UCR's Inaugural Sustainability Literacy Assessment:

Development, Testing & Results

UCR’s first sustainability literacy assessment was administered during Winter and Spring quarters of 2025. This assessment, funded by the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), is designed to measure sustainability knowledge within the social, environmental, and economic domains of sustainability. Sustainability literacy assessments are an emerging tool at institutions of higher education to identify student knowledge over time, assess sustainability course outcomes, and achieve institutional sustainability goals. The assessment was designed for and administered to undergraduate students only.

The planning for UCRs sustainability literacy assessment started in 2023, focused on measuring student sustainability literacy (focused on knowledge), and fulfilling institutional sustainability goals. Starting in early 2024, our literature review assessed about 60 articles and gathered ~400 potential assessment questions on sustainability literacy and environmental literacy into a question bank. Both articles covering environmental literacy and knowledge, and sustainability literacy and knowledge were examined in the literature for breadth and question quality. Once the question bank was built, successive rounds of review using inclusion/exclusion criteria narrowed the question bank to ~20 question. Each question was modernized for the purposes of this assessment and corresponds in substance to one of the domains of the triple bottom line: planet, profit, people.