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For sustainable engineering to contribute to sustainability, curricular reforms are needed to train sustainability-conscious engineers. Examining student perceptions of sustainability education can provide insights for benchmarking the current quality of a curriculum and for identifying strategies for reforming a curriculum. Thus, the goal of this study was to examine student interest in, knowledge of, and experiences related to sustainability in civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). A survey was developed and administered to students () enrolled in CEE capstone courses. The results indicated that although students are interested in sustainable development, there is potential for further enhancing sustainability learning. In addition, students reported that CEE courses strongly impacted their learning, which underscores the importance of curricular quality. Finally, although students were generally satisfied with CEE sustainability education, they cited the need for more guidance on integrating sustainability into the design process. Although this case study provides feedback to improve CEE sustainability education at Georgia Tech, it also serves as an example for other programs interested in evaluating their curricula from a student perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental responsibilities have evolved beyond controlling the emissions and wastes of industrial production to now incorporating logistics, products and processes. Corporations have become environmentally conscious to satisfy corporate responsibilities and to ensure sustainable development, increasing the demand for environmental engineering professionals. Engineering education should not be restricted to satisfying the demands of employers, industry and the marketplace or be isolated within disciplines. This study examined the instructional strategies implemented by a professor in his environmental sustainability engineering course to make his students critical thinkers, who can create sustainable products, programs and solutions. This mixed methods single case study adopted a positive deviance approach to identify this best practices case where the professor applied attitudinal learning principles in a non-intrusive way, that is without trying to change attitudes directly and forcefully. This allowed students to critically examine presented content, connect emotionally to issues they valued, take ownership of their learning, and make decisions and take responsibility for their actions, according to this study. Since sustainability projects are multi-disciplinary in the real world, ill-structured problem solving incorporated in semester-long team projects showed that students learned to work in diverse teams and understood team dynamics. These skills are expected to be transferred into students' future engineering professional careers where they could demonstrate broader management, multidisciplinary, and communication skills, in addition to social, economic and environmental responsibilities. • Course objective: Creating critical thinkers, problems solvers and team players. • Non-intrusive instruction (without trying to change attitudes directly and forcefully). • Attitudinal instruction focused on cognitive, affective, behavioral, and social learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method to evaluate students' application of sustainability principles into engineering design and problem solving was developed. Students were presented with two challenge questions that each posed a scenario. Students responded to one question and their answers were scored using a rubric that combined both analytic and holistic scoring criteria to account for sustainability principles. The rubric was iteratively developed and met standard measures of reliability and validity. Based on responses from primarily civil and environmental engineering students at three institutions, it was found that male students, seniors, and participants in many diverse learning activities (extracurricular service, internships, undergraduate research, and engineering design courses) achieved higher rubric scores. Scores on the challenge questions did not correlate to students' interests in sustainable engineering, which were measured using a Likert-based survey. A challenge-question approach to formative assessment may enable instructors to adapt curricula to foster student learning of implicit sustainability issues in engineering. The rubric may be used with a diversity of content-focused challenge questions as a tool for assessing students' holistic, sustainability-focused approaches to engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]