Towards sustainable futures: Validating an instrument for assessing sustainable development competence in open education

Abstract

Educating for sustainable development is important to ensure economic, environmental, and social well-being for present and future generations. The purpose of this paper is to share a tool to self-assess the competence of sustainable development in the framework of an open education that guarantees the development of timely actions. In the methodology for determining the validity and reliability of the instrument presented, validation by expert judgment was used to determine content validity; for construct validity, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were considered. Five expert judges and 124 students of the bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education participated in the process. The results show a valid and reliable instrument that includes four dimensions: knowledge on sustainable development, skills and actions for open education, awareness on sustainable development, values, and actions for sustainable development. The instrument that was designed can be used in formal and informal educational contexts in which the objective is to contribute to education for sustainable development through open education.