Climate change, one of the most critical issues of our time, has transcended being merely an environmental problem and has become a multi-dimensional crisis involving ethics, politics, and education. To respond to the urgent needs created by this crisis, climate change education must be redesigned with an inclusive, holistic, flexible, and locally sensitive approach (Lautensach et al., 2025). Indeed, the need for radical change and action, long emphasized by the scientific community, has reached a critical point today (Lackner et al., 2025). In this transformation process, teachers are undoubtedly the key actors who will both guide strategic design and ensure the development of action-oriented individuals (Tang, 2025). However, the effective transfer of complex scientific and social strategies into the classroom environment primarily depends on the academic qualifications and pedagogical preparation levels of the teachers who will manage these processes (Moshou & Drinia, 2023).

Despite the critical role of teachers, the current literature points to a fundamental structural gap regarding the effectiveness of educational processes. Studies show that individuals' theoretical knowledge (literacy) about climate change does not always translate into concrete actions or behavioral intentions; a disconnect, defined in the literature as the knowledge-action gap, exists at this point (Knutti, 2019). There is increasing evidence that the emotional connection individuals form with climate change influences their climate actions, making it necessary to investigate the emotional mechanisms in the process of literacy evolving into behavioral intentions. This highlights the growing importance of holistic models that address cognitive, affective, and behavioral components in climate pedagogy (Olsen et al., 2024). In this context, the research. This study aims to examine, through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the direct impact of pre-service teachers' environmental literacy on their behavioral intentions to mitigate climate change, and how this relationship is indirectly shaped through hope, one of the ecological emotions.

Theoretical background

The theoretical basis of this study is the Head–Heart–Hand (HHH) model developed by Sipos, Battisti, and Grimm (2008). This model represents a holistic approach that simultaneously addresses individuals' cognitive learning processes (Head), their capacity for affective connection and meaning-making (Heart), and their ability to translate these acquisitions into action (Hand). The HHH model conceptualizes learning not merely as a process limited to information acquisition, but as a transformative learning process in which information is internalized through emotions and gains meaning through action (Olsen et al., 2024). In this respect, the model aligns with theoretical views that, particularly in complex and multifaceted problem areas involving uncertainty, emotional burden, and ethical responsibility, such as climate change, learning should be evaluated not only in terms of cognitive components but also in terms of emotional and behavioral components (Tsevreni et al., 2025).

In this context, the environmental literacy construct examined in the study corresponds to the cognitive dimension (Head) of the HHH model; the ecological hope variable corresponds to the affective dimension (Heart); and the behavioral intention to mitigate climate change corresponds to the action-oriented dimension (Hand). The study aims to test the structural validity of the HHH model in a sample of prospective teachers by examining the direct and indirect relationships between these three constructs. The SEM analyses to be conducted within this scope are expected to contribute to the empirical foundations of the model and to highlight the need to address the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of climate change education holistically.

In line with the research objective, this study utilized a cross-sectional survey design, a quantitative research method. Cross-sectional design is a type of survey research used to determine the current state of individuals' attitudes, opinions, beliefs, behaviors, or practices at a specific point in time (Creswell, 2019). In this study, environmental literacy was considered as an extrinsic latent variable, while ecological hope and behavioral intentions towards climate change mitigation were considered as intrinsic latent variables. The multifaceted and latent nature of social reality necessitates the use of advanced statistical methods capable of analyzing causal relationships. To analyze the multifaceted structure of social phenomena and the latent processes that cannot be directly observed, the SEM method, which can test complex causal relationships, was adopted (Tarka, 2018). SEM is an advanced multivariate analysis technique that allows for the simultaneous and flexible testing of psychometric and causal relationships between observed and latent variables through theoretically grounded models (Kline, 2015). The study population consists of prospective teachers enrolled in Faculties of Education across Turkey during the 2025–2026 academic year (N = 180,925; YÖK, 2026). The study sample consists of prospective teachers volunteering from the Faculty of Education of a state university in eastern Turkey. The study used a convenience sampling method, commonly used in studies that rely on voluntary participation. While this method offers advantages in terms of accessibility and cost, it is acknowledged to have limitations in the statistical representation of the population (Gliner et al., 2023; Muijs, 2004). According to Cohen et al. (2021), a sample size of 384 people is sufficient for a study with a 95% confidence interval and a 5% margin of error. In the current study, this sample size threshold is exceeded, aiming to reach at least 400 prospective teachers. The data collection tools used in the study were: Atabek-Yiğit et al. The Environmental Literacy Scale developed by (2014), the Climate Change Hope Scale adapted into Turkish by Gezer and İlhan (2020), and the Climate Change Mitigation Behavioral Intentions Scale, whose Turkish validity and reliability study was conducted by Usluer et al. (2023), were used. The agreement between the theoretical model and the data will be evaluated using SEM with maximum likelihood estimation; the mediating role of ecological hope in the relationship between environmental literacy and behavioral intentions to mitigate climate change will be tested with bootstrap-based path analysis.

In accordance with the proposed model, the findings of this study will reveal that the HHH framework offers a functional and holistic theoretical framework for explaining climate action. In this context, it is expected that pre-service teachers' environmental literacy levels (Head) will have a positive but relatively limited direct effect on their behavioral intentions (Hand) towards mitigating climate change. It is predicted that the relationship in question is significantly strengthened through the ecological hope (Heart) variable, and that the indirect effect is more explanatory than the direct effect. These findings are expected to help explain the knowledge-action gap, a frequently discussed topic in climate change education, through affective mechanisms that go beyond cognitive processes. In particular, ecological hope is thought to function as a critical mediating variable that prevents individuals from experiencing eco-paralysis in the face of uncertainty and the emotional burden of climate change, thereby transforming knowledge into action. The research findings, showing that environmental literacy significantly predicts ecological hope and that ecological hope strongly explains behavioral intentions, demonstrate that the HHH model is empirically supported in a sample of prospective teachers. Based on these expected results, the study suggests that climate education initiatives, which explicitly include emotional components such as ecological hope alongside cognitive and behavioral dimensions, should be restructured as a transformative learning process to help close the knowledge-action gap in climate change education.

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