Utilizing Civil Engineering Senior Design Capstone Projects to Evaluate Students' Sustainability Education across Engineering Curriculum

Abstract

While many institutions express interest in integrating sustainability into their civil engineering curriculum, the engineering community lacks consensus on established methods for infusing sustainability into curriculum and verified approaches to assess engineers' sustainability knowledge. This paper presents the development of a sustainability rubric and application of the rubric to civil engineering senior design capstone projects to evaluate students' sustainability knowledge at two institutions. The rubric built upon previous assessment approaches to 2 FALL 2017 ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATIONUtilizing Civil Engineering Senior Design Capstone Projects to Evaluate Students' Sustainability Education across Engineering Curriculum evaluate student reports for nine different factors including dimensions of sustainability, Bloom's taxonomy, sustainability links, drivers for including sustainability, location of sustainability within report, qualitative/quantitative incorporation, sustainability source/reference, and sustainability topics. The sustainability content within Spring 2014, Fall 2014, and Spring 2015 senior design capstone projects from university A (UA, n = 181 students, n p = 28 projects) and university B (UB, n = 106 students, n p = 15 projects) was evaluated using a mixed-methods approach. The mixed-methods assessment included observation of student project presentations and evaluation of student reports via rubric. Rubric evaluation of student reports revealed that students' performance in senior design projects is primarily driven by their instructor's expectations; if sustainability is not a major deliverable, then students are less likely to integrate sustainability concepts that they learned from prior classes in their reports. To make sustainability a priority, senior design project requirements should be updated to explicitly require holistic sustainability applications. Instructors could approach raising sustainability expectations by engaging a sustainability expert as an advisor to the senior design course and/or utilizing a sustainability expert as project mentor, as demonstrated in the success of one senior design project at each institution during this study.

Engineering Education for Sustainable Development: The European Project Semester Approach

“…Dancz et al report the development and application of a sustainability rubric to civil engineering senior design capstone projects [3]. The rubric considers: (i) Bloom's knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation cognitive levels; (ii) the number of times the economic, environmental, and social pillars of sustainability were discussed in student reports; (iii) the connections and inter-relatedness between the three dimensions of sustainability; and (iv) the motivations, quantitative/qualitative incorporation of sustainability and references.…”

“…When considering sustainability learning assessment, researchers conduct student surveys (at the start and end of the program) [11], ask students to create concept maps (start and end of the program) and analyze their content with word clouds [13], apply existing assessment frameworks, like the Sustainability in Higher Education Assessment Rubric [14] or the Social, Economic, Ecological, Technological and Time framework [15], create assessment rubrics [4], [11], or combine existing methods [3].…”

“…The faculty's strong perspective on sustainability is embedded in the program through the dedicated support modules offered, the nature of the problems posed and the structure of report templates. That, according to Dancz et al [3], is a recommended approach for having students successfully apply sustainability in their senior design projects, since they are primarily driven by their instructor's expectations. Moreover, according to Stanford et al [11], the characteristics of EPS projects-open-ended problems with real project constraints-contribute to a positive impact on students' critical thinking skills and sustainability knowledge.…”

“…According to UNESCO, engineering is one of the most important activities in the context of sustainable development and, consequently, future engineers need to incorporate sustainability into their practice to improve the quality of life for all [2]. However, the engineering community lacks consensus on established methods for infusing sustainability into the curriculum and on verified approaches to assess engineers' sustainability knowledge [3]. Typically, engineering degrees address this challenge by explicitly including in the syllabus mandatory or optional modules on design, ethics, sustainability, or by implicitly using project-based learning cornerstone or capstone modules to convey these skills.…”

Board # 33 : Positioning Students to Understand Urban Sustainability Strategies through Vertical Integration: Years One through Four

“…Sustainability is generally taught in upper-level classes, yet lower-level classes may include some supplemental sustainability course. Although undergraduate students may have an interest in sustainability, their exposure to it comes later in their educational curriculum (Dancz, 2016). Sustainability has been identified as a "wicked problem" (Brundiers andWiek, 2011, Seager et al, 2012), unstructured and thus difficult to model, with multiple interconnected and integrated aspects that spans policy domains and levels of government.…”