The Development and Validation of an Instrument for Assessing Science Teacher Competency to Teach ESD

Abstract

Promoting the implementation of education for sustainable development (ESD) in schools is necessary to educate future generations about sustainability. In cases where ESD is integrated into science lessons or ESD has to be taught by science teachers, science teachers have to integrate ESD teaching competencies with their science teaching competencies. The absence of an instrument to assess science teacher competencies to teach ESD makes it difficult for schools to assign the right science teacher to teach ESD or to support science teachers to integrate ESD into their lessons. This study aims to develop an instrument for measuring science teacher competencies to teach ESD. The instrument was developed by combining frameworks of science teacher competencies and ESD teacher competencies issued by several countries and ESD teacher competencies proposed by Okayama University ESD Promotion Center. A four-scale questionnaire comprising 96 statements was developed to assess seven competencies, i.e., content knowledge, content pedagogy, inquiry, professional practice, professional development, assessment and evaluation, and attitude. The instrument was tested on 234 science teachers nationwide, consisting of 166 females and 68 males from different schools, teaching years, and educational levels. The results show that the Cronbach’s alpha of the instrument is 0.99 (very good category), person reliability 0.96 (good category), and item reliability 0.67 (fairly good category). Based on explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis, six competency dimensions are identified. The score of explanatory factor analysis based on Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) was 0.966 and the significance on Bartlett’s test of sphericity was 0.00. This means that there are significant correlations among the items. This suggests that the instrument is suitable to identify science teachers’ competencies as indicators of their readiness to teach ESD.