What do teachers think and do about Sustainability at engineering degrees? A new instrument to know it.

Abstract

The work presented below is part of a more extensive study, which tries to gather the perception about the insertion level of sustainability in engineering degrees, and the importance given to Sustainable Development (SD), by both academics and students. The study focuses on the University of the Basque Country, which through the SDG, tries to insert SD at all institutional levels, also in degrees curriculums. Recently, Electrical, Mechanical, and Electronic and Automatic Engineering students were surveyed with a validated instrument, created specifically for the current research. After analyzing students’ responses, it seemed necessary to contrast students’ perception to teachers’ perception to explain among others questions the low insertion level of SD. Therefore, the previous instrument (students’ instrument) has been adapted and slightly modified to compare the two groups and to answer some new questions that emerged after analyzing students’ responses. This paper shows the new instrument creation process and its piloting.The novelty of the presented instrument to obtain engineering teachers’ perceptions about sustainability at the undergraduate level is based on the activity of students in a student-centered environment. The improved instrument and the new way of passing the survey, in addition to providing answers to the research questions, will serve to reduce the nonresponse bias, not valued in the students’ survey.Now the University has a novel tool based on student activity, to gain insight from the teachers’ perspective, fulfilling the lack of instruments in the literature to gather teachers’ points of view.