A sustainability quiz university officials distributed over spring break measured students’ sustainability knowledge.
With a quick 14-question quiz, university sustainability leaders are looking to gain a better understanding of students’ knowledge of basic environmental issues and green methods.
Over spring break, Mark Stewart, sustainability senior project manager, and Nicole Horvath, coordinator of the Honors College’s Integrated Life Sciences living-learning program, sent the survey to 10,000 randomly selected students. The quiz is part of a collaborative effort with Ohio State University seeking to develop a set of survey questions that can be used to test sustainability literacy on campuses across the country, Horvath said.
About 15 institutions have already contacted the university and expressed interest in the project, Horvath said. Colleges and universities are catching on to the sustainability trend in part because of the increasing relevance of the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System, a framework created by The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education that awards points to schools with high sustainability performance, she said. Student knowledge is part of the criteria in the program’s goals of building more sustainable communities on college campuses.
When the survey is finalized this summer, it could help schools — including this university — evaluate how to improve their own sustainability education programs, Horvath said.
“If graduates aren’t leaving with knowledge about how to integrate sustainability into their personal and professional lives, then are we really setting up graduates the way we’re supposed to?” Horvath said.
The university first tested students’ collective knowledge of sustainability in 2010. The results of that assessment, Stewart said, were disappointing. The average score was a “C,” with students from the business school and education college receiving the lowest scores, he added.
“If there are any two schools that I think are incredibly important to have sustainability literacy, it would be those two above others,” Stewart said.
The Office of Sustainability will not completely analyze all of this year’s quiz responses until the summer, Stewart said. So far, only 1,200 students have responded, he added.
Some students said they simply don’t have time to do so.
Anastasia Champ, a junior history and journalism major, deleted the quiz when it showed up in her email inbox — it seemed like a waste of time, she said. Though having an environmentally friendly campus is important, Champ added, students should not be forced to participate in green initiatives.
“Most American kids learn about recycling in elementary and middle school,” Champ said. “When you’re in college, you’re making your own decisions about whether or not you should be learning these kinds of things.”
The university will present the questions used in this survey at the Smart and Sustainable Campuses Conference in April to help design a better assessment for colleges with fewer resources, Horvath said. With enough feedback and revision, she said she hopes to design a standard quiz that could be used on any campus.
“We hope it will be a tool that small colleges and universities that don’t have the manpower we have can use at their campuses,” she said. “We hope that in a few years campuses across the country and around the world will be using this.”
