Carnegie Mellon University
ER-13: Sustainability Literacy Assessment

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Funded by the Henry Luce Foundation from 2003-2006, “The Greening of Undergraduate Education” project was a university-wide effort in environmental education primarily for first-year and second-year undergraduates. Over the three years, the project resulted in innovative modules or full courses that introduced concepts central to environmental literacy and built a learning community of the project faculty. A total of 35 courses were affected, and the environmental material developed has been integrated permanently to the content of courses ranging from Writing and History to Art and Design to Architecture and Engineering. This innovation continues to touch over 300 students each semester. Three overarching features were embedded into the courses as foundations for ecological thinking: systems thinking, life cycles, and self as agent.

Environmental literacy is a way of thinking as much as it is knowledge of facts and methods. Seeking to capture how students think about and understand environmental issues, the project tried an interview protocol, in which students verbally discussed an environmental case study with a moderator. From these interviews, the researchers devised an essay question based on a case study to illuminate students’ additional thought processes.

The assessment strengthened the faculty’s understanding of the challenges of teaching for environmental literacy. The following outcomes were noted in the final report to the Luce Foundation:

• Creation of a Learning Community
• A Learning Experience for Faculty—Improved pedagogy through a sharing of ideas and methods
• Systematic Assessment of Learning Objectives
• Scholarship of Teaching and Pedagogy: Teaching for Environmental Literacy
• Definition of Environmental Literacy: We documented our process of defining, teaching, evaluating performance, and assessing the learning of environmental literacy and how to measure the impact of a specific course.

Carnegie Mellon University first initiated the development of environmental education in our curriculum through “The Greening of Undergraduate Education” project in 2003. The project included literacy assessment of students, and a review of how environmental pedagogy could be integrated across the entire curriculum. The project successfully ended in 2006.