Collaborative Research: NLI: Design and Development: Supporting Professional Formation for Sustainable Construction Practice

The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry will play a major role in building a more sustainable future because construction decisions shape energy use, carbon emissions, material consumption, waste, worker safety, community well-being, and the long-term performance of the built environment. Yet many future construction professionals will enter practice having learned sustainability as a technical topic rather than as a professional responsibility that must be balanced with cost, schedule, safety, codes, contracts, and stakeholder needs. This project will address that gap by creating and studying BuildEthos, an instructional module that will help undergraduate construction engineering and management students reason through real sustainability dilemmas before they enter the workforce. The project will move sustainability education beyond isolated lectures or elective content and embed it into required senior-level courses where students are preparing to transition into professional practice. It aligns with NSF's Research in the Formation of Engineers program by investigating how students form the knowledge, judgment, identity, and agency needed to act as responsible professionals in engineering-related practice. NSF investment will support a timely effort to prepare graduates who can see sustainable construction not only as a set of green features, but as a core part of ethical and socially responsible professional work. By integrating industry-informed cases and stakeholder debates into existing courses at two institutions, the project will broaden access to high-impact sustainability learning, strengthen academic-industry partnerships, and generate teaching resources that other construction, architecture, and engineering programs will be able to adapt. This project will develop, refine, and study BuildEthos as a transferable instructional approach for supporting professional formation for sustainable construction practice in undergraduate construction engineering and management education. The project will conceptualize professional formation through three interrelated dimensions: sustainable construction knowledge and reasoning, ethical responsibility, and professional identity and agency. It will address three research questions: in what ways and to what extent BuildEthos will support students' professional formation; through what mechanisms the module will contribute to that formation; and which instructional elements and contextual conditions will enable successful implementation. Guided by experiential learning theory and the Engineering for One Planet framework, BuildEthos will include lecture-based conceptual grounding, authentic construction case studies, and stakeholder role-playing debates. These activities will ask students to analyze sustainability trade-offs involving delivery methods, environmental compliance, labor and safety pressures, schedule and cost constraints, digital construction, data ethics, and competing stakeholder priorities. The project will be implemented over three years in senior-level required courses at Georgia Tech and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and will reach approximately 200 students. Data will include pre- and post-module surveys, case-study and debate artifacts, written reflections, rubric scores, implementation logs, instructor memos, and industry co-design records. Quantitative analyses will examine changes in student outcomes, while qualitative and cross-cycle analyses will identify context-mechanism-outcome patterns that explain how and why the module supports student development. Industry partners with expertise in construction law, project controls, infrastructure delivery, and construction management will support co-design and validation of cases and debate scenarios, while learning-science expertise will support inclusive pedagogy and assessment. Expected outcomes will include a refined BuildEthos module, rubrics and prompts, evidence about student professional formation, design principles for adaptation, and open educational resources. The project will contribute new knowledge about how required construction courses can integrate sustainability, ethics, and professional judgment in ways that are feasible, industry grounded, and transferable across AEC and engineering education contexts. This project is funded through a joint partnership between The National Science Foundation and The Lemelson Foundation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.