Press Release: What do Irish university students know about sustainability and responsibility?

by University of Limerick – Kemmy Business School

Press Release

What do our university graduates know about sustainability?

University of Limerick is leading the way in Ireland on an innovative new UN-sponsored initiative to assess the sustainability literacy of university graduates worldwide. The Sustainability Literacy Test is short multiple choice test targeting a range of issues related to sustainable and responsible behaviour. The questions are both global and local in scope, and have been customised for Irish norms by a team at the Kemmy School. They allow the students to test their knowledge against tens of thousands of their peers worldwide.

“Everyone realises now how important it is to educate our students in the basics of sustainability and personal and organisational responsibility”, said Dr Philip O’Regan, Dean of the Kemmy Businses School. “We take that very seriously at Kemmy, because of our commitment to the UN PRME. What this test does is gives us a measure of the extent to which we are succeeding in that ambition”.

The Kemmy Business School is one of only 30 University Business Schools worldwide which has been designated as a Champion of the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), and it is through that network that the School was chosen to customise the questions for Ireland. The sustainability literacy test is not just for business students, however. It will be offered to all post-graduate students in the University initially, and then rolled out to undergraduates in the new academic year.

“The great thing about this test is that it will let us establish a trend”, said Dr Sheila Killian, who directs the Principles for Responsible Management Education Initiative at the Business School. “We’ll be applying equivalent randomised questions year on year, and so we can track where things are going well, and where we need to improve. It should also prompt some questions among the students, and help to shape what goes on in the classroom.”

This is one of the most comprehensive attempts to map the outcomes of Irish university education to best international norms in the areas of sustainability and responsibility. Dr Killian also hopes other universities in Ireland will take up the test which they have made freely available to all third-level institutions in Ireland. “We really hope that other universities will take it up now, and offer it to their students also. Now that we’ve customised this for Irish students, it’s a really useful free tool, and we’d love it to be widely used.”

More information on the test is available at www.sustainabilitytest.org

For more information on this initiative, contact Sheila Killian. Picture shows Dr Sheila Killian of the Kemmy Business School

[email protected] 0878122739

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