Professional Readiness for Education for Sustainable Development
Development and Validation of the Teachers’ Intention to Implement ESD Scale
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22044598 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nena Vukelić (0000-0002-0658-8947, University of Rijeka, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 900 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Education Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2227-7102 • E-ISSN: 2227-7102 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/educsci16060900 |
| OpenAlex | W7163918544 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 45 |
As educators play a pivotal role in advancing sustainable futures, understanding their readiness to translate sustainability-related knowledge and values into teaching practice has become an important concern in teacher education and professional development research. This study aims to develop and validate a measurement instrument assessing student teachers’ intention to implement education for sustainable development (ESD). By operationalizing intention as a proximal indicator of future-oriented professional readiness for ESD, the study addresses the need for empirically grounded tools that capture educators’ preparedness to engage in sustainability-oriented teaching. The Intention to Implement ESD Scale (IESDS) was developed through a theory-informed item construction process grounded in ESD literature, teacher agency, and competence-oriented approaches to sustainable education. The instrument was validated on a sample of 706 student teachers enrolled in the final years of teacher education programs. The findings indicate that a bifactor model provided the best fit to the data, with a dominant general factor supporting the interpretation of the IESDS as a primarily unidimensional measure of intention to implement ESD. In addition, intention to implement ESD was positively associated with teacher self-efficacy for ESD, providing evidence of convergent validity and reinforcing the role of perceived capability in sustainability-oriented professional action. The IESDS can support teacher education institutions and professional development providers in monitoring and strengthening educators’ readiness for sustainability-oriented teaching. It may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of courses, modules, and professional learning interventions aimed at promoting teaching for sustainable futures
Education for sustainable development · Grounded theory · Operationalization · Preparedness · Professional development · Psychological intervention · Environmental Education and Sustainability · Environmental Sustainability in Business · Sustainability in Higher Education
Structural Equation Modeling
Scoring and Modeling Psychological Measures in the Presence of Multidimensionality
Learning Our Way to Sustainability
Learning for a Change
Bifactor Models and Rotations
The role of beliefs in teacher agency
Connecting Competences and Pedagogical Approaches for Sustainable Development in Higher Education
Testing Factorial Invariance With Unbalanced Samples
Action Competence and Environmental Education
Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis
The theory of planned behavior
Teaching action competence in education for sustainable development – a qualitative study on teachers’ ideas, opinions, attitudes and self-conceptions
Teaching for tomorrow
Redefining action competence
Exploring the concept of sustainable development within education for sustainable development
Teacher Education for Sustainable Development
Subject- and experience-bound differences in teachers’ conceptual understanding of sustainable development
A sustainability education academic development framework (Sead)
Your View of Nature is Not Mine
Starting the pluralistic tradition of teaching? Effects of education for sustainable development (ESD) on pre-service teachers’ views on teaching about sustainable development
Self-efficacy for promoting EfS among pre-service teachers in Israel
How transformational learning promotes caring, consultation and creativity, and ultimately contributes to sustainable development
Teacher efficacy
Research Synthesis
Achieving transformative sustainability learning
Transformative, transgressive social learning
The development of ESD-related competencies in supportive institutional frameworks
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |