How can you assess EfS learning?

Assessing sustainability learning goes beyond traditional assessment approaches, while some still work well to assess particular EfS competencies or learning outcomes. Overall, you're capturing how students think systemically, grapple with real-world dilemmas, and develop as change-makers. Research by Vogel et al. (2023) shows that while you can adapt familiar assessment methods, some innovative approaches can help you better reveal the depth and complexity of what students learn. 

• Written assignments remain your most versatile tool. Essays, reports, reflective pieces, and even letters to future generations help you see how students connect personal perspectives with systemic sustainability issues. These work particularly well for assessing knowledge and values.

• Written exams offer efficiency for large cohorts, but they're limited when you want to assess competencies or values. You can adapt exam formats - short-answer questions or dialogue-based prompts work better than traditional formats for testing critical thinking and systems thinking (Vogel et al., 2023). 
• Concept maps give you a window into how students organise ideas. These visual diagrams reveal mental models and whether learning involves restructuring understanding rather than just accumulating facts. They're particularly valuable for assessing interdisciplinary knowledge (Vogel et al., 2023). 
• Dilemmas, case studies, and role-play scenarios place students in complex situations where they must weigh competing perspectives and take positions on contested issues. These methods excel at assessing values and readiness to act, though they can't guarantee how students will act in future real-world situations (Vogel et al., 2023). 
• Presentations, posters, and design projects let students demonstrate competencies like communication, collaboration, and creativity while applying sustainability knowledge to practical tasks - designing a sustainability label, producing a business plan, or pitching a community initiative. 
• Assessments with external partners add complexity but offer rich opportunities to capture readiness to act in transdisciplinary contexts. This is where boundary-crossing rubrics become particularly useful. A rubric is a structured scoring guide that sets out clear criteria and achievement levels - essentially a framework showing what good performance looks like. In boundary-crossing rubrics specifically, you define what effective collaboration with stakeholders involves: recognising their perspectives, coordinating work across different knowledge systems, reflecting on tensions between academic and practical priorities, and co-creating integrated solutions. These rubrics help you assess the often-ambiguous learning from stakeholder engagement (Vogel et al., 2023).

Curious how rubrics can work in practice? In this video from the LSE Eden Centre Academic Forum (2024), LSE100 colleagues walk through their assessment redesign and explain how a grading rubric helped them better assess interdisciplinary learning. Link to video

• Capstone courses can also provide spaces for students to integrate learning across disciplines, with assessment typically focusing on knowledge integration and competencies. Rubrics are sometimes used here to help students self-monitor their progress - for instance, a rubric might outline stages from "identifying connections between disciplines" to "synthesising concepts into coherent frameworks." These courses can also reveal obstacles to achieving sustainability outcomes that inform your future curriculum design.
• Self- and peer-assessment develop reflection and accountability around values and competencies. However, these approaches work best when you provide clear rubrics that specify what sustainability concepts and practices look like at different levels of competence, helping students make meaningful and consistent self-assessments  (Vogel et al., 2023).