1. Conceptual maps
Jordi Segalàs

2. Draw a conceptual map in relation to: What do you think it is?
Conceptual maps
Please write in a piece of paper
Name:
Age:
Nationality:
Background:
Draw a conceptual map in relation to: What do you think it is?
Sustainability

3. Concepts and aspects considered
Assessment
Concepts taxonomies
Taxonomy
Concepts and aspects considered
4 Categories
10 Categories
1. Environmental
1. Environment
Pollution, degradation, conservation, biodiversity, ecological footprint, ...
2. Resources scarcity
Un-renewable resources, run out of materials, …
2. Social
3. Social impact
Quality of life, health, risk management, ...
4. Values
Ethics, respect for traditions and cultures, …
5. Future (Temporal)
Future generations, scenario analysis, forecasting, backcasting, …
6. Unbalances (Spatial)
The equity dimension, North-South cooperation, fair distribution of goods, fair use of resources, …
3. Economic
7. Technology
Best Available Technologies, Industry, efficiency, clean-technologies, energy, impact of technology …
8. Economy
Role of economy, fair trade, consumption patterns, ...
4. Institutional
9. Education
Role of education, rise of awareness, education institutions, media role in education or disinformation, …
10. Actors and Stakeholders
Role of governments, NGOs, rules, laws, international agreements, individuals and society stakeholders, …
To evaluate the Cmaps, I defined 2 taxonomies of concepts.
The first one has 4 categories: Environmental, Social, Economic and Institutional.
This taxonomy shows the big picture of the students understanding of SD.
The second one splits the previous 4 categories into 10 categories. This way we obtain more detailed information of the cmaps analysis.
For instance the social category is divided into Social impact, Values, Future and Unbalances categories.
In the right column you can see some of the typical concepts that students related to each category.

4. Number of concepts category Number of links intercategories
Cmap
Categories
Lets see an example of Cmap analysis.
First, the concepts of a given Cmap are distributed among the categories as shown in this example.
Afterwards, I count the number of concepts per category and the number of links intercategories.
Number of concepts category
Number of links intercategories

5. Assessment Indexes Category relevance (CR) - Interdisciplinarity
Concepts’ distribution among categories
Percentage of students that write concepts assigned to a certain category
Complexity (CO) - Systemic thinking
Concepts per student
Inter-category connections
With all this information, I defined 2 indexes: the category relevance index and the complexity index.
The category relevance index measures how important the different categories are for the students. It is related to how interdisciplinar students see Sustainability.
To evaluate this index, I used two indicators:
The distribution of concepts among categories
And the percentage of students that gave concepts to a certain category.
The second index, the complexity index, shows how complex students see sustainability and is therefore related to systemic thinking.
To evaluate this index, I also defined 2 indicators:
- The average number of concepts per student.
And the relative number of links between different categories.
The research design is a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design.
Students draw Cmap1 before the course, then they took the course, and finally they draw Cmap2 after finishing the course.
This methodology has been applied to 10 case studies

6. Complexity index (CO) CO >> 0 CO = 0
With all this information, I defined 2 indexes: the category relevance index and the complexity index.
The category relevance index measures how important the different categories are for the students. It is related to how interdisciplinar students see Sustainability.
To evaluate this index, I used two indicators:
The distribution of concepts among categories
And the percentage of students that gave concepts to a certain category.
The second index, the complexity index, shows how complex students see sustainability and is therefore related to systemic thinking.
To evaluate this index, I also defined 2 indicators:
- The average number of concepts per student.
And the relative number of links between different categories.
The research design is a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design.
Students draw Cmap1 before the course, then they took the course, and finally they draw Cmap2 after finishing the course.
This methodology has been applied to 10 case studies

7. Experts Category Relevance
Environ./Technological role
Sociological role
CR (%)
All Students Category Relevance
Environ./Technological role
Sociological role
CR (%)
I’ve joined all the samples of the students in one graph for both 4 and 10 categories taxonomy.
This graph shows the results. Where we can see the environmental, technological, social and institutional categories.
This is before taking the course and this is after taking the course.
And we can see that most students understand sustainability basically as a scientific-technological issue.
These are the reference results from the experts, using the same kind of graph. We can see that experts highlight the sociological role of sustainability.
This mismatching reveals that sustainability courses that we are offering now to our students need to place more emphasis in the sociological role of sustainability.

8. Conceptual maps
Aktau
Almaty
Experts

14. Complexity index (CO)

15. Concepts and aspects considered
Assessment
Concepts taxonomies
Taxonomy
Concepts and aspects considered
4 Categories
10 Categories
1. Environmental
1. Environment
Pollution, degradation, conservation, biodiversity, ecological footprint, ...
2. Resources scarcity
Un-renewable resources, run out of materials, …
2. Social
3. Social impact
Quality of life, health, risk management, ...
4. Values
Ethics, respect for traditions and cultures, …
5. Future (Temporal)
Future generations, scenario analysis, forecasting, backcasting, …
6. Unbalances (Spatial)
The equity dimension, North-South cooperation, fair distribution of goods, fair use of resources, …
3. Economic
7. Technology
Best Available Technologies, Industry, efficiency, clean-technologies, energy, impact of technology …
8. Economy
Role of economy, fair trade, consumption patterns, ...
4. Institutional
9. Education
Role of education, rise of awareness, education institutions, media role in education or disinformation, …
10. Actors and Stakeholders
Role of governments, NGOs, rules, laws, international agreements, individuals and society stakeholders, …
To evaluate the Cmaps, I defined 2 taxonomies of concepts.
The first one has 4 categories: Environmental, Social, Economic and Institutional.
This taxonomy shows the big picture of the students understanding of SD.
The second one splits the previous 4 categories into 10 categories. This way we obtain more detailed information of the cmaps analysis.
For instance the social category is divided into Social impact, Values, Future and Unbalances categories.
In the right column you can see some of the typical concepts that students related to each category.