Sustainability literacy and engineering : Experiences from a literacy test as a teaching and assessment tool in Nordic universities

The role of engineering education is essential in global sustainability transformation, considering the impact technology has on the environment and societies. Many suggestions have been made on what competences universities should teach to educate game changers and how to improve sustainability literacy. Despite the growing number of studies in the field, research is scarce on how to assess what the students know about global sustainability challenges and how to embed sustainability literacy into curricula. This paper presents the first experiences on using a sustainability literacy test (the Sulitest) as a teaching tool. The test was developed in 2012, and it includes global and national questions on multifaceted sustainability challenges. Our results are based on national questions created for the Nordic countries and on the test results we got from 700 students in Finland, Sweden and Norway. The Sulitest seems to be useful as a teaching tool, but the national questions ought to be re-evaluated to achieve balance between different aspects of sustainability. The test has weaknesses regarding its use as a curricula development tool, but it can facilitate teachers in engineering education in drawing a comprehensive picture on the problems the future engineers are required to solve.