Cal Poly Humboldt
AC-6: Sustainability Literacy Assessment

The assessment includes questions specific to sustainability literacy, as well as cultural questions on sustainability values, behaviors, beliefs, and awareness of campus sustainability initiatives. See the attached document for the questions and responses to the Spring 2022 Graduating Students survey.

In the fall semester of 2016, a working group, comprised of the Office of Sustainability (OS) and faculty members, developed questions for a sustainability literacy assessment (SLA) for Cal Poly Humboldt. The group reviewed SLA’s from other institutions, and developed certain questions about local issues. The OS then compiled the questions, worked with the IRB and Office of Institutional Research, Analytics, and Reporting (IRAR) to administer the assessment in April 2017, and analyzed the results. 1,018 HSU students completed this initial, 27 question assessment. Among the results,
• Response rate of approximately 12%
• All majors (except for Francophone studies) were represented
• Baccalaureate and post-baccalaureate were represented
The OS then worked with IRAR to administer the same assessment in the spring of 2018. In the summer of 2018, however, the OS met with Dr. Tony Silvaggio, Department of Sociology, who had expressed interest in refining the SLA, using it as a tool to teach his students about survey development and analysis, and building it out to a longitudinal study by surveying new students (i.e., freshmen and transfers) in the fall semester and then surveying graduating students in the spring semester. The revised, longitudinal SLA was first launched in the fall of 2018, was again deployed in the spring of 2019, and continues each year moving forward.

In the fall semester, the SLA survey is emailed out to all freshmen and transfer students, across all colleges and programs, by the Office of Institutional Research, Analytics, and Reporting (IRAR). In the spring semester, the same questions are emailed out to graduating students. The survey is online and is hosted on Qualtrics. Respondents first review consent information and click on a consent button before they can enter the survey. The survey remains open for three weeks. To help bolster response rates, the OS requests department administrative support coordinators to request faculty to remind their students to take the survey. All identifying information is removed before IE shares survey data with Dr. Silvaggio and the OS.

One might assume that graduating students will outperform new students on all questions. While true for most questions, this has not always the case. For example, on the 2021-22 survey, "Which of the following is the United Nations' definition of sustainable development?" [96.1% correct response from new students compared to 86.1% of graduating student responses]. In general, however, we see a significant majority of respondents, whether new student or graduating, scoring the correct answer, except in two instances: "What is the source of water for Arcata and Cal Poly Humboldt?" [72.8% of new students with incorrect response, 56.9% of graduating students with incorrect response], and "Which of the following are principles of systems thinking?" [55.2% of graduating students with incorrect response]. See the attached report for an additional overview and summary of results.