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Effects of College Major on Environmental Knowledge and Awareness at Cal Poly Katie Love and Katie Nehrenz | Dr. Stacey Rucas | California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo Do students studying in different colleges at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo exhibit different levels of environmentalism due to alterations in course requirements and content? Due to the greater emphasis of environmentalism in majors in COSAM, CAFES, and CLA, students are educated in environmental empathy more than their other college peers. Students in the COE and COB receive less environmental education in their majors and would benefit from an increase in such topics in their courses. A survey was administered to 142 Cal Poly students. Participants were asked a series of questions regarding their (1) view of the importance of environmentalism, (2) environmental knowledge, (3) lifestyle habits, and (4) opinions on environmental education within their majors and at Cal Poly at large. Environmentalism was measured by pre- assigning values to each survey response on a scale of one to four and producing an “environmental score” for each participant. Undergraduate education data was collected and compared to their responses to determine correlation. With the current state of our world, it is necessary for students and professionals of all fields to be literate in environmental issues. We surveyed Cal Poly students to examine any difference in environmental knowledge between majors to determine whether or not certain majors require increased environmental curriculum. Our results suggested no significant differences in knowledge but did find significance in perceived level of environmental knowledge, especially amongst business majors. This research highlights the overall environmentally aware campus of Cal Poly and could be a launch point for similar research. Our data yielded no significant differences among colleges regarding environmental score. It did provide insight to perceived relative environmental knowledge, especially within the College of Business, who self-scored themselves significantly lower than other. In addition Business students do not think their major adequately incorporates environmentalism and Cal Poly students at large voted Business as most in need of increased environmental knowledge. Therefore, our hypothesis stating students in the College of Business would have a lower environmental score is clearly shared by other Cal Poly students, including Business students themselves. However, as mentioned previously, there was no significant difference in environmental scores between any of the majors. There are a few potential reasons for the differences between our hypotheses and results. First, our methodology could have been flawed. Upon reflection, if we were to redesign the survey, we would have made the questions harder, have more questions, give more answer choices, and make the point spread larger. These solutions would hopefully increase variance and give more insight to the differences between colleges within Cal Poly. Second, our sample could have been too homogenous. Perhaps Cal Poly attracts a community of generally environmental students, causing a similarly- minded student body. Third, our hypotheses could have been based on false assumptions. Perhaps some colleges have more environmental classes than expected and we are undereducated regarding their major requirements. If we were to complete further research, we would want a larger sample size for our data and make the before-mentioned alterations to our questionnaire. We would also be interested to test Cal Poly’s student body against other colleges to see if the homogenous sample idea is plausible. Education Level Education Level Environmental Score Environmental Knowledge Added assigned values to survey responses Self- reported one of Cal Poly’s five colleges Respondent’s self- reported relative knowledge of environmental issues Incorporated Environmentalism Respondent’s self- reported opinion of whether their major adequately incorporates environmentalism Major Benefit Most Self-reported of which major could benefit most from environmental education Most Environmental Major Respondent’s self- reported belief of which major best teaches environmentalism Figure 4. The mean environmental score by college. The standard error bars represent the standard deviation of the mean. Figure 9. The mean plots of perceived environmental knowledge by college. Scores of 1 represent the survey answer below average, 2 represent average, and 3 represent above average. The College of Business is significantly lower than every college except for the College of Science and Math (p=0.062) as seen in the multiple comparisons table. Figure 14. The number of participants that answered agree and disagree for the question of their major adequately incorporating environmentalism into courses. Figure 18. Bar chart depicting participant answer’s to the question regarding which major would benefit for more environmental education, the mode being business, followed by agriculture and engineering. Figure 8. Multiple comparisons chart for perceived level of environmental knowledge by college. There are significant differences between the College of Business and the College of Agriculture, Food, and Environmental Science (p=0.013), the College of Architecture and Environmental Design (p=0.003), the College of Engineering (p=0.013), and the College of Liberal Arts (p=0.02). Students in the College of Business responded with the least confidence in their environmental knowledge compared to these other colleges. We ran our ordinal variable as an interval variable to get these results but see below for chi-square tests that do treat this variable as ordinal as it should.