In education for sustainable development (ESD), student teachers are considered crucial agents facilitating changes in—and promoting—sustainable development (SD; UNESCO, 2017). Their willingness to implement ESD is essential for the sustainable reconfiguration of institutions and educational processes. The role of (student) teachers in ESD and their preparation for the implementation of ESD is the topic of international concern that attracts more and more attention from educational researchers, practitioners and creators of policy guidelines and recommendations. However, studies focused on examining either student teachers’ intention to implement ESD or identification of factors that shape the same intention are scarce. Therefore, this study focused on student teachers and aimed to examine the factors contributing to their intention to implement ESD in their future professional life.

One of the relevant theories for studying teacher intention to implement ESD is the Norm Activation Model (NAM, Schwartz, 1977; Schwartz & Howard, 1981). NAM’s main assumptions is that individuals will be ready to behave in a certain way only after their personal norm has been activated. To activate personal norm, an individual has to take the responsibility for their actions (a construct named ascription of personal responsibility), and they have to assess whether they are capable to behave in a particular way, which in the education research field represents (teacher) self-efficacy construct.

Therefore, two theoretically supported predictors of intention to implement ESD can be identified: teacher self-efficacy and ascription of personal responsibility for ESD implementation. Furthermore, it seems that there are both theoretical and empirical evidence that these two predictors are interconnected. For example, Lauermann & Karabenick (2011) argue that teachers who accept or take responsibility for certain action (e.g., they believe it is their responsibility to solve certain educational problem), to a larger degree believe in their own abilities to conduct certain activity or action. Responsibility is conceptualized as motivational factor that drives teacher’s decision to behave in the way they find efficient (Lauermann & Karabenick, 2011). Furthermore, the significant relationship between teacher self-efficacy and teacher’s ascription of responsibility was confirmed in empirical studies. For example, while studying the factors that form student teacher’s decisions to implement aspects of multicultural education in their future professional work, Kozel (2007) found that teacher self-efficacy represents one of the key factors, followed by the evaluation of whether certain action or strategy will result in desired learning outcome and the sense of responsibility to solve certain problem or achieve certain outcome. In ESD research field, Vukelić & Rončević (2019) found that ascription of personal responsibility represents a significant predictor of teacher self-efficacy for ESD. Student teachers who ascribe responsibility to solve sustainability and environmental protection issues to themselves to a higher extent, show higher levels of belief that they are competent to implement ESD.

So according to the NAM and aforementioned studies results, even putting them separately, teacher self-efficacy and ascription of responsibility in isolation are both good predictors of teachers' intentions (Kozel, 2007; Schwartz, 1977; Schwartz & Howard, 1981). Therefore, it can be expected that individuals who are both high in self-efficacy and ascription of personal responsibility are inclined to implement ESD. Furthermore, it can be argued the joint effect of teacher self-efficacy and ascription of personal responsibility is instrumental to enhancing teachers' intention to implement ESD.

As teacher self-efficacy and ascription of personal responsibility are both relevant to teachers’ professional activities, it is especially essential to examine how both variables interact with each other to affect teachers’ intention to implement ESD. Thus, this study aimed to investigate how teacher self-efficacy and ascription of personal responsibility (for ESD implementation) interact to affect teachers’ intention to implement ESD.

Interaction describes a situation in which combined effects of two interacting variables (predictors) act on an outcome variable. To test the interaction effects of teacher self-efficacy and ascription of personal responsibility the polynomial regression with response surface analysis was employed. Compared to a regular moderation analysis, this approach allows for a more nuanced examination of the different levels at which (mis)match between two predictors (in this case teacher self-efficacy for ESD and the teacher ESD responsibility) can be achieved as well as the functional forms of the (mis)match. A total of 698 student teachers (of which 528 female and 170 male) participated in the study. Student teachers’ average age was 22.54 (SD=2.42). The research was conducted by using the combination of printed and online questionnaires, completed during regular teacher education lessons in Croatia. This study is part of a larger, mixed-method project “Formal Education in Service of Sustainable Development”, 5 years long research project funded by Croatian Science Foundation (2018-2023). Research instrument consisted of three scales: (I) Intention to implement ESD scale (Vukelić, 2021) that measures four different types of teacher intention in ESD (general intention to implement ESD, intention to implement ESD content, intention to implement ESD teaching approaches and methods and intention to focus on achieving ESD learning goals), (II) Teacher self-efficacy for ESD scale (Vukelić & Rončević, 2019; based on Effeney & Davis, 2013), and (III) Teacher ascription of responsibility for ESD scale (Vukelić, 2021). The combination of polynomial regression analysis and response surface analysis was used. In the polynomial model the outcome variables (four different aspects of intention to implement ESD) are regressed on the teacher self-efficacy for ESD (X) and the teacher ESD responsibility (Y), the squared terms of the teacher self-efficacy for ESD (X2) and the teacher ESD responsibility (Y2), and the cross-product of the teacher self-efficacy for ESD and teacher ESD responsibility (XY). This model can be examined since both predictor variables are commensurable, i.e., both variables (teacher self-efficacy for ESD and teacher ESD responsibility) are measured on the same measurement scale and represent the same content domain (Edwards & Parry, 1993).

This study expands current work on teachers’ intention to implement ESD by exploring its predictors and their joint effects. Apart from that, this study provides a basic framework on how to examine interaction effect by using polynomial regression with response surface analysis (Shanock et al., 2010). It allows us to test the joint effect of two predictors on one outcome variable, permitting a three-dimensional description, a method that is rarely used in educational research. Teacher self-efficacy and ascription of responsibility positively contribute to student teachers’ intention to implement ESD. Furthermore, when teacher self-efficacy and ascription of responsibility for ESD implementation are in agreement, intention to implement ESD increases as teacher self-efficacy and ascription of responsibility for ESD implementation both increases. When both teacher self-efficacy and ascription of responsibility for ESD implementation are low, the intention to implement ESD is also low. Furthermore, it was obtained that student teachers’ intentions increase when the difference between teacher self-efficacy and ascription of responsibility for ESD implementation becomes larger. These results suggest that higher levels of either one of the predictors lead to higher teachers’ intention to implement ESD. Although teachers’ intention to implement ESD is the highest when teacher self-efficacy and ascription of responsibility are both high, it seems that higher levels of at least one of the two predictors are enough for student teachers to intend to implement ESD. This accentuates the need to empower future teachers for the implementation of ESD through initial and lifelong learning programs, by encouraging the development of their teacher self-efficacy, but also a sense of responsibility for moving towards a sustainable future.

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