Design and Validation of a Scale for Teacher Educator’s Conceptions Regarding Education for Sustainable Development

Author(s) : Madiha Khadim , Naima Qureshi2 & Ayaz Muhammad Khan3

Abstract:

The current research aimed to design a scale to measure teacher educators’ conceptions regarding sustainable development. A systematic review of the relevant literature was conducted to generate and operationalize the initial item pool. Initially, the quantitative scale consists of 54 items in total covering the following four dimensions i.e. environmental, social, economic and moral. After the expert opinion 10 redundant and ambiguous items were deleted from the tool. A total of 44 items were finalized for the scale under four domains with thirteen items under social dimensions, 10 items under economic and environmental dimensions and eleven items under moral dimensions. Through a survey, the scale was administered to 60 teacher educators chosen from 3 public sector teacher education departments of Punjab. The validity and reliability of the scale was statistically tested by computing confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. The values of factor loading were between .973 to 0.512. A total of 07 items were dropped from the pooled items resulting in the retention of 37 items on the final version. The final scale indicates adequate reliability and validity across four dimensions of sustainable development. Theoretically, this scale contributes significantly to the identification of moral dimension of sustainability. The scale for teacher educators’ conception regarding education for sustainable development could be a useful for understanding the ways in which teacher educators think about sustainability and could be useful to investigate the relationship between sustainable development conceptions and other variables.

Key Words: Scale, Conception, Sustainable development, four dimensions, Education for sustainable development, Teacher educators.