Characterizing undergraduate engineering students' understanding of sustainability

Engineering professionals in Australia and internationally are coming under increased pressure to practise engineering more sustainably. In response to this pressure, the Institution of Engineers, Australia, has updated the procedure for accreditation of the engineering baccalaureate to ensure inclusion of sustainability learning. In order to graduate, Australian engineering students must now 'understand sustainability'. This paper reports on a theoretical synthesis of the literature on sustainability and understanding, and an empirical investigation into sustainability conceptions held by a group of chemical engineering undergraduate students at the University of Sydney. During the theoretical synthesis we examined what it might mean for a student to understand sustainability by deriving a suite of sustainability principles and describing the component parts of an expert-like understanding of sustainability. In the empirical investigation, students' written responses to the question 'In your own words, what is sustainability?' were analysed using a modified version of the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy. The SOLO analysis revealed broad structural variation in the way our students understood sustainability.