Concordia University
AC-5: Sustainability Literacy Assessment

In October 2024, Concordia’s Office of Sustainability, jointly with the Office of Institutional Planning and Analysis (OIPA), disseminated the university’s third comprehensive Sustainability Culture and Literacy Assessment (SCLA). . The 2024 Sustainability Culture and Literacy Assessment survey was disseminated on October 30th, 2024 using the survey software Qualtrics. The survey was designed to meet requirements under AASHE's STARS version 3.0 and the objectives of the Office of Sustainability. 15,000 students and 5,374 employees were sent the survey, 920 of whom participated in the survey. The online survey was sent to all full/part-time faculty, full-time staff, and to a representative sample of graduate and undergraduate students. The margin of error (at 95% confidence interval) was 2.1%. Two reminder emails were sent out to survey participants.

The first section was dedicated to collecting demographic information. There was 1 optional question that asked for information about the respondent's age, gender, ethnic background and ability. The other questions from this section asked about their primary role at the university, what degree they were pursuing and what year of study. The second section was designed to assess the influence of sustainability in students’ enrollment decisions. It included four questions for first year students only. The next section was on sustainability culture and engagement on and off campus. It included questions designed to generate opinions, thoughts, and beliefs about sustainability. The questions in this section were not associated with right or wrong answers, but were rather intended to collect data about how the Concordia population perceives sustainability, where they obtain information about sustainability, and how aware the community is about sustainability initiatives on campus.

The last section of the survey was designed to assess the sustainability literacy of the Concordia population. This section comprised of multiple choice and true or false questions where each is associated with at least one right or wrong answer. All survey questions (approximately 37) were mandatory, except an optional open-ended question at the end of the survey. The open-ended questions asked participants to write down what they think Concordia could be doing better to advance sustainability goals.

The "Literacy" section of the survey began with a question that asked survey participants to identify the most commonly used definition of sustainable development. Of the multiple-choice questions, 68% of participants answered correctly. Survey participants were then asked to identify the concepts that are included in the commonly used “three pillars” or “concentric circles” models of sustainability. Approximately 46% of participants answered correctly. The two questions about Indigenous topics and challenges were created in consultation with Concordia’s Indigenous Directions Office. Survey participants were asked to identify whose land Concordia University is situated on. 74% of participants answered the first question correctly, which could be a result of increased teaching and awareness of Concordia’s land acknowledgement to faculty/staff. 55% of participants answered the second question correctly. 

The last section of the sustainability literacy section included ten true or false questions about various sustainability topics. Of the ten questions, participants performed the best on the following:
The first multiple choice question asked if Canadians currently have the right to a healthy environment as recognized by federal law-- 45% of participants answered this correctly. The third question asked if less than 1% of Earth's water is available for fresh drinking water--58.5% of participants answered this correctly. Participants were also asked if CO2 emissions from most plant-based products are much lower than most animal-based products--59.68% of participants answered "true", which was correct. Survey participants were then asked a question about whether 99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels, which 58.7% of participants answered correctly to. Moreover, they were asked if Fair trade is an approach to global trade aiming to ensure that producers in developing countries receive a fair price for their products-- which 67.5% of participants answered correctly. Finally, 84.8% of participants correctly answered that landfills, pipelines, chemical plants, and other environmental hazards are frequently placed in poor and racialized neighborhoods, contributing to environmental inequities in quality of life. 

The survey draft was prepared by the Office of Sustainability, based on the 2021 version to ensure the possibility of a pre- and post- assessment. The clean survey draft was then shared with the  Vice-Provost, Innovation in Teaching & Learning and their team for review. The draft was also shared with members of the Curriculum team and Centre for Teaching and Learning. They were all given a few weeks to provide their full review, comments and edits to the survey before the final survey version was shared with the Institutional Planning Office for dissemination. 

As the survey was produced in collaboration with staff from the curriculum and teaching sectors of the university, the literacy questions were carefully designed to help the instituion understand how familiar community members are with core sustainability topics and facts, as well as to assess the extent to wich community members are engaged in sustainability learning and initiatives. The results could then inform some employees on how to better integrate sustainability in courses, workshops, and/or events to improve the sustainability literacy of the community.

The 2021 survey results served as a baseline to measure change in literacy at Concordia over time, whilst this 2024 survey version allows the institution to see how literacy has potentially changed since 2021. 

The survey software Qualtrics provides data on the number of respondents who identified themselves as students. The percentage was calculated based on the number of students who participated in the survey.