Awareness and attitude of college students majoring in landscape architecture towards the sustainable development

Abstract

Reflecting the interest in sustainable development (SD), researches on the attitude toward SD have been steadily conducted for various groups. To explore the characteristics of awareness and attitude of college students majoring in landscape architecture towards the concept of SD, this study has two research questions; to analysis latent classes according to the learning participation pattern (research question 1), and to explore student characteristics that influence the classification of each classes (research question 2). The latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify the combination of relationships found in the classes based on similar patterns among the characteristics of people rather than the relationship between observed variables. A total of 495 students majoring in landscape architecture, 222 males and 275 females, are participated in this study. The results of this study are as follows. First, six latent classes were extracted in relation to attitudes toward SD. Second, college students majoring in landscape architecture tend to view the concept of SD from an 'environmental' and 'environmental and economic harmony' point of view rather than from an 'environmental, social, and economic' point of view. Third, grades and educational experiences were found to have a significant effect on the probability of belonging to a specific latent class for SD. Finally, based on these results, we suggest a method for organizing interdisciplinary courses to comprehensively access the 'environmental, social and economic' areas of the curriculum.