Measuring Sustainability Literacy: Scale Development and Validation

Concerns have been raised after recent reports from the United Nations and Higher Education Sustainability Initiative showed a lower score in sustainability literacy of people. Among other things, these reports show that educational practices are not effective enough to inform and educate people about sustainability. Thus, an effective assessment of the sustainability literacy of a society can be a turning point and will tremendously help in improving sustainability literacy. In recent years, different researchers tried to develop tools to measure sustainability literacy, however, most of the research focused on specific or limited dimensions of sustainability literacy such as environment or society, and lacked inclusivity. Thus, in this study, we aimed to develop a tool that can measure sustainability literacy holistically. We developed the scale under the UNESCO framework of Sustainable Development and used the existing literature and focus group recommendations to generate items for the scale. The methodology used in the paper involved Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) followed by the reliability analysis of the developed scale. The sample size of the data was 172 individuals. The EFA and reliability results indicate that the developed scale is strongly valid and highly reliable and can be used to measure sustainability literacy holistically.