Hi Jim,

You may have already come across them, but just in case you haven't, AASHE maintains a list of all the surveys of sustainability awareness, attitudes, and values.  Many of them are quite old unfortunately.  The results from the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS) Pilot Project indicate that this practice is still quite rare.  Only 3 schools out of the 44 who submitted data indicated that they had completed a sustainability literacy assessment of students.

Since STARS awards points for conducting such assessments, I expect we'll be seeing many more schools considering them in the future. 

I think one of the primary reasons that more schools do not conduct sustainability literacy surveys is because developing one that produces meaningful results is incredibly difficult.  If there were a group of people that would be willing to work to develop a sustainability literacy assessment tool that could be picked up and used by any school, I think we would see a dramatic increase in the number and value of sustainability literacy assessments.  (The model I'm imagining here is something like the Clean Air-Cool Planet GHG Inventory Calculator which was developed by students in partnership with a nonprofit organization and then released and refined over time as an open source tool.)

When I was a student and later when I was the Sustainability Coordinator at Duke University, we regularly talked about wanting to conduct a sustainability literacy assessment survey so that we could see if our programs were having the desired effect, as far as public education was concerned.  Despite our desire to do so, it never happened because we discovered almost immediately upon setting out to do it that the true difficulty in conducting such a survey is not finding the person power to conduct it or the money for participation incentives.  It is the knowledge power needed to craft questions that will produce meaningful results, design a distribution methodology that will ensure a good sample, and an analysis scheme free of common pitfalls. (The same thing was true before the CA-CP GHG Inventory tool. Getting students to collect the data was easy once you had a guidebook of how to do it, you had a place to put the data once you got it and you had analytical tools to help you interpret it.)  

I can tell you I would have *jumped for joy* if, while I was at Duke, somebody would have handed me a sustainability literacy survey, methodology and analytical tools devised with the input of a number of expert/wise people from a number of campuses!  And after I finished jumping for joy I would have conducted the survey according to the methdology, run the results through the analytical tools and published the findings so that all could learn from them.  Unfortunately, what I remember instead is that I searched and searched online for such a thing and came up empty-handed.  Maybe things are a little better 4 years later.

I think that the development of this tool needs to be an open source process similar to the iterative cycle of drafting, publishing, workshopping and revising that the CA-CP GHG Inventory tool and the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS) both went through.  I believe it needs to be developed this way because creating a survey tool that will produce meaningful results when deployed on a number of campuses will require the input of people from diverse perspectives.

I can imagine some people reading this and thinking "a one-size-fits-all solution is not the answer; the survey needs to be tailored to the location." I agree that some portion of the tool should be customizable to a particular setting (just as portions of the CA-CP GHG Inventory Tool is).  However, leaving each school with the task of creating a sustainability literacy assessment tool from scratch has a number of big liabilities:

1. Many schools will never benefit from the insights provided by a sustainability literacy assessment because they won't be able to get over the hurdle of developing a survey and methodology themselves.
2. Enormous hours of campus sustainability enthusiasts' time and energy will be wasted reinventing the wheel, campus by campus.
3. Let's face it, creating, conducting and analyzing a survey that produces results that are meaningful is very difficult and most people aren't well trained in the nuances and pitfalls of survey research.  (Worst yet, they aren't aware of the short-comings of their methodology so they publish their results as though they were meaningful.)
4. The results of sustainability literacy assessment surveys will continue to be completely incomparable and unaggregatable.

To re-cap, dear reader, I've been thinking about this and wishing for something like the tool I'm describing here for a very long time.  You can be the one that makes my dream come true!  Please be my s/hero!

We aim to conduct a campus-wide survey this semester/year.  We started by reviewing the surveys posted on AASHE, but expect to customize for some of our bigger issues.  I would have greatly appreciated a question bank or some guidelines about format.

One of the major hurdles can be to get permission from Administration.  In our case it was the Chancellor's idea to conduct a campus-wide sustainability survey, so I will not be passing up the opportunity.  The issue on our large campus is the very real problem of survey fatigue.  Our Administration has also been under increased pressure recently to use surveys regarding major issues in campus management (e.g. budgets in a time of budget cuts; growth plans; increasing student engagement).

Mike Lizotte, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

Here at North Carolina State University we are in the process of conducting a student sustainability attitude survey, which will include elements of measuring student literacy. Our survey team includes a Ph.D. Marketing/Advertising Prof who specializes in consumer research, two Lean Six Sigma grad students who have training in voice-of-the-customer analytics, plus campus reps from sustainability, transportation, solid waste & recycling, and energy management. Like you, Mike, we started with a review of AASHE questionnaires, then began customizing our own survey tool. We have conducted 2 pre-tests to date, have administation buy-in, and hope to push the refined questionnaire out to student population later this month. The results will be used to develop a 2010 sustainability communication strategy (e.g., awareness --> understanding --> action). Once the communication strategy is defined, both media and creative strategies will be developed and implemented. The real benefit will be repeating the questionnaire next year to see if our new campaign moved the needle toward more sustainable awareness and behavior.  We have no idea if this effort will elevate the team to hero status, but we are making sure we apply survey research best practices that will help ensure we yield valid and reliable results.  We will share the results with AASHE, and others, in due course.

Paul McConocha, North Carolina State University
 

Wow this forum is amazing, this is exactly the type of work I am trying to do at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.  I am a Master's Student in Environmental Psychology, so we work specifically on developing surveys, tools, and understand perceptions of such concepts as sustainability.  While I think understanding sustainability literacy is important, I plan to take one step back and try to use a survey and interviews to learn about the perceptions students have about sustainability.  I think this type of data might be a very beneficial way to inform the creation of the tool that Sam Hummel is discussing or future sustainability surveys.  And if there is a group of people that are all working on these types of surveys and projects, maybe at some point we could all collaborate and share data to create something like that.  

Well, I plan on using this forum as a place to throw out my ideas as my project develops.  I look forward to getting some great feedback from everyone, and am excited to help others in any way I can as well.

Corrin Behm, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign

Greetings! My name is Corrine Williams and I am a doctoral student at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia researching the relationship between leadership strategies and environmental sustainability on university campuses around the United States. I am using institutions that completed the college survey for the 2010 Green Report Card conducted by the Sustainable Endowments Institute and correlating the data with survey results from school leaders. The purpose is to identify whether there is a relationship between key strategies and the environmental ranking (A-F) of an institution. If you are a leader at your institution, you would be helping not only me with my research, but our educational community. Colleges and universities have been called upon to be leaders in the area of sustainable development and need some guidance to meet that call.  Hopefully the results of my research will help, or at the very least, suggest where our weaknesses are so that we can work on solutions. But of course, I need your help!  The survey contains 20 leadership strategies suggested by varying organizations or declarations, such as the Talloires Declaration Act. . Last, a "leader" is defined as a faculty, staff or administrator that holds an active position and takes part in decision making. A leader may also be a student that plays a role in sustainability at your institution.

Thank you for all of your support and I hope to hear from you soon! 

The website survey link is:    http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AD93YVU3Z

Hello All, My name is Amy Brown and I am an undergraduate student at the University of Southern Indiana.  Our newly formed sustainability committee hired me as an intern to develop a survey that would measure faculty, staff, and student behaviors and beliefs.  I believe the survey would give us a wealth of knowledge about where our social weakness and strengths are in regards to environmental issues.  Specifically, where the committee (with very limited resources) needs to focus its work. I have been searching desperately for survey questions that have been used at other universities,  I can find results but not questions. The AASHE forum may be good, but our University administration has not found the means to become a  member yet, therefore I don't have access.   I would love to work with those who would develop a social/cultural survey instrument that could be used by all universities, with minor changes to adapt to the different sustainability needs of the region.  I agree wholeheartedly with Sam Hummel.  This has been a much larger undertaking than I expected,  the resources for not reinventing the wheel and having an efficient, well built survey are a challenge.  For those who are working on surveys, please post question/answer choices that you are willing to share and be used to further our knowledge about ideas of sustainability and campus culture, let us encourage our journey forward.  Peace, AB

Hey Corrin,

Did this project come to fruition? I work for UTexas at Austin and am looking for some examples of peer institutions work on this front.

Thanks!

Greetings all,

I have completed my research study pertaining to strategies that relate to environmental sustainability progress on U.S. campuses. First, for a full review, my dissertation is available online in AASHE's database of student sustainability research. Feel free to use it for your own information or research efforts.

A brief overview of the study

I investigated whether or not the advancement of environmental strategies within institutions had any impact on environmental sustainability rankings of colleges and universities. All data was quantified. 335 institutions were asked to participate, of course, not all institutions responded. Two tools were used.

AISHE (The Auditing Instrument for Sustainability in Higher Education) was used to acquire information pertaining to environmental strategies used at U.S. colleges. AISHE is an internationally used self assessment tool that was based on strategies identified by the Talloires Declaration. It was selected because it had already been successfully used in several other countries and was under modification for improvements and STARS was, at the time of the study, not yet fully piloted within the United States.

The second tool used to analyze the environmental rankings of institutions was the Green Report Card, released annually.

Results

There were no significant relationships between strategies used and the advancement of environmental sustainability on college campuses. For example: If having a "vision" was a strategy implemented on a campus, it did not guarantee a sustainable campus. In addition, if the vision was well developed and well known by all stakeholders, it still did not guarantee a sustainable campus. I examined 15 different strategies.

Review

The outcome may be surprising, but if you think about it, there are many variables at work and I only examined a fundamental, potential, connection.

1. For environmental sustainability to be successful, it's multidimensional components should be acknowledged. Back to the "vision" strategy. Having a vision and only a vision for a campus will not solely move the campus toward sustainability. You must also consider the connections between having a vision, developing the vision, educating stakeholders, implementing programs, so on and so forth. Strategies suggested by the Talloires Declaration and other strategies that have been implemented by leaders are strongly interrelated. This would be an excellent research area.

2. Campuses are unique. While some campuses may benefit from strategies A,B,C, other campuses may not benefit from those very same strategies. Why? The culture is different, operations are different, stakeholders are different, campus sizes are different, and you can go on and on.

Anyway, I loved the research. It was an eye opener for me. I am in search of an organization that will support me so that I may continue and expand my research! lol! I have had the opportunity to present my research abroad at a few international conferences.

By the way, AISHE and STARS are excellent assessment tools that are available to colleges and universities looking to self assess, evaluate and improve. Of course, tools are not perfect, but they are constantly be reevaluated and improved upon.

If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me directly at: williams.cdh@gmail.com