While many institutions express interest in integrating sustainability into their civil engineering curriculum, the engineering community lacks consensus on established methods for infusing sustainability into curriculum and verified approaches to assess engineers' sustainability knowledge. This paper presents the development of a sustainability rubric and application of the rubric to civil engineering senior design capstone projects to evaluate students' sustainability knowledge at two institutions. The rubric built upon previous assessment approaches to 2 FALL 2017
ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATIONUtilizing Civil Engineering Senior Design Capstone Projects to Evaluate Students' Sustainability Education across Engineering Curriculum evaluate student reports for nine different factors including dimensions of sustainability, Bloom's taxonomy, sustainability links, drivers for including sustainability, location of sustainability within report, qualitative/quantitative incorporation, sustainability source/reference, and sustainability topics. The sustainability content within Spring 2014, Fall 2014, and Spring 2015 senior design capstone projects from university A (UA, n = 181 students, n p = 28 projects) and university B (UB, n = 106 students, n p = 15 projects) was evaluated using a mixed-methods approach. The mixed-methods assessment included observation of student project presentations and evaluation of student reports via rubric. Rubric evaluation of student reports revealed that students' performance in senior design projects is primarily driven by their instructor's expectations; if sustainability is not a major deliverable, then students are less likely to integrate sustainability concepts that they learned from prior classes in their reports. To make sustainability a priority, senior design project requirements should be updated to explicitly require holistic sustainability applications. Instructors could approach raising sustainability expectations by engaging a sustainability expert as an advisor to the senior design course and/or utilizing a sustainability expert as project mentor, as demonstrated in the success of one senior design project at each institution during this study.
is a faculty member in the Penn State Department of Architectural Engineering. His fields of expertise include education for sustainability, sustainable building methods, renewable energy deployment, and sustainable housing design. Dr Riley directed Penn State's Center for Sustainability (now Sustainability Institute) from 2005 to 2013. He currently serves as the Senior Resident Scholar and Reinvention Fund Program Manager for the Institute. Dr. Riley also leads multiple DOE funded energy centers, including the Northern Mid-Atlantic Solar Education and Resource Center, and the Grid-Smart Application and Resource Center. In 2009 he initiated the launch of the National Energy Leadership Corps (NELC), a hands-on program that challenges college students to engage residents in their communities in meaningful home energy and sustainability planning and actions. He is now working with collaborators at numerous institutions to advance the and replicate the NELC in sustainable and high-impact applications.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.