Overall Rating Silver - expired
Overall Score 50.14
Liaison Jarrett Smith
Submission Date Dec. 5, 2012
Executive Letter Download

STARS v1.1

University of Colorado Denver - Anschutz Medical Campus
ER-13: Sustainability Literacy Assessment

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 2.00 / 2.00 Anu Ramaswami
Director and Professor, CSIS and IGERT Program on Sustainable Urban Infrastructure
Civil Engineering
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Has the institution conducted a sustainability literacy assessment?:
Yes

Did the assessment include a baseline evaluation of students and then a follow-up evaluation of the same cohort?:
Yes

A copy of the questions included in the sustainability literacy assessment:
A copy of the questions included in the sustainability literacy assessment :

Please see the uploaded pdf file for the list of vocabulary included in the assessment (the same list is utilized for both pre and post assessements). Students were required to report on their knowledge of the 45+ concepts as well as where they first learned the concept.


A brief description of how the assessment was developed:

As part of an NSF grant (Award No. DGE-0654378) a graduate curriculum on Sustainable Infrastructure-Sustainable Cities has been built at UCD using a novel interdisciplinary framework. This program has been described and evaluated for its efficacy in promoting systems thinking, inter-disciplinary vocabulary development, and team-building across seven major professional disciplines (engineering, environmental sciences, architecture, planning, public affairs, health and behavioral sciences). A paper describing this curriculum is forthcoming (Ramaswami et. al 2012 Journal of Industrial Ecology).


A brief description of how the assessment was administered:

The assessments were administered at the beginning and end (pre and post) of Core SEIS courses across multiple cohorts.


A brief summary of results from the assessment:

The value of this framework has been evaluated by the interdisciplinary learning occurring in the short-term by the curriculum offered to student cohorts. Student pre and post surveys provided feedback on systems concepts, social actor involvement, and interdisciplinary sustainability vocabulary at each of the CORE courses developed under this effort. Please see ‘Social-Ecological Infrastructural Systems (SEIS) Framework for Inter-Disciplinary Study of Sustainable City Systems: An Integrative Curriculum Across Seven Major Disciplines’ by Ramaswami et. al currently submitted as a DRAFT article for the Journal of Industrial Ecology for further information, including statistical data from these pre and post surveys.


The website URL where information about the literacy assessment is available:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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