2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research answers the question: “To what extent is sustainability education informed by established learning theories, and which learning theories are most frequently applied within the existing literature?” As sustainability becomes central to engineering practice, integrating sustainability education into engineering curricula is both urgent and complex. Yet, while the content of sustainability education has been widely examined, far less attention has been devoted to the learning theories that shape its delivery. This gap limits the field’s ability to design pedagogies that not only convey sustainability knowledge but also cultivate the deeper cognitive, reflective, and action‑oriented capacities required for engineers to address contemporary sustainability challenges.

Using a scoping literature review, this study collects and analyzes peer-reviewed articles from academic databases including Compendex, INSPEC, Scopus, and ERIC. Studies are selected based on their focus on sustainability education in engineering and explicit reference to learning theories such as constructivism, experiential learning, transformative learning, or social learning. The findings indicate a growing incorporation of learning theory in sustainability teaching within engineering education, with approximately 76% of the studies included in this review published in 2019 or later explicitly grounding their work in a learning theory. Both constructivism and transformative learning theory featured prominently. However, some studies lacked clarity or consistency in articulating the learning theories guiding their instructional design, student learning processes, or research framing.

The findings of this study offer valuable guidance for engineering educators engaged in sustainability education by supporting more intentional pedagogical choices. Deliberately integrating learning theory into curriculum design enhances educational effectiveness, fosters deeper learning outcomes, and aligns instruction with the interdisciplinary and values‑driven nature of sustainability challenges.

Keywords: Sustainability, Learning Theories, Engineering Education