TASK™ – Doing the job of assessing sustainability knowledge

Eighteen months after being piloted globally, TASK™ – a psychometric test of sustainability knowledge targeting the higher education sector – has been taken by more than 17,000 students and adopted by 60 universities worldwide. Some use it to track students’ progress in learning about sustainability.

The Assessment of Sustainability Knowledge, known as TASK™, was showcased by its developer – the France-based, United Nations-linked initiative Sulitest – on the sidelines of the UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development held in New York from 8 to 17 July. Sulitest is part of the UN Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, HESI.

“We want TASK™ to have a systemic impact, incentivising people to learn about sustainability, to gain their certificate, and to demonstrate the knowledge and understanding that they have about sustainability,” says Dr Aurelien Decamps, co-founder and managing director of Sulitest.

“Also, we are equipping universities with data to pilot their transformation. As is well known, sustainability is becoming more and more important as a topic for higher education. In almost every university there is a current process exploring how to embed sustainability in curricula.

“We are providing a tool to inform this process and to collect data that are able to track in a robust way the impact of pedagogy and curricula on the level of sustainability knowledge and understanding of students and graduates,” Decamps told University World News.

TASK™ has been Sulitest’s flagship assessment tool since it first came online as a pilot in November 2022. The 17,000 tests taken have been since the TASK™ launch in March 2023. Each test-taker receives a certificate reflecting their score.

TASK™ data on sustainability knowledge also inform the advocacy and reporting mission of Sulitest at the UN. The Sulitest NGO has accreditation from three United Nations bodies: UNESCO, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the UN Environment Assembly.

How it all came about

Sulitest – the Sustainability Literacy Test – was launched in 2014 to mainstream sustainability literacy as a crucial missing piece in the sustainable development landscape, says Decamps, also an affiliate professor at France’s KEDGE Business School. “We grew the movement with a set of tools to raise awareness of sustainability.”

According to the NGO’s annual report for 2024*, over the past 10 years Sulitest has developed and provided easy access to three online tools designed to raise awareness about sustainability: an awareness test; an interactive quiz; and a “reverse pedagogy” platform called Looping for sustainability learning. The awareness test has been taken by more than 300,000 people.

“The movement is growing, and we wanted scale and to design a tool that was more than raising awareness – a standardised assessment tool. This is what we have created with TASK,” says the business professor. “All of our work has the same mission to mainstream sustainability literacy.”

The nuts and bolts

TASK™ may be used by students and individuals, universities and companies, and ranking and accreditation bodies seeking comparable data on sustainability knowledge. Access requires online registration.

There are 112 multiple-choice questions, available in English and French (and possibly other languages later), to be completed in 80 minutes. The certificate issued has a score that can range from zero to 100. The data produced is comparable by country and by organisation.

TASK™ is a robust measure, backed by a scientific framework and producing reliable data, says Decamps, the researcher and professor in him accepting nothing less. “Meaning that if you score 70 and I score 70, we can scientifically say that we have an equivalent level of sustainability knowledge and understanding.”

Most of the people who take the Sulitest assessments are students in higher education – 80% of users – with other individuals mostly in adult education and lifelong learning. “A university can choose to use TASK™ not only for students, but also for staff or faculty as a way to bring sustainability into the conversation and the process at the university,” Decamps continues.

“What is really important for us is to convey a systemic perspective of sustainability. We have a domain of knowledge that we documented, and TASK™ assesses this domain of knowledge.”

TASK™ has 28 subjects that tap into areas such as Earth systems, planetary boundaries, climate, biodiversity, and land use and change, as well as social areas inspired by the SDGs, like nutrition, poverty and inequality.

The tool has three main categories: Earth system, social foundation, and levers of actions. “What we see is that between these three frameworks, knowledge is quite balanced. But inside those three frameworks there are some differences. Climate and biodiversity, for example, are a bit better known within the Earth system than other planetary boundaries.

More reflections on assessments

“Every year we conduct mapping and present the global trends on knowledge and understanding of the SDGs,” says Decamps. This is presented to the UN.

“We see that global understanding is quite stable. The average score is about 52. There is a very stable distribution of the score, regardless of the type of university.” Scoring more than 70 out of 100 places the test-taker among the top 13.5% of scores.

One of the insights that the test results provided is that there is less disparity in sustainability knowledge between disciplines than might be expected.

“It is interesting to look at differences between subjects,” Decamps says. For example, it would be expected that a natural sciences person would have a higher score in Earth systems than in social foundations; or that a business school would have a higher score in economics than biogeochemical flows. “It’s partly true, but less than what we expected.”

Another insight is about progress. Sulitest has been “advocating very strongly” that TASK™ should not be used by the 60 universities involved so far as a single or one-shot test, but more as an indicator to track progress. When TASK™ is taken several times, a university can monitor progress over time.

“If we look at the evolution of the score, for those who have taken TASK™ several times, the magnitude of progress is higher than the magnitude of decrease,” he said. If a score does drop, often it is because the test-taker had a high starting score. This suggests students become more knowledgeable about sustainability during the course of their studies – and this can be measured.

“Not only can the tool be used as an indicator of progress, but also as an initiative to learn more about sustainability,” says Decamps.

Test-takers are asked to declare their level of expertise: some knowledge; intermediate knowledge; or expert. “What we see is that having some or intermediate knowledge has a positive impact on the score, whereas declaring yourself an expert has a lower impact on your score, which is unexpected because you consider yourself an expert.”

This could be because people who consider themselves experts are possibly experts on a specific topic and score well on that but score similarly to others when assessed about systemic aspects of sustainability. Or it could be the Dunning-Kruger effect, which in psychology is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or competence greatly overestimate their knowledge.

TASK™ includes some variables at the end of the assessment, including socio-demographics and level of education, as well as self-perceived expertise about sustainability. A statistical analysis was undertaken to see what the impacts of these determinants on the score of the 17,000 TASK-takers might be.

“What we see is that age and gender have a low impact. Females have a slightly better average score than males, but sometimes it is insignificant. On the contrary, education matters a lot,” says Decamp. The higher the education level, the greater the sustainability knowledge among test-takers.

“So, education for sustainability matters,” says Decamp.

* See the Sulitest annual report 2024, Bridging the Gap: Equipping educators for sustainability, for detailed information on TASK™.

Email Karen MacGregor: macgregor.karen@gmail.com.