Abstract:

The Sustainable development (SD) and diverse environmental issues had never been as important as they are today. As it stated in numerous documents, without the contemporary, scientific, lifelong and interdisciplinary concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), the Sustainable development is not possible to achieve. A key part of the Education for Sustainable Development concept is the education of future educators and teachers - it is the bearer and a tool to meet the 17 goals of Sustainable development 2030 (SDG 2030). As bearers of contemporary Education for Sustainable development, future teachers and their attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, knowledge, etc. are often the subjects of many researches. Their initial education and professional development and other forms of lifelong learning are extremely important and represents the contemporary field of research and future of implementation of SD trough society and its institutions. Therefore, in this paper, we present research that measured the attitudes of future teachers, kindergarten/preschool teachers and primary school teachers towards Sustainable Development.

The aim of the research was to adapt and validate the Scale of Attitudes towards Sustainable development constructed by the authors M. Biasutti and S. Frate (2017), in the Croatian language. The reasons for choosing this Scale of SD is the fact that the authors concluded the Education as one of four main dimensions of Sustainable Development in their framework.

The tasks of the research included the following: to determine the measurement characteristics of the scale (after adaptation) and to determine attitudes toward four dimensions of Sustainable development. In addition, the study examined whether there was a statistically significant difference among students who took a course related to Sustainable Development (SD) or not and among students enrolled in different study programs. The research was conducted with a questionnaire that included questions of sociodemographic characteristics of respondents, study program, a question about previous education on the content of the SD / course of study and a translated and adapted scale of Attitudes towards Sustainable Development (ATDS, Biasutti and Frate, 2017). The sample consisted of students in two study programs: undergraduate students of early and preschool education and students of integrated undergraduate and graduate teacher education at the Faculty of Teacher Education in Rijeka, University of Rijeka, Croatia (N = 226). Adapted and validated scale resulted with adequate measurement characteristics and results did confirm the four dimensions of SD. Results also showed evidently different understanding of some items in the ATSD Scale regarding dimensions of environment and economy. Also, the results of ATDS showed high means in all items of the scale, and especially regarding dimensions of society and education. Results of Mann-Whitney tests regarding attending the course of study and enrolled study programs showed statistically significant difference just in a few items of the ATDS. In addition to the obtained results, among other things, the limitations and results of this research relate to the fact that the Faculty of Teacher Education in Rijeka conducts study programs with compulsory and elective courses based on environmental issues and sustainable development.

Keywords:

Attitudes, Education for sustainable development, student, Scale of Attitudes towards Sustainable development, teachers.