Physical Education for Sustainable Development (PESD) University context

The primary purpose of this instrumental study was to validate the psychometric properties and analyze the factor structure of the extended version of the Physical Education for Sustainable Development (PESD) questionnaire in the context of higher education. A sample of 589 undergraduate students of Physical Activity and Sports Sciences (CAFD) in Spain was used. The analysis included internal consistency procedures (Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and hierarchical item clustering techniques. The results revealed excellent reliability levels (α = .94; ω = .94). Unlike previous validations in teacher populations, which showed multifactorial structures, the scree analysis and the explained variance (50.8%; eigenvalue = 12.7) confirmed a dominant unidimensional structure in the students. A high degree of convergence was identified in the items related to health and equality, revealing a latent hierarchy of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This structural divergence suggests that students possess a holistic and syncretic ecological awareness, lacking the technical fragmentation characteristic of experts. It is concluded that the PESD is a robust and valid tool for diagnosing sustainability in initial teacher training. The finding of this functional unidimensionality underscores the need to shift from a general ethical awareness to specific technical competencies in physical education curricula to avoid interpretive biases in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.