HOW DO STUDENTS DEFINE AND DESCRIBE SUSTAINABILITY, AND WHAT CAN WE DO TO BETTER CONVEY THE IMPORTANCE OF GEOLOGY IN SUSTAINABILITY?

Environmental challenges of the 21^st century involving geoscience overlap with concepts of sustainability. Consequently, sustainability has been highlighted in numerous nationwide documents defining the future of science education, and providing students with a more complete understanding of sustainability has been established as a central theme of geoscience literacy. The importance of sustainability toward geoscience literacy led us to investigate what impact a standard physical geology course had on students’ understanding of the concept. We also investigated how students’ conceptualization of sustainability changed after modifying a physical geology course using InTeGrate modules that are designed to highlight connections between geoscience and society. To characterize these differences, we administered a short answer question on the final course exam over four semesters asking students to define sustainability in the geosciences, identify topics in the course related to sustainability and elaborate why a particular topic would be important for someone to understand. Data was analyzed by a directed content analysis using codes based upon concepts of sustainability science and earth science literacy documents. Coding of students’ responses consisted of identifying key words employing constant comparison to ensure that data was analyzed consistently. Results show that students conceptualize sustainability as being important for future generations but rarely describe a need for balance between society and the environment. Students most frequently identified climate change as an important sustainability topic and rarely ever mentioned mineral resources as an issue related to geoscience. After modifying a physical geology class using InTeGrate, the most significant changes occurred in the frequency and occurrence of students incorporating mining and mineral resources when discussing the importance of sustainability. Physical geology is important because it is one of the few courses that have the opportunity to convey the importance of minerals and mining in sustainability. Our results suggest that an explicit and pervasive emphasis on why geoscience is important to society may be an effective method for changing students’ perceptions of sustainability to include the role of minerals.