Abstract
Existing environmental and social issues require all learners to acquire the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to play active roles and promote sustainable development. Following this trend, Higher Education Institutions reconsider how to better integrate sustainable development into the curriculum design. However, large-scale empirical studies are lacking to examine the effectiveness of existing sustainability-related courses and curricula. Thus, this comparative study aims to investigate the effectiveness of ESD in engaging students and influencing students' knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards sustainable development in different contexts. It provides insights into how curriculum guidelines on ESD are transformed into a pedagogic approach through a comparative perspective by testing quantitative data collected from HEIs in China and the UK.