Abstract
The college impact model provides a valuable framework for explaining various college student learning outcomes. However, few quantitative studies have examined the effectiveness of college impact model in explaining engineering undergraduates’ sustainability consciousness, a critical learning outcome in engineering education. This study proposes a modified college impact model to test the structural links among curriculum experiences, sustainable agency beliefs, and engineering undergraduates’ sustainability consciousness, and to explore the moderating effect of gender on the structural model. Data are collected from 1804 senior engineering students enrolled in five traditional engineering disciplines at 14 first-class engineering universities in China. Structural equation modeling was used for testing the research model. The results demonstrate that (1) curricular emphasis has a significant direct impact on all three dimensions of students’ sustainability consciousness, while instructional practice has a significant direct influence on the sustainability knowingness dimension; (2) both curricular emphasis and instructional practice have a significant indirect influence on sustainability consciousness through the full or partial mediation of sustainable agency beliefs; and (3) gender moderates several paths in the structural model. Theoretical and practical implications are provided, and suggestions for future research are offered.
Highlights
Given the crucial role of engineering and engineers in promotion of sustainable development, facilitating the development of engineering students’ sustainability consciousness and preparing them to be capable of serving in sustainable development in their future careers have been prioritized by many engineering and technological universities, accreditation agencies, and professional societies around the world
The results suggested that the measurement model had a satisfactory fit to the survey data (χ2 = 1107.154; df = 309; χ2/df = 3.583; goodness-of-fit index (GFI) = 0.955; adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI) = 0.945; comparative fix index (CFI) = 0.975; incremental fit index (IFI) = 0.975; Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.971; SRMR = 0.035; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.038 [90% confidence intervals (CI): 0.035, 0.040])
With a modified college impact model, we examined the hypothesized links among curriculum experiences, sustainable agency beliefs, and three dimensions of sustainability consciousness, and tested the moderating role of gender on the relationships among research variables
Summary
Given the crucial role of engineering and engineers in promotion of sustainable development, facilitating the development of engineering students’ sustainability consciousness and preparing them to be capable of serving in sustainable development in their future careers have been prioritized by many engineering and technological universities, accreditation agencies, and professional societies around the world. The other line has shifted to evaluate the effectiveness of various curriculum and pedagogical methods toward sustainability integration These studies are limited in several ways. Most existing research lacks a holistic and integrative view on students’ sustainability learning outcomes, which should encompass the development in the cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains [9,10]. Previous research or case studies have been mainly conducted in Europe and North America, and little research exists on engineering students in developing countries or areas, such as China, which has the largest scale of engineering education around the world [11]. The last, but maybe most notable, limitation of previous studies is the lack of a comprehensive empirical framework used to explore the causal relationship between the introduction of sustainability into engineering education and engineering students’ sustainability learning outcomes
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