From scientific and technological literacy to pro-environmental behavior: The role of 21st-century skills in biology education

This study examined how scientific and technological literacy relate to self-reported pro-environmental behavior through the mediating role of 21st-century skills among 578 undergraduate Biology Education students from 16 universities in Eastern Indonesia. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory and the Action Competence Framework, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication were conceptualized as an integrated competence-enactment mechanism linking literacy to behavioral tendencies. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire and analyzed using PLS-SEM with SmartPLS 4. The 21st-century skills construct was modeled as a second-order mediating variable using the disjoint two-stage approach. The measurement model confirmed satisfactory reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. The structural model showed that scientific literacy and technological literacy significantly predicted 21st-century skills, which emerged as the strongest predictor of self-reported pro-environmental behavior. Scientific literacy retained a small but significant direct effect, indicating complementary partial mediation, whereas technological literacy showed no significant direct effect, indicating indirect-only mediation. The mediated model explained 65.1% of the variance in pro-environmental behavior, compared with 50.6% in the direct-effect model. These findings demonstrate that 21st-century skills function as the key mediating mechanism through which literacy competencies are transformed into environmental behavioral tendencies and support the integration of scientific understanding, purposeful technology use, and action-oriented 4C learning in Biology Education curricula.