Pedagogical Approaches for Sustainable Development in Building in Higher Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is well written and interesting. It is well fitted concerning the topic of the journal. It’s addressing one of the crucial problems nowadays: how should higher education contribute to the challenge of sustainability? And it is providing potential answer to this question from the perspective of selected studying programs (Civil Engineering and Technical Architecture) and university (University of the Basque Country). Despite its limited range the paper aims to contribute to global knowledge in the field of sustainability education and propose some universal methods and approaches. Paper refers vastly to theoretical background and empirical research on the topic and in detail presents the UPV approach towards sustainability education within aforementioned fields.

The problem with the paper lies within its objectives and the way they are achieved. The overall aim of the paper is to present “developed pedagogical tools that have been implemented in the construction degrees” (rows 111-112) and verify whether it contributes to “the training of citizens committed to the protection of the environmental and the values of sustainable development” (109-110). But such an aim cannot be achieved through presentation of the teaching-learning methods and approaches, their contribution to specific and overall results of students. Paper presents in detail basic assumptions of commonly known and vastly presented methods or tools (i.e. PBL) while it should rather explore the topic from the sustainability perspective.

The verification should be clearly focused on its contribution to the sustainability and students motivation, perception, understanding on how to achieve it in the course of their studies and professional career. Some of the methods and approaches are well suited towards sustainability (i.e. NEST), but some other are just focused on typical for architecture field of education and Authors fail to exploit its sustainability context (i.e. PBL on material properties, CT on isostatic beam solving). Instead of presenting methodology of each method/approach Authors should focus on its contribution to sustainability, competences required for sustainability or the relationship and synergy effects between them. This is briefly done in the Discussion section but I would suggest to make it more complex (including all the methods/approaches and projecting them towards SDG, some table or figure here would be useful).

Another acceptable approach is to show the dynamics of Civil Engineering and Technical Architecture programs with reference to sustainability and possible contribution to SDG. Some facts are mentioned here while university policy towards sustainability is explained, but more holistic approach should be used here (all the methods/approaches, time framework and introduced changes/effects).

Finally, current content of discussion section or should be moved to the results section or it should be complemented with references to the literature. Authors should discuss with other Authors and their works on how to introduce sustainability goals and competences with university curricula. This type of discussion is completely missing and should be added to the paper.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has a descriptive character. I suggest Authors some changes: 
1. Abstract. Use brackets when you enter an abbreviation (f.e.: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
2. Introduction. ESD is an older idea than you wrote. Read about The Thessaloniki Declaration, Agenda 21 (chapter 36).

3. When you write about Competencies for ESD, find the most important Authors, like G. de Haan, M. Rieckmann, M. Barth....

4. Section 2.1. - you need to add some references when you state something like in lines 127-130. 

5. As above - lines 163-180. 

6. I don't see the need to include comments on covid-19 (like in line 451). 

7. Section 3 - "Results" of.... what? It should be specified. 

8. Line 493 - it sounds like you invented PBL; it should be rather "the model of PBL..." 

9. Section 3.2. is very interesting, but very short and does not add any new information. 

10. Line 518 - Fig. 6, not 5. IS it necessary to add this figure?

11. Section 4. It's not a discussion, it's rather a conclusion, and it's too laconic. The text is long, it's easy to lose the main thread, this section should summarize previous considerations.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Your paper is a very detailed and accurate description of different educational approaches offered to students during a University Degree program. It is interesting to read, and it is a very innovative approach to University Education, however the paper is not a research paper and thus can not be accepted as such.

The paper is missing a research questions which ask for a causal relationship between the phenomenon you observe and the educational approach you chose. It is not clear how many students participated in this research and whether their average IQ and other demographic data allow a direct comparison with students who participated in former degree-programs.  

Students result appear to be better in year 2019/20 and 2020/21 –Due to the Covid Pandemic the fundamental framework of teaching has changed (students could not enter the Labs (line 434-436) and thus there is a high chance that other factors may cause this effect.

Looking at students grades only is not enough to state that there is a causal relationship between changed teaching methods and higher achievement in particular when COVID effects are present. This phenomenon appears to be frequent

Please check the following https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iree.2021.100215

However the goal of changing the teaching approach was not to support students to achieve better grades but to support the development of  learning outcomes that “include core competences … System thinking etc..” (line 55 ff.) and contribute to EDS (line 614ff) in general. There is no evidence provided that better grades have a causal relationship to the development of EDS core competences.

Fig. 8 refers to data that will be collected in the future (two subsequent courses 2019/20 and 2021/22 ??) line 556

Fig.5 needs the information how many students participated in the courses the particular year to see whether these cohorts are comparable

As your education approach is multifaceted and has a great potential to supports students to develop EDS competence I suggest to apply decent education research and present a scientifically accurate study to describe possible learning effects. I recommend to team up with education research professionals.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I believe that the changes made by the Authors are enough.

Author Response

The authors thank the reviewer for the review, for his/her interesting proposals and corrections to improve the manuscript.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Author,

Thank you for improving the manuscript and taking most comments into consideration.

Unfortunately the research question is still missing

Your comment

The phenomenon observed is the need for sustainable education, described in the

introductory section of the article.

I try to explain now why I consider it important to formulate a research question explicitly:

It is important to formulate a research question because it predicts a causal relationship between particular variables. For the reader it is important to understand which research questions you want to investigate. Otherwise it is not possible to consider whether or not the evidence provided is relevant and reliable for the question and the conclusions you draw.

For me as a reader it appears as if you want to find out whether or not the teaching models applied contribute to students acquisition of sustainability skills. As I stated already the evidence provided is not relevant for this question.

You claim you want to observe the need for sustainability education. My question is: Who needs sustainability education? If students are the one in need of sustainability education - Is this need influenced by the teaching approach?  If you want to find out whether or not student needs have changed after implementing new teaching approaches it is still difficult for me to see the relevance of the date presented.

Thus, I really recommend to formulate research questions explicitly and offer hypothesis to help the reader understand where you are heading at with this study.

Maybe you do not want to observe whether there is a need for sustainability education or not but to simply claim that there is a need of sustainability education because this explains why you implemented new teaching approaches.

Thank you very much for the comment. In this article, we try to show the tools that we have developed for the purpose of implementing ESD in our university, that is, it would be the first step in a line of work in which a team from the EIG faculty is immersed

That’s exactly what I assumed while reading your manuscript: your paper does not want to provide empirical evidence but to present a theory-based teaching design that has a potential to be successful in contributing to sustainability education and the SDGs– which I really apricate. However, I do not recommend to present empirical data if it does not provide a sufficient foundation for conclusions which finally appear to be evidence based . This contradicts the reliability of research. However well-crafted theory based argumentation does.

I suggest to state clearly that this paper is not an empirical study but a detailed description of a teaching approach which has a theory-based potential to fulfill its given goals but further research needs to provide praxis-based evidence. I strongly recommend to delete the presentation of weak empirical data but focus on a theory-based argumentation as you did in many paragraphs already.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

Now, I think the paper is OK, authors do not present results which run the high risk to be misinterpreted. It is not a research paper but a detailed and theoretically well founded presentation of an educations approach the University has tried and is still developing further. I assume the paper will be interesting to read for people in charge to develop educational programs at technical Universities.

Author Response

The authors thank the reviewer for his/her kind and constructive review. Thanks to their contributions the manuscript has improved considerably.