Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to teach sustainability in multiple contexts

Developmental instruction in four sustainability contexts (social, environmental, economic, technical) in an engineering design curriculum offers a strong foundation and framework upon which to build an engineering program that teaches students the necessary methodologies for designing for sustainability. Instruction in sustainability contexts described in this paper employs a developmental approach using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which is a way to classify instructional activities or questions as they progress in cognitive difficulty. This paper describes a methodology and the results of a National Science Foundation-funded 3-year instructional grant that integrates sustainability instruction in four contexts into a six-course design curriculum using a developmental approach. Results indicate that students analyze sustainability case studies and move developmentally through six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation with increasing skill. As well, even though students were not instructed to include in their case study responses any other context than the assigned one, they included other contexts at increasing rates over the three stages of the study. This indicated an increasing ability to think using a systems theory perspective by including other related sustainability contexts.

► We use a developmental and systems approach to teaching sustainability to engineering students.
► We assessed student responses to case studies throughout six design classes over three years.
► Students showed increasing expertise analyzing case studies through all stages of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
► This methodology shows promise for teaching engineering design and other engineering courses.