Authors
Elise Barrella, Mary Katherine Watson
Publication date
2016/9
Journal
Engineering Education for Sustainable Development, Bruges, Belgium
Pages
4-7
Description
Sustainable development poses a challenge for all engineers, regardless of discipline, to improve the design of infrastructure, products, and processes. In order to provide undergraduate engineering students with a strong, consistent foundation in sustainability principles to frame and guide design decisions, new educational tools need to be developed and validated. One approach to stimulating both student learning and assessment is the use of rubrics. Rubrics can be used to evaluate the quality of student products like homework, reports, presentations, prototypes, etc. They can also be used prior to assignments to help students learn about different dimensions of sustainability, establish expectations for sustainable design, and self-assess how well principles were applied to design projects. In prior work, the authors developed a sustainable design rubric by decomposing and supplementing the Nine Principles of Green Engineering to aid in quantifying students’ abilities to incorporate sustainability into design projects. The rubric was successfully used to assess undergraduate civil and environmental engineering capstone design projects at a research-intensive university. In order to apply the rubric more broadly across engineering projects, it needs to capture criteria reflective of multiple engineering disciplines. The development of a new rubric for cross-disciplinary application begins with a systematic literature review of academic and industry publications is used to distil principles of “Engineering Sustainability” and “Sustainable Design.” Principles of sustainable design are typically framed from the point of view of a particular discipline; for …
Total citations
201720182019202020216111
Scholar articles
E Barrella, MK Watson - Engineering Education for Sustainable Development …, 2016