Abstract:

The aim of this study is to adapt the three-tier ecological footprint diagnostic test developed by Liampa et al. (2019) to Turkish, and to determine the conceptual understanding of high school students about ecologogical footprint. The instrument, including 42 items in total, was translated into Turkish by the researchers. Then, the items were examined by three experts and translted into Turkish. The reaearchers came together to compare the translations and determine the differences in translations. Then, experts and reserachers came together to discuss these differences and reached a consensus. Subsequently, the items were translated back to English by a linguist. By conducting a pilot study, some items were improved regarding the item test analysis. During the improvement, expert opinions were taken again, and items were finalized for the main study. KR-20 value of questions in content and reasoning tiers was 0.77. According to the item analysis, the avearage item difficulty index was 0.58, and the average discrimination index was 0.38. The Cronbach alpha value was 0.85 for 12 items measuring how confident students were about their answers.The results of the main study revealed that although most of the students gave correct answers to the questions in the content tier, they could not answer most of the questions in the reasoning tier. The majority of students were confident about their answers. Based on this result, students may have misconceptions about the ecological footprint.

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