AI Literacy, Attitudes and Perceived Technological Competence as Correlates of Pre-Service Teachers’ Beliefs About the Professional Relevance of AI: A Latent Mediation Analysis for Sustainable Teacher Education

Preparing pre-service teachers to use artificial intelligence (AI) critically and equitably is part of the quality-education agenda of Sustainable Development Goal 4. Within a framework informed by the theory of planned behaviour, this study examined how AI literacy is associated with pre-service teachers’ belief that AI will play an important role in the teaching profession, and whether a gender difference in this belief runs through attitudes and perceived technological competence. Data from 493 pre-service teachers at one Turkish faculty were analysed with a latent structural equation model for ordinal indicators. Within this model, the association between self-reported AI literacy competence and the belief ran predominantly through positive attitude (indirect β = 0.20) and secondarily through perceived competence (β = 0.07). Ethical understanding was associated with stronger concerns about AI (β = 0.30). Women held a weaker belief than men (standardised difference = −0.28), a difference statistically accounted for mainly by lower positive attitude, with weaker evidence for perceived competence. Coefficients were stable across specifications. Because the design is cross-sectional and single-institution, the associations are not causal and require replication; they suggest that equitable AI preparation may be better targeted at positive experience with AI and perceived competence than at demographic categories.