Developing Assessment Tools for Sustainability Learning in Engineering Education

Sustainability is becoming an important topic in the society. Industries are adopting policies not only to comply with regulations but also to exercise social responsibility. As a result, academia is making efforts to prepare professionals with the knowledge and skills to facilitate sustainable solutions. Several initiatives to introduce sustainability in engineering education have been reported in the literature. However, the complexity and wide scope of sustainability make the teaching and learning of this subject a challenge. Sustainability can be defined from different perspectives and its balance between environment, economy and social pillars is not always preserved. Additionally, the existing instruments to assess sustainability knowledge are too general and no discipline specific. In a complex topic like this, the knowledge in different disciplines cannot be measured the same. This work presents an approach to develop assessment instruments to assess sustainability knowledge in engineering in a learning module to be introduced in a first year engineering design course. The tools will be designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the module and the performance of the students in the module.