Factor Structure, Reliability and Measurement Invariance of the Attitude Scale towards Sustainable Development for Prospective Teachers: Comparison of Their Attitudes Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This study has two purposes. The first of these is the adaptation of the Attitudes towards Sustainable Development (ASD) scale developed by Biasutti and Frate into Turkish and finding evidence of its factor structure, reliability and measurement invariance by gender. The second one is to examine teacher candidates' attitudes towards sustainable development before and during Covid-19. For this purpose, two applications were conducted. The first application was conducted on 412 participants in the 2018-2019 spring semester (before Covid-19), 291 of whom were female (70%) and 121 male (30%). The findings of the adaptation study have indicated that ASD is suitable to collect Turkish pre-service students’ attitudes towards sustainable development. The second application was conducted on 628 participants in the 2021-2022 spring semester (during Covid-19), of whom 421 were female (67%) and 207 were male (33%). The participants were students of the faculty of education. As a result, before Covid-19, the environment and economy sub-scale means of males were higher than females. Total ASD, economy, society and education sub-scale mean of the females were higher than males during Covid-19. Finally, females' total ASD, economy, society and education sub-scale mean during Covid-19 were higher than their pre-Covid-19 means. In all comparisons, no significant differences were found between the environmental sub-scale means of ASD.