DEVELOPMENT OF STUDENT SUSTAINABILITY AWARENESS, ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS

Research on sustainability in Higher Education lacks the focus on measuring the differences in knowledge, attitudes and actions of students before and after being exposed to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially within a West-Asian context. The 17 SDGs and their learning objectives, developed by the UNESCO (2017), represent the framework of this study. For each of the SDGs, a relevant learning objective has been selected for measuring the awareness, attitude and action of students working on an engineering design/build project in teams. The learning objective of each SDG has been selected based on relevance for the given context. Students participated in a questionnaire survey to evaluate their awareness, attitude and action related to the SDGs on a 4-point response scale. This has been done twice, before and after being exposed to a design/build project using a Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) framework. Descriptive statistics as well as inferential statistics have been carried out in order to analyze the impact of the project on students’ perspectives and illustrate the extent of the influence. Some SDGs were more affected by the project scenario than others. Scaffolding engineering students’ learning of the SDGs by personal reflection ensured that no goal is excluded from the learning process. The results show that students’ learning needs to be supported by reflection on these goals in order to avoid confining the learning process to SDGs that are developed more intensively by the project scenario. It is recommended to do future studies using an experimental/control group design in order to differentiate learning supported by reflection versus project scenario. The findings confirm the approach of including real life sustainability issues in the project scenario. This study is part of an ongoing research effort related to sustainability and engineering education in the region of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).