Incorporating green building into architectural education: what can we learn from the value-belief-norm theory?

Abstract

Purpose Aiming to find out how to incorporate green building into the architectural curriculum, this study aims to explore the psychological path for cultivating architectural students’ awareness and motivation to learn the green design concepts and related technologies. Design/methodology/approach Based on a global review of relevant architectural courses in universities, a set of green building learning behaviors was proposed and a survey was conducted in architectural schools in South China to verify the “value-belief-norm” theory through the lens of green building learning behaviors. The psychological path that affects students’ green building learning behaviors was analyzed using structural equation modeling. Findings The results showed that biospheric and altruistic values could directly affect students’ motivation to learn green building, while personal norms served as the mediating condition for personal values and beliefs, and ultimately improved motivation. Practical implications The study suggests that the cultivation of environmental awareness and a sense of the ecological crisis should be developed through foundation courses, by establishing an ecological architecture curriculum, to more effectively guide students to learn and practice green building. Originality/value This study, for the first time, applied the “value-belief-norm” theory, which was developed to explain the psychological path for pro-environmental behaviors, to green building learning behaviors of architectural students.

A Tool to Assess Architectural Education from the Sustainable Development Perspective and the Students’ Viewpoint

“…Nonetheless, it is important to indicate that the result of the dimension C1 is directly connected with L5, as the Cronbach's alfa value of the scale C1 would be 0.708 if the indicator of the level of domain L5 was removed. Nevertheless, due to this reason, and to the fact that these two scales do not have many items (7 each one), their Cronbach's alfa values were considered acceptable, as proposed by some authors [62,138,139], especially in scales with less than 10 items [140].…”

“…This measure indicates the extent to which the different items of a scale are closely related as a group. In particular, values of 0.7 or higher are considered acceptable [130][131][132][133], although some authors also refer to acceptable values of 0.6 or higher [62,[138][139][140].…”

“…With this aim, generalist Architectural Education (AE) has been assessed from the sustainability perspective in Spain and worldwide in relation to three main aspects: curriculaunderstood as a plan for formal learning- , the learning experience provided by schools [26][27][28][31][32][33][34]40,41,[43][44][45][46][47]49,50,[52][53][54][55], and the learning outcomes acquired by students [26,28,43,53,54,[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63].…”

“…Learning outcomes have been primarily assessed with questionnaires for students [26,28,43,53,54,[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63].…”

“…In the case of learning outcomes for SD, existing evaluations have only covered the different levels of domain in one case [56][57][58] while overlooking some of them in the rest [26,28,43,53,54,[59][60][61][62][63]. These studies have occasionally considered social and/or economic dimensions of sustainability [28,43,53,61] and have in all cases ignored the cross-cutting competencies for sustainability and architectural competencies unrelated to design or building design.…”