Investigation of Sustainable Development Awareness Levels of Social Studies Teacher Candidates

The fact that the social studies course has an intense content for sustainable development makes it important to reveal the awareness of social studies teacher candidates on this issue. From this point of view, in this study, it was tried to determine the sustainable development awareness levels of social studies teacher candidates in terms of various variables. The study group of the research conducted in the survey model consists of 304 social studies teacher candidates studying at different universities in the fall semester of the 2020-2021 academic year. The Sustainable Development Awareness Scale developed by Atmaca, Kiray and Pehlivan (2019) was used as a data collection tool in the research. The Cronbach Alpha value of this scale, which consists of social sustainability, environmental sustainability and economic sustainability sub-dimensions, was calculated as 0.91. In the analysis of the data, tests such as Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis H were used as well as descriptive statistics. As a result of the research, it was determined that the scores of female participants in both social and environmental sustainability dimensions and the overall scale were higher than men. For all other analyzed variables, no significant difference was determined for both the dimensions of the scale and the overall scale. Based on the findings obtained from the research, various suggestions were presented based on the examination of the gender-related difference in other studies.