Evaluating STEM-Based Sustainability Understanding: A Cognitive Mapping Approach

Elizabeth L Petrun Sayers,Emily Skonicki,Song Feng,Grace Gahlon,Susan Gilbertz,Christopher A Craig

doi:10.3390/su13148074

Abstract

Management education holds promise for addressing deficiencies in interuniversity science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as well as sustainability curricula. Accordingly, we designed, developed, implemented, and longitudinally evaluated interdisciplinary STEM-based curricula in the United States. Students in five sections of business management courses and two sections of STEM courses received a STEM-based sustainability intervention (i.e., an interdisciplinary STEM and sustainability module). To assess student outcomes following the intervention and examine the feasibility of cognitive mapping as a student learning assessment tool, we implemented a pre- and post-course modified cognitive mapping assessment in treatment and comparison courses. To interpret the results, we ran descriptives, correlations, paired sample t tests, and principal component analysis. The t tests suggest that when all coding categories are considered, those participating in curricular interventions listed significantly more sustainability terms. The principal component analysis results demonstrate that treatment courses improved variability explained by 7.23% between pre- and post-tests but declined by 8.22% for comparison courses. Overall, linkages became stronger between parent code categories for treatment courses and weaker for comparison courses. These findings add to existing research related to cognitive mapping and demonstrate the ability of the method to capture changes in student outcomes after exposure to STEM-based sustainability curriculum.

Highlights

Challenges remain in interdisciplinary sustainability education across business and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines [1,2]
The lack of communication and collaboration across disciplines hinders the implementation of interdisciplinary curricula [27] such as the STEM-based sustainability curriculum presented in this study
Our results suggest that cognitive learning, as a function of curricular interventions and/or learning that may have occurred from the cognitive mapping exercise, is negatively related to an affective connection with sustainability

Summary

Introduction

Challenges remain in interdisciplinary sustainability education across business and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines [1,2]. Educators use sustainability as a concept to integrate STEM into curricula across disciplines [3]. Many sustainability curricular initiatives involving multiple disciplines (e.g., management, STEM) result in multi-disciplinary curricula either by design or in part due to instructors developing curricula in disciplinary silos [3,4,5,6]. Multidisciplinary curricula, as opposed to interdisciplinary, create challenges because students view sustainability as outside the normal realm of their own discipline and they cannot draw a clear connection to others’ perspectives about sustainability [5,7]. Complex sustainability-related challenges (e.g., climate change) will require current and future leaders, regardless of disciplinary background, to demonstrate and apply an interconnected, interdisciplinary understanding of the challenges of using STEM competencies [8,9,10,11]

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion