradigm within science content standards. The findings illustrate that detecting ecological thinking within the content standards is a complex and unwieldy process, even when the coders are experts in the content area. Despite this limitation, our expert coders rated the standards document with an overall agreement of 81%. Future research was discussed in terms of how our method could be used to further stakeholders’ understanding about how and to what extent ecological thinking is covered within science content standards.