An Assessment of Sustainability across the Campus
Abstract
Across the curriculum approaches have been used successfully with a variety of topics to
demonstrate the importance of skills and ideas across topical areas. Sustainability is a logical
candidate for an across the curriculum approach because the concept itself spans disciplines.
We sought to implement sustainability across the campus to extend the idea of topical breadth.
Sustainability was integrated across four disciplines and three non-curricular areas with
control groups to assess the impact of the approach on students’ understanding of the concept
and their view of its importance. Based in responses to a voluntary survey, students
experiencing the treatment courses scored significantly better in their understanding of
sustainability than control students. These approaches were less successful in helping
students to see the relevance of sustainability to their courses and careers. These results
demonstrate that sustainability can be effectively integrated across the campus, but more
work needs to be done to promote application of and student caring about sustainability