Sustainable development literacy in engineering degrees at UPV

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes a global set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), subdivided into 169 targets addressed to different stakeholders, including universities. This agenda emphasizes the importance of an integral training by incorporating sustainable development topics, which is crucial for engineers when they take decisions that can affect the future of our planet. In order to measure and evaluate the integration of the 2030 Agenda at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV), a diagnosis has been carried out based on the analysis of courses' teaching guides of engineering degrees as well as by assessing literacy in sustainable development, both for students and faculty, to design indicators aimed at measuring their integration. This paper presents a statistical methodology based on the Sulitest questionnaire in order to analyze sustainable development literacy. This methodology uses Structural Equations Models (SEM) based on partial least squares (PLS) to analyze quantitative and qualitative data from different information sources. In particular, the necessary outcomes for sustainable development will be considered. The use of this type of models allows improving the information obtained from the analysis in order to take better informed decisions about the degree of integration of the 2030 Agenda and the steps to follow according to this diagnosis. The Sulitest questionnaire is part of one of the first 17 United Nations initiatives outstanding for the SDGs and since its launch in 2014, it has been a star project of the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI). Together with this action, the present paper shows how UPV is integrating generic outcomes that include SDG in every engineering degree. This action is made in three different levels: courses, capstone project and complementary activities.