2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Piloting a Brief, Cross-Disciplinary Survey Instrument for Measuring Sustainability Learning Outcomes: Year 2 Results from UTA’s Engineering for One Planet (EOP) Institutionalization Program

Presented at Sustainability Literacy and Education- ENVEST Division (Tech Session 5/7)

This paper reports the design, administration, and preliminary results of a brief student survey instrument developed to measure sustainability learning outcomes in courses taught by faculty participating in the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) Engineering for One Planet (EOP) Institutionalization Program. The program’s original semester-long Sustainability Professional Learning Community (SPLC) proved difficult to scale during Year 1, and in Year 2 the team centered faculty development on a two-day Sustainability High Impact Practices (SHIP) bootcamp that was opened to faculty from any discipline. That pivot created a measurement problem: how to evaluate student-level impact in a large, heterogeneous set of courses without adding substantial burden on faculty or students.
To address this, we developed a 15-item survey organized into five constructs: Awareness and Exposure; Relevance and Learning; Knowledge and Definitions; Engagement and Behavior; and Overall Impressions. We administered the survey in Fall 2025 through SHIP-trained instructors in approximately ten courses spanning engineering, computing, and other disciplines. We obtained 246 responses from an undergraduate population that is 45.6% Asian, 25.2% Hispanic or Latino, 13.1% Black or African American, and 46.5% first-generation college students.
Across the sample, 80.3% of students reported that their instructor included sustainability content, 68.5% rated that content was moderately or very relevant to their career, and over 70% reported that the material made the course more engaging. Goal 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) was the most frequently recognized Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), with Goals 6 and 11 close behind. An initial large language model (LLM)-assisted thematic analysis of open-ended responses identified three recurring themes: real-world application, hands-on project work, and a broadening of students’ definitions of sustainability beyond environmental concerns.
We report these findings alongside a set of item-level validity concerns the pilot surfaced, and we describe a planned validation pipeline that includes confirmatory factor analysis, human–LLM inter-rater reliability testing, and demographic disaggregation across cohorts. The results suggest that brief, course-embedded instruments can produce useful, comparable evidence of sustainability learning outcomes across disciplines, and they provide a foundation for the continued instrument development the program will undertake as it scales. An updated Spring 2026 dataset is being collected and will be incorporated in future work.

Authors

Dr. Erick C. Jones Jr. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0559-4699 The University of Texas at Arlington [biography]

Erick Jones is an assistant professor in the IMSE department at UTA and the founder and director of the Sustainable and Equitable Allocation of Resources or SEAR Lab. He obtained a PhD from the Operations Research and Industrial Engineering program at the University of Texas at Austin, a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University, and is a fellow of GEM, NSF INFEWS, and DOE MLEF. He spent several years working in the design, manufacturing, oil and gas, and HVAC industries. During this time, he traveled around the world and witnessed how the lack of basic infrastructure like electricity, HVAC systems, clean water, internet, and banking negatively affects the quality of life of the majority of the world’s population. These experiences motivated him to pursue research that can enhance quality of life by improving access to sustainable resources and economic opportunities, particularly where a lack of physical infrastructure or economic resources presents a major obstacle, leading to the creation of the SEAR lab. The SEAR lab investigates how communities, companies, and countries can allocate their limited resources in a way that maximizes their desired outcomes in a sustainable, equitable, and resilient but also elegant way. The SEAR lab assesses these problems by combining physical experimentation, data analytics, and stochastic systems optimization to provide actionable decisions and create scalable prototypes.
Mengqi Monica Zhan [biography]

MONICA ZHAN
Dr. Zhan serves as an Associate Professor for the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research interests include employee communication and corporate communication. Recently, she has developed growing interests in underrepresented minority student and employee experiences.

GRACE BRANNON
Dr. Brannon serves as an Associate Professor for the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research interests include communication pathways affecting specific outcomes (e.g., health, educational major choice) among marginalized populations.

LIWEI ZHANG
Dr. Liwei Zhang serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research interests includes fluid and combustion physics, propulsion engineering, computational science, and engineering education.

FRANK LU
Dr. Lu is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research is in high-speed aerodynamics and propulsion, primarily in novel detonation engines.
Kendra Lee Wallis The University of Texas at Arlington [biography]

Dr. Wallis did her academic work in physics and currently teaches in the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is Director of Undergraduate Curriculum Development for the new Bachelor of Science degree program in Resource and Energy Engineering. She has been a Faculty Fellow for the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and currently leads the Professional Learning Community on Sustainability.
Ann M.L. Cavallo http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-1441-3204 The University of Texas at Arlington

Download paper (934 KB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session

For those interested in:

Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
engineering
Faculty
undergraduate