School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences
Student capstone and applied projects from ASU's School of Sustainability.
Filtering by
- Creators: Darnall, Nicole
For decades, understanding the complexity of behaviors, motivations, and values has interested researchers across various disciplines. So much so that there are numerous terms, frameworks, theories, and studies devoted to understanding these complexities and how they interact and evolve into actions. However, little research has examined how employee behaviors translate into the work environment, particularly regarding perceived organizational success. This study advances research by quantitatively assessing how a greater number of individual employees’ pro-environmental behaviors are related to the perceived success of environmentally sustainable workplace activities. We have concluded that the more pro-environmental behaviors an employee embodies, the more positively they perceive the success of their local government's sustainable purchasing policy. Additionally, other factors matter, including organizational behaviors, like training, innovation, and reduction of red tape.
not reduced drastically over the next few decades.
When evaluating the required Next Generation Science Standards for elementary school, these standards do not include environmental literacy or sustainability themes in either second, third, or fourth grades, with little mention via one standard in first, fifth, and sixth grades. Overall, the Next Generation Science Standards do not adequately prepare students for the sustainability problems of
the future nor do the standards help connect students to the natural environment by not connecting the standards to real world climate issues. Not educating students about sustainability topics in elementary school passes the responsibility off to higher grades with optional science classes, where this sustainability education could be missed altogether.
The Sustainability for Young Learners Courses were created to equip elementary school teachers with sustainability knowledge and resources to effectivity teach sustainability to their students. The Sustainability for Young Learners Courses infuse sustainability and environmental literacy Graduate Culminating Experience
Sharing Permissions Agreement into second through fifth grade science classes via the creation of detailed unit plans. Each course incorporates important sustainability themes into the required Next Generation Science Standards, to encourage teachers to adopt these unit plans without taking away limited class time to teach about sustainability. Rather than ending in doom and gloom, students finish each unit becoming the heroes of the story by creating their own solutions to combat climate change that they can implement into their own lives, communities, homes, and classroom.
Sustainability and climate related issues are already sweeping our Earth and the problem is likely going to accelerate as today's current elementary school students start their professional careers. Equipping young students with environmental literacy and sustainability knowledge can allow students to be ready to face real-world climate related issues in the future as well as today as these students serve as leaders within their communities and schools. By realizing the gap in the United States education system, the Sustainability for Young Learners courses is helping to create a more equitable, prosperous, and sustainable society through education and knowledge.
Sustainable purchasing policies and e-procurement are both fast becoming popular topics across city governments in the United States. As these two relatively new initiatives meet, the relationship they share has some promising implications that have gone mostly unexplored until now. E-procurement systems have gained a reputation of being one of the most effective ways to advance sustainable purchasing goals, but the belief alone may not be enough to create director-level buy-in throughout city governments. The possible link between these two tools was identified while working with the City of Phoenix’s Office of Environmental Programs. While helping them integrate sustainability considerations into their procurement process, it was noticed that e-procurement systems typically facilitated many of the obstructions the department faced and that there could be a positive relationship between their already existing e-procurement system and their sustainable purchasing policy. To investigate this relationship deeper, a survey of city government procurement was sent to 1,845 directors from Finance, Public Works, and Environmental departments across 791 U.S. cities. These decision-makers answered questions relating to their assessment of how sustainable purchasing policies are implemented and the extent to which their city uses an e-procurement system. Tests of independence were then performed to determine if a relationship between different e-procurement activities and perceived success of cities’ sustainable purchasing policies existed. Results show that the use of an environmentally friendly database of products and services in a city’s e-procurement system is the single most important e-procurement pursuit cities can undertake to influence the opinions that city managers have regarding the success of their sustainable purchasing policy. By understanding this connection, The City of Phoenix and other cities facing the same challenges are able to develop best practices to leverage e-procurement for purchasing sustainably and fully implementing their sustainable purchasing policies.