From Believers to Disbelievers: Understanding Student Diversity in Sustainability Education

Products with sustainable attributes cannot be marketed in the same way, just as sustainability education demands tailored pedagogical approaches. Sustainability education centers on promoting responsible choices and consumption in relations to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Elements of sustainable education are being introduced to different tertiary curricula. While much of the current research discusses broad teaching and learning approaches, less attention is given to how individual differences among tertiary students receiving sustainability education affect their perceptions, learning processes, and real-world behaviors. Seeing tertiary students as consumers in their daily lives, this work expands the consumer model developed by Dalsace and Challagalla (2024), classifying students into three groups: true believers, agnostics and disbelievers of sustainability concepts. Drawing from our experience in implementing curriculum changes by explicitly incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concepts into various related marketing topics and refining the assessment items accordingly, we critically assess how different types of students learn and transfer the essential content of sustainability education in different assessment tasks. Our experiences reveal that different student types demonstrate significant differences in study strategies, perceived importance of learning materials and choices made in assessment. Our findings highlight the limitations of a mass approach to sustainability education, and provide practical insights in understanding the effective learning incentive to each student group and designing multiple assessments that fit the characteristics of different students.