Major
Business Administration (General)
Advisor
Dr. Thomas Husband
Advisor Department
Natural Resources Science
Date
5-2011
Keywords
sustainability, sustainability education, survey
Abstract
For my project, I created a survey for University of Rhode Island students’ exploring their experiences and interest in course offerings on sustainability. I am distributing it to students through different mediums such as email, Facebook and in person. Through my analysis of the results, I am seeking some evidence about whether or not students at this institute feel that our school offers enough courses on this topic and whether or not students are interested in taking courses on this topic.
As a business major, I have taken several courses where we learned about surveying and analysis of the results. To learn about this topic, I felt the best way to go about my project was to create a survey. My senior honors seminar was a course on Environmental Ethics taught by Dr. Thomas Husband. Not only did this course interest me deeply, but it opened my eyes and made me question whether or not the University of Rhode Island offers enough class options on sustainability. Taking ideas from each of these subject areas, I came to the topic of my honors project.
Through the results of this survey, I intend to give suggestions to relevant University of Rhode Island faculty as to how the science elective courses should expand or be updated to make the program stronger and more importantly, geared towards the students’ interests in sustainability. This will include suggestions for specific courses students would like to take related to sustainability.
The process of this project began with some preliminary data collection into the current course offerings of sustainability and energy conservation. After that, I began constructing the survey. I kept the survey to one page so it would not look intimidating, thus discouraging students from taking it. Once all of the results are in, I am going to conduct a focus group to investigate the results a bit further. Afterwards, I will make some suggestions as to what the University of Rhode Island can do to better meet the students’ interests.
My goal for this project is to put into practice what I have learned in several classes, and to investigate a subject area that I find to be very interesting and relevant to the University of Rhode Island. This project will help prepare me for my future in business, and the analysis of the results will give me some experience in an area related my career.
Suvey
Sarah Kane FINAL Presentation.ppt (1305 kB)
PowerPoint Presentation