Incorporating Standards Education into Courses on Environmental 

Management and Sustainability1 

Final Project Report 

April 28, 2018 

Deanna H. Matthews# 

H. Scott Matthews#,^ 

#Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University 

^Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University 

Abstract: This project modified content in a popular free open access textbook on 

environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), which has been standardized under the ISO 140000 

environmental management system family of standards. The goal and intention of these content 

modifications was to improve student understanding of the role of standards in promoting 

environmental sustainability. The research involved a pre-assessment of student knowledge about 

the ISO 14040 Life cycle Assessment standards, examining the coverage of standards materials 

in courses, and assessing gains in standards knowledge through a post-assessment. Participants 

included students from several universities where courses in LCA, environmental management 

and sustainability are taught annually. Over the period of research, we expanded and enhanced 

the content related to engineering standards, the standards making process and organizations, the 

ISO 14040 LCA standards, and its uses in professional practice. Comparisons are made in 

individual student gains pre- and post-course, and in cohort gains prior to changing the content in 

the textbook. 

1 This report is a derivative work of a paper published by the authors in the proceedings of the American 

Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) [10] 

1 
Introduction 

The ISO 14040 standard for Life Cycle Assessment is a foundational standard for 

practitioners in the area of environmental benchmarking and comparative assessment. 

Students studying environmental management and sustainable engineering need to be 

aware of this standard and have a more in-depth understanding of its definitions and 

requirements as they move to the workplace. Our work developed materials on ISO 

14040 standards to be used in course materials, with an investigation of how including 

these materials might impact student learning on the topic. This paper demonstrates our 

method for enhancing standards education through materials development. We first 

discuss the development of standards for benchmarking and comparative assessment, and 

various courses and curricula that include these materials. Next we describe our process 

for assessing student knowledge of standards and developing standards based material. 

We end with some lessons learned about the process for developing materials on 

standards. 

Project and Importance 

There is increasing global demand for benchmarking and comparative assessment of the 

environmental performance of companies including that of specific products and 

processes. This information is becoming more important to consumers and decisionmakers in industry, society, and government worldwide. These performance 

measurements have been achieved through development of metrics and methods to 

consider use of energy and other material and resource inputs, as well as outputs such as 

air and water emissions and releases like wastes. A relatively recent component of this 

performance assessment has included consideration of sustainability, which is often 

broadly defined as the ability of current generations to meet their needs without 

compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs [1]. Sustainability has 

more colloquially been defined as the interaction of economic, environmental, and social 

factors. Companies have thus been more broadly seeking ways to report their 

performance across this holistic view of their operations and led to outcomes like annual 

sustainability reports for major corporations around the world. For companies operating 

in certain jurisdictions, reporting of this kind is mandatory, but in most cases is done on a 

voluntary basis as a means of driving shareholder value by creating a perception that the 

company is proactively measuring their performance and developing competitive 

advantage. 

At present, companies are largely focused on reporting the energy consumption, water 

use, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their company overall, as well 

as on a product or process level. The US EPA's GHG Reporting Program (GHGRP) 

launched mandatory reporting at the facility level for many energy-intensive sectors, 

which has caused approximately 10,000 facilities per year to quantify their carbon 

emissions. In support of such efforts, global bodies have defined methods to quantify the 

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energy, environmental, and other impacts at various levels of resolution. Companies are 

reporting their performance at unprecedented levels to agencies using mandatory and 

voluntary data systems. 

At the company level, documentary standards have been created by groups like the World 

Resources Institute (WRI) to define how firms should measure their overall “carbon 

footprint” of GHG emissions from their own in-company activities (called scope 1), that 

of their energy suppliers (scope 2), and for all other upstream and downstream activities 

(scope 3) [2], [3]. Once the emissions have been quantified, firms report resulting GHG 

emissions through voluntary or mandatory data collection efforts like the Carbon 

Disclosure Project or EPA's GHGRP. Building on the foundation of these standards, WRI 

has also developed standards for reporting GHG emissions at the product-specific level 

[4]. Finally, ISO has developed standards specific to carbon and water footprinting (ISO 

14067, ISO 14046). 

The aforementioned standards fundamentally depend on the definitions and 

comprehensive environmental analysis contained in the ISO 14040 standards for life 

cycle assessment (LCA). These standards, first formalized via ISO 14000 for 

environmental management systems in the 1990s, provide a systematic quantified 

inventory and impact assessment of the environmental implications of products in every 

life-cycle stage: materials extraction, manufacturing, use, and ultimate fate of the product 

(reuse, recycling, incineration, or landfilling). Based on the environmental assessment, 

improvements could be made to products or processes to minimize their environmental 

footprint over their life cycle. 

Since the LCA Standard has created all of the underlying definitions and terminology to 

be used to assess environmental performance for specified functional units, it was the 

natural building block for all of the other standards mentioned above. Thus, the ISO 

14040 LCA standard should be a focus of instruction for practitioners and students in this 

field. 

U.S. Sustainability Courses and Curricula 

Despite the large investments in the underlying standards, as well as supporting methods 

to implement them and to create robust decision tools, most students are unaware of the 

critical role of standards and the standardization of methods needed to support all of these 

process, product, and firm-level performance measurements. Results of national 

sustainable engineering curriculum assessments in which our team collaborated showed 

that five years ago there were only a few whole semester undergraduate or graduate 

courses on life cycle assessment (LCA) in 100 engineering colleges in the US. Most 

science and engineering programs that discussed or taught LCA did so in 2-3 lecture 

course modules focused on LCA data collection and organization and simple modeling 

exercises [5], [6]. An identified gap was that there were no centralized teaching resources 

such as textbooks or lecture materials available in this domain. 

3 
Based on this outcome, members of our team led the development over the past several 

years of a free online textbook [7] (available at lcatextbook.com) to teach various 

concepts associated with LCA to undergraduate and graduate students. It has been 

developed to support entire semester LCA courses, as well as the short course modules 

historically used, and short course or executive education formats. Chapter resources 

include learning objectives and homework questions, as well as tailored interactive 

spreadsheet and web models. For instructors, we have developed PowerPoint lecture note 

files, and have been developing video lectures (approximately 1 hour total per session). 

We developed and disseminated all of these materials in electronic and web-based 

formats to ensure a long-term and low-cost sustainable delivery platform. In this report, 

when we refer to 'the textbook', we refer to not just the text itself, but also this entire 

ecosystem of learning resources. 

As a result of these investments, the textbook has already been adopted in around 50 

undergraduate or graduate full-semester courses at universities in the US, leading to 

thousands of downloads of the textbook, with adoptions increasing every semester (e.g., 

the Spring 2018 semester inspired 2,000 full book-equivalent downloads). These courses 

are in science, engineering, social science, and management departments. The online 

textbook and website is being used on all continents, and is being translated into three 

languages. In short we have curated an international network of professors and 

professionals using the LCA textbook as well as the supplemental learning resources that 

form a natural audience for educational material. 

Original Project Goals 

The textbook has always included some content related to ISO 14040. However, we 

recognized the need for further developing this content to make it more robust and useful 

for future practitioners. Better understanding of both the standards development process 

and the standards text and uses was needed. For example, while the details of the ISO 

LCA Standard were a central component, the development of the specific Standard as 

well as the general way in which Standards are created, or in the case of greenhouse gas 

protocols the interaction of multiple standards, was not originally a part of curricula or 

course content. 

Through our project, we sought to develop the standards content and fill a significant gap 

in the teaching of environmental performance assessment (such as LCA) by formalizing 

curricular elements associated with the development of the underlying standards, as well 

as how those standards enable the comparative assessments of processes, products, and 

companies. This would allow many people, beginning at the undergraduate level, to 

understand the important role that standards have played in this domain. They will also 

see how the critical interconnected development of standards and practice are enabling 

4 
innovative sustainable opportunities to understand and improve environmental 

performance. Specifically, based on our unique experience in assessing curricula needs 

and developing teaching resources related to LCA, we identified the following four 

aspects to be integrated into newly developed materials: 

1) The historical drivers for standardization in the environmental performance 

domain, the organization of the various entities (ISO, ASTM, etc.) that interact to 

produce standards, and the role of standards in increasing competitiveness and 

spurring sustainable innovation of products, processes, and firms. 

2) The difference between documentary and measurement standards. In the 

environmental performance domain, they are generally accounting rather than 

measurement standards. While the overall carbon footprint of a company may be 

comprised of many individual components that can be measured in some way 

(e.g., tailpipe or stack measurements of emissions), the overall combination is 

done through accounting methods. 

3) The 'map' between the standard and the study document. Current courses mention 

the standards, their development, and use, but do not directly integrate use of the 

standard in the course. This presents the Standard as secondary to the methods 

used, even though following the standards is essential for an ISO-compliant LCA 

or carbon footprint report. Since many students will go on to be practitioners by 

completing LCAs based on the standards, or reviewing LCAs according to the 

standards, it is important for them to recognize the complexity and rigor these 

standards have. 

4) Understanding the role of professional peer review for standard compliance. ISO 

LCA studies must be peer reviewed by external parties if they will support 

comparative assessments intended for the public (which many are). Learning how 

peer review is done, and the role of critical feedback, is a critical piece of the 

standard process. This means both writing peer reviews and reading/ 

comprehending existing reviews. 

Project Evaluation and Assessment 

The research involved study over a two year period. We asked faculty who taught a full-semester 

life cycle assessment course that used our textbook as a resource to participate and eleven faculty 

at different institutions volunteered. These institutions included eight doctoral, highest research 

level universities, and one each of doctoral - higher research, doctoral - moderate research, and 

masters institutions. The courses included mostly courses for graduate students but included 

undergraduate enrollment. Students from eight institutions completed assessments. 

In year one, we collected pre- and post-assessment survey data from students in courses at these 

institutions. Year one data provides a baseline of knowledge in standards content for life cycle 

assessment. At the end of year one, after discussion with LCA practitioners and standards 

5 
colleagues, we made changes to the textbook to improve standards content. During year two, we 

repeated the pre- and post-assessment surveys for students in the courses. Thus we have pre- and 

post-assessments of a cohort of students before the “intervention” of textbook improvements, 

and pre- and post-assessments of a cohort of students after the “intervention” of textbook 

improvements. 

The pre- and post-assessment included a set of questions to gauge student knowledge and 

awareness of both life cycle assessment generally (12 questions), and life cycle assessment 

standards specifically (24 questions, full assessment provided at end of the paper). The survey 

instrument was the same for both assessments, with the post-assessment also including questions 

about the chapters of the textbook that the student read and which ones were assigned. The latter 

questions help us to identify whether the standards content was emphasized in their particular 

course or not, at least according to the student. 

Students were solicited via an email forwarded from the study team to the course instructor who 

then forwarded it to their students either directly or through a course management system. In the 

surveys, students were asked for their name, email, and institution in order to match pre- and 

post-assessment results. We also used emails from the pre-assessments to directly email students 

the post-assessment link. A total of 135 students completed the pre-assessment, and 35 students 

completed the post-assessment, with 29 students completing both surveys. Students were not 

compensated for their time, and unless their instructor made other arrangements they were not 

rewarded or penalized in their course for completing either assessment. We did not share 

information about students completing the assessment with course instructors. 

On the pre-assessment, we find that students across all three semesters had similar prior 

knowledge about life cycle assessment topics and life cycle assessment standards issues. Mean 

scores were 21, 21, and 20 points (out of 36, where questions with multiple subcomponent 

elements could be worth multiple points) for students from the three semesters, respectively. We 

divided the questions on the assessment into “general LCA knowledge” questions and “LCA 

standards knowledge” questions. No difference in the mean scores or standard deviations across 

the three semesters is found. Students answer ~7 of the 12 general questions correctly, and ~13 

of the 24 standards questions correctly. 

We next examined scores for all of the students responding to the post-test, not matching 

students across both assessments. Overall, we find that students did better on the post test 

generally - scores were 26, 22, and 26 (out of 36) for students from the three semesters 

respectively. The improvement in scores is due to increased correct answers on the LCA 

standards question set. Students gained ~1 point on the general questions, but 2-4 points on the 

standards questions. Correspondingly, when looking at the scores for an individual question, we 

see that students responded correctly more often on the post-assessment than on the preassessment. Table 1 shows the percentage of students answering each question correctly. Note 

that for some questions, students were given the option to “select all that apply” so multiple 

responses could have been recorded. We give an overall score for that question (100% would 

mean a student selected only the correct boxes and none of the incorrect boxes), as well as the 

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scores for the individual elements of a question (the percentage of students identifying one of the 

options as correct response, or not selecting an incorrect response). Few students were able to get 

all elements correct as reflected in the overall score, whereas certain elements were easily 

identified as the correct response. 

Table 1. Pre- and Post-Assessment Scores 

Question Pre-assessment percent correct Post-assessment percent correct 

Which of the following are examples 

of life cycle thinking? 73% 83% 

Which of the following are examples 

of activities of initial costs to be 

included in a life cycle cost model of 

a building (you may choose more 

than one)? 

67% 

(82%, 90%, 46%, 56%) 

73% 

(86%, 89%, 33%, 50%) 

Which of the following are part of 

the LCA standard (choose all that 

apply) 

77% 

(86%, 73%, 95%, 55%) 

94% 

(100%, 92%, 100%, 83%) 

Which of the following activities 

were done to produce the LCA 

Standard (choose all that apply)? 

53% 

(56%, 82%, 56%, 33%, 38%) 

65% 

(78%, 94%, 56%, 50%, 47%) 

ISO 14040 is an example of which 

type of standard? 48% 75% 

Why is it important to follow a 

standard when doing environmental 

comparisons? 

88% 100% 

Which of the following activities are 

required as part of the LCA 

Standard? (choose all that apply) 

55% 

(56%, 87%, 24%, 30%, 76%) 

70% 

(67%, 100%, 58%, 36%, 89%) 

Which of the following is not a study 

design parameter in the LCA 

Standard 

35% 67% 

In what order does the LCA Standard 

suggests dealing with a hypothetical 

multifunctional system involving a 

refinery system. Select 1 for the first 

method, 2 for the second method, and 

3 for the third method. 

14% 

(24%, 30%, 14%) 

27% 

(44%, 39%, 53%) 

Which of the following is true about 

input-output models for LCA? (select 

all that apply) 

33% 

(55%, 56%, 53%) 

37% 

(67%, 58%, 61%) 

Why are process matrix models 

useful in LCA? (Select all that apply) 

47%, 

(49%, 81%, 70%, 36%) 

58% 

(72%, 86%, 86%, 44%) 

What is true about life cycle impact 

assessment (LCIA) in the LCA 

Standard? 

39% 47% 

How is peer review of an LCA 

addressed in the ISO Standard? 

(Select all that apply.) 

40% 

(42%, 73%, 87%) 

47% 

(61%, 86%, 89%) 

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When looking at scores for students with matched pre-assessment and post-assessment surveys 

(29 total), we can examine gains more closely. On average, these students increased their scores 

an average of 4 points or about a 10% increase in score from the pre- to the post-assessment. The 

majority of those gains came on answering standards questions correctly on the post-assessment. 

Students in the final semester, who were using the text with additional and updated standards 

content, increased their scores on the standards based questions more than those in the prior 

semesters but the difference is not significant. 

Student responses to the open ended question - “How would the ISO 14040 standard be useful 

for completing this LCA task from your boss, if at all?” indicated a gain in awareness of 

standards in the LCA area. On the pre-assessment, 51% of the students responded “don’t know” 

or “unsure” or left the question blank. On the post-assessment, no students answered don’t know 

or unsure, but nine students left the question blank (25%). On the pre-assessment, 30% of 

students had a response that generally referred to standards, and 13% had responses that 

indicated some knowledge of LCA. On the post-assessment, 33% had a response that generally 

referred to standards, and 39% had responses that indicated some knowledge of LCA. These 

responses included comments about the elements of an LCA that the standard would address, the 

fact that the standard would promote consistency, and identified the need for using the standard 

to allow comparisons across different products. 

Project Outcomes 

The materials added (detailed above) include content on an array of standards knowledge. We 

emphasize the market orientation of the standards, from both the development and use 

perspectives. We provide students with linkages from the standard text to the work in LCA that 

they would be performing or reviewing, thus giving them an integrated view of the role standards 

will likely have in their future positions in LCA. These areas are consistent with suggested 

standards content areas [8], [9]. While one chapter of the textbook is specifically focused on the 

ISO standard, we incorporate references to the standard in subsequent chapters to reinforce the 

need to be knowledgeable about this content. The students may also have used resources 

(provided by the faculty instructor or not) that include standards content. 

One difference in this approach is the potential reach of the materials. Rather than creating a 

single module on standards, we created centralized materials in an existing textbook and course 

materials environment. Within the scope of our project, we had participation from 8 courses 

reaching approximately 300 - 500 students over the 3 semesters of courses with correspondence 

about the project that was standards based. We made improvements to the textbook chapter on 

standards and increased references to standards in other chapters. Outside the scope of the 

project, we are aware of at least eighty (80) different courses around the world that are using our 

textbook, with an annual enrollment of around 2,000 - 3,000 students. Since we do an annual 

update of the text, and notify instructors on our mailing list annually of changes, we have made 

these instructors more aware of the need to cover standards content in their courses. So, through 

8 
 

this model, we hope to have a far reaching impact on standards awareness among students and 

faculty alike. 

While not assessed via the pre- and post-assessments discussed above, as part of this project we 

also led the development of a continuing education course provided by the American Society for 

Civil Engineers (ASCE) on the topic of life cycle sustainability analysis. This course is 

comprised of about 15 one-hour lecture videos, and a significant portion of one of these lectures 

relates to the ISO standard and its development. This course, taken by practicing engineers, will 

further allow the standards content to permeate through additional audiences beyond those of 

undergraduate and graduate students. 

Findings, Lessons Learned, and Potential for Knowledge Transfer 

While we did not attempt to extract statistically significant results, we saw an apparent gain in 

knowledge from the pre-assessments to the post-assessments. These gains could be due to 

differences in the students’ work ethic and success in the individual courses, and selection bias of 

students who are generally doing well in the class being willing to respond to the postassessment request. We may also be seeing an indirect effect of awareness on behalf of the 

faculty member that is extended to the students. Since the faculty instructors were receiving our 

correspondence about the research project and changes to the textbook in the area of standards, 

we may be seeing the general effect of these instructors highlighting the standards material in 

their courses. 

Some lessons learned from the assessment project are to provide students several options to 

complete the post-assessment instrument. The low end-of-semester response rate was 

disappointing, albeit not surprising. We of course would have preferred a more extensive 

assessment tool rather than the brief instrument we created in order to get a more robust idea of 

what the students know at the end of the course. We see some of the questions with low correct 

response rates that would reflect coverage in course content - for example, few students are able 

to answer the question about dealing with a multifunctional system through system expansion. 

Since instructors may not be address system expansion in a course, since it is an advanced topic, 

the students may not be exposed to this content to be able to answer correctly. 

The modest gains that students made reinforce the need for faculty to emphasize standards in the 

classroom setting. We cannot guarantee that students in these courses, or any courses that use the 

text, are reading the material to a depth of understanding to have the broad standards awareness 

that is needed. We hope that by including repeated references to the standard in different portions 

of the text we begin to address this lack of emphasis. 

This work helped to fill a gap in teaching environmental performance assessment by formalizing 

curricular elements associate with the development of the underlying standards, as well as how 

those standards enable the comparative assessments of processes, products, and companies. This 

9 
will allow many people, beginning at the undergraduate level, to understand the important role 

that standards have played, and continue to play, in this domain. They will also see how the 

critical interconnected development of standards and practice are enabling innovative sustainable 

opportunities to understand and improve environmental performance. 

Acknowledgements 

This work was supported by a Standards Services Curricula Development Cooperative 

Agreement #70NANB15H338 awarded by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute 

of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

10 
 

References 

[1] World Commission on Environment and Development, A Future for All (Brundtland 

Commission Report), London: Oxford Press, 1988 

[2] World Resources Institute, "The Greenhouse Gas Protocol: A Corporate Accounting 

and Reporting Standard", 2001. 

[3] World Resources Institute, "The Greenhouse Gas Protocol: Corporate Value Chain 

(Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard", 2011. 

[4] World Resources Institute, "The Greenhouse Gas Protocol: Product Life Cycle 

Accounting and Reporting Standard”, 2011. 

[5] C. Murphy, D. Allen, B. Allenby, J. Crittenden, C. Davidson, C. Hendrickson, H. S. 

Matthews, “Sustainability in Engineering Education and Research at U.S. 

Universities”, Environmental Science & Technology, 2009, 43 (15), pp. 5558– 

5564, 2009. 

[6] M. Bilec, C. Hendrickson, A. Landis and H. S. Matthews, ‘Updating the Benchmark 

Sustainable Engineering Education Report – Trends from 2005 to 2010’, 

Proceedings of the 2011 ASEE Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 

June 26-29, 2011, 7 pages. 

[7] H. S. Matthews, C. Hendrickson, and D. Matthews, Life Cycle Assessment: 

Quantitative Approaches for Big Decisions, http://www.lcatextbook.com/, 2015. 

[8] C. Leachman and C. Pezeshki, “What’s Standard? Industry Application versus 

University Education of Engineering Standards,” Proceedings of the 2015 ASEE 

Conference, Seattle Washington, June 14-17, 2015, 13 pages. 

[9] J. Olshefsky, “Standards Education: Bridging the Gap Between Classroom Learning 

and Real World Applications,” Proceedings of the 2010 ASEE Conference, 

Louisville, Kentucky, June 20-23, 2010, 9 pages. 

[10] D. Matthews and H. S. Matthews, “Incorporating Standards Education into Courses 

on Environmental Management and Sustainability”, Proceedings of the 2018 

ASEE Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 24-27, 2018, 10 pages. 

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