Development and validation of a questionnaire on teachers’ instructional beliefs and practices in education for sustainable development

Abstract

Holistic and pluralistic instructional beliefs and instructional practices in Education for Sustainable Development are often considered of high importance to foster students’ competences. This mixed-method study describes the development and the validation of the Holism-Pluralism in Education for Sustainable Development questionnaire (HPESD-Q) to measure teachers’ instructional beliefs and their instructional practices in ESD. The development process includes a survey to choose participants for interviews, review from an expert team, cognitive testing, pilot-testing and the main-run study. Confirmatory factor analysis, reliability and intercorrelations analysis were applied in the validation process. The final version of the HPESD- Q consists of the Instructional Beliefs scales and the Instructional Practices scales. Both have good fit-of-goodness indicators (CLI = .992, TLI = .9891, RMSEA = .030 and CLI = .984, TLI = .980, RMSEA = .043, respectively). The Cronbach’s α for the scales range from .90 to .97, indicating good internal consistency, while the intercorrelations indicate good discriminant validity. The results indicate the potential of the questionnaire for research and practice in ESD.

Keywords:

• Education for Sustainable Development
• instructional practices
• instructional beliefs
• holism
• pluralism
• validation

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research was undertaken as part of the VALIES project, which has received funding from the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO) under the Strategic Basic Research (SBO) (46/FA0400400/7474). The first author has also been fellow of Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, Greece, [F ZL 089-1, 2015-2016].

Notes on contributors

Eleni Sinakou

Eleni Sinakou is a doctoral researcher at the Edubron Research Unit at the Training and Educational Sciences Department of the University of Antwerp (BE). Her research interests include teaching practices in education for sustainable development in elementary, secondary school and higher education from conceptual, teaching as well as implementation perspectives. She has also worked as preschool teacher.

Vincent Donche

Vincent Donche is a full professor at the Department of Training and Education Sciences of the University of Antwerp (BE). Within the research group Edubron, he conducts research in the domains of learning and instruction, higher education and educational measurement.

Jelle Boeve-de Pauw

Jelle Boeve-de Pauw is a postdoc fellow and project leader at the University of Antwerp, faculty of Social Sciences, research unit Edubron (BE). He is also head of the Expertise centre on Urban education at the Karel de Grote University College in Antwerp, Belgium. His main research interests are education for sustainable development, science education and urban education.

Peter Van Petegem

Peter Van Petegem was teacher in sciences and is now full professor in educational sciences at the Department of Training and Education Sciences of the University of Antwerp (BE). His research focuses on educational evaluation at pupil, institution and system level. He has a special interest in research in the area of Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development.