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The Impact Of Individual Decision Making On Campus Sustainability Initiatives, Aurali Ella Dade
The Impact Of Individual Decision Making On Campus Sustainability Initiatives, Aurali Ella Dade
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) have increasingly committed to become more sustainable in recent years. Despite this commitment, academic publications in the sustainability field assert that progress has been slower at IHEs than expected and that most IHEs have found sustainability initiatives difficult to implement. Comprehensive sustainability initiatives require cooperation from a broad set of constituents with diverse and sometimes conflicting goals. Creating a sustainable IHE also requires changes in both physical infrastructure and individual behavior. Any number of institutional factors can advance or limit progress towards these objectives.
Previous investigations have assessed individual case studies, compared IHEs in a …
Assessing The Effect Of Simulation Models On Systems Learning In An Introductory Environmental Science Course, Heather J. Skaza
Assessing The Effect Of Simulation Models On Systems Learning In An Introductory Environmental Science Course, Heather J. Skaza
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
While there is plenty of anecdotal evidence within the systems dynamics community supporting the use of systems simulations in the classroom to improve student understanding, there is little published, controlled, experimental research. This paper describes the results of a paired experiment testing the effect of using system dynamics simulations to increase systems understanding in an introductory environmental science course. We believed that the students using the systems simulations would demonstrate a greater systemic understanding of environmental issues than those who did not.
We conducted an experiment during the fall semester of 2009, with 304 students enrolled in four sections of …