University of Cincinnati
AC-6: Sustainability Literacy Assessment

UC's instrument is a combined "literacy" and "culture" survey, which contains a total of thirteen content-directed questions. Six of the questions were designed to evaluate respondents’ knowledge and literacy regarding sustainability issues:
1) “Sustainable development” can be described as … [multiple choice options]?
2) Which of the following is a greenhouse gas [CO2/CH4/CO/O2/N]? 
3) Approximately what is the world’s population [7.8 billion/6.5 billion/7.2 billion/8.6 billion]? 
4) Is global warming [caused mostly by humans/caused mostly by natural causes/other/not happening]?
5) Environmental Justice refers to how people of color and minority groups are often disproportionately burdened by negative environmental externalities (side effects or unintended consequences) [true/false]?
6) In the US, approximately how much food is wasted [40%/24%/10%/60%]?

See the bottom of this page for more information: https://www.uc.edu/about/admin-finance/planning-design-construction/sustainability/links-&-resources/on-campus-resources.html

In 2016, the UC Office of Sustainability collected examples of survey instruments being used by other schools used for these purposes, including the Ohio State University and the University of Maryland, with their Assessing Sustainability Knowledge (ASK) instrument; the annual survey American University conducts, and others. These instruments were adapted by UC’s Office of Sustainability, in cooperation with the UC Institutional Research office. In 2021, further (minor) refinements were made in collaboration with Dr. Abel Gustafson (Asst. Professor, Communication), who managed the fall 2021 data collection, conducted the analyses, designed the figures, and produced a report document.

UC’s first sustainability literacy assessment was conducted in 2017 and sent to students on the Uptown campus.

In 2019, a slightly-updated version of the same instrument was once again distributed to the student body on the Uptown campus, including to the third- and fourth-year student cohorts to whom the assessment had been administered in 2017. (It was also distributed to faculty and staff.) The 2019 assessment served as a "post-test" to determine the degree to which sustainability literacy had changed for the third- and fourth-year students; it also served as the "pre-test" for first- and second-year students.

In fall 2021, a slightly refined version of the survey was distributed to the entire UC community, including all students, staff and faculty. This served as a "post-test" for the third- and fourth-year students who'd received it as first- and second-year students in 2019, and a "pre-test" for the students who were in their first and second years at UC.

The Office of Sustainability worked with the University’s departments of Institutional Research and Communications to best determine the most effective way to distribute the survey to ensure a diverse representative sample. This entailed creating a unique email listserv group that included all full-time students, staff, and faculty. To avoid a self-selection bias favoring participants who were highly interested in giving their opinion on sustainability topics, this recruitment email did not mention the topic of sustainability. Instead, the email informed participants that the survey was about important issues related to UC’s guiding mission of “Next Lives Here.” The email provided a link to the online survey, which respondents completed in the online platform Qualtrics.

The survey will continue to be administered every two years to the entire student body, and results will continue to be tracked to use first-and second-year student responses as "pre-test" results, and upper-class student responses as "post-test" results.

In general, the survey paint a picture of a campus community at UC that is somewhat knowledgeable about sustainability. However, the degree of knowledge regarding sustainability concepts seems to have stalled or even decreased since the previous assessment in 2019, with every question in 2021 being answered accurately with less frequency than in 2019. We expect that to some degree this reflects engagement challenges associated with the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. It also indicates that there is significant need and opportunity to ramp up UC's sustainability education efforts.

In 2021, three quarters or more of students were familiar with the definition of sustainability and the cause of global warming. However, only slightly more than half are familiar with the idea of environmental justice, and less than 60% could accurately answer questions about levels of food waste in the United States.

The Sustainability Office will be focused on finding ways to increase the overall response rate for the next survey in fall 2023—and on implementing increased peer education and other outreach programs to increase overall awareness, literacy and engagement.

Information about the assessment findings is available at the bottom of the page linked to abovve: https://www.uc.edu/about/admin-finance/planning-design-construction/sustainability/links-&-resources/on-campus-resources.html