Designing Interdisciplinary Soil Education in Higher Education: Planned Interventions and Impact Evaluation

Soils are central to environmental sustainability and human well-being, yet they remain underrepresented in higher education and insufficiently addressed in societal awareness. With more than 60% of European soils affected by degradation, there is an urgent need for educational strategies to help reverse this trend. Within this context, the CURIOSOIL (URL: curiosoil.eu) project implements an integrated educational approach built on the Soil Literacy Assessment Framework (SLAF), which conceptualises soil literacy across four domains of knowledge, attitudes, and skills, operationalised through defined subdomains, descriptors, and learning outcomes. The SLAF provides a common structure for both the design of educational resources and the assessment of learning processes. Guided by this framework, a range of educational resources is being developed across different educational levels.

For higher education, CURIOSOIL will implement four complementary approaches: (1) ready-to-use lesson plans for higher education teaching, including discipline-targeted materials to support integration of soil topics into non-soil standard curricula (2) a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) as a scalable learning environment designed to raise soil awareness and strengthen soil knowledge in higher education; (3) challenge-based learning activities that engage learners in authentic, societally relevant soil-health challenges; and (4) short online micro-credentials designed to deepen soil health knowledge. Together, these approaches address complementary dimensions of science communication, spanning soil knowledge acquisition, reflection, participation, and action-oriented learning.  

 These activities are guided by CURIOSOIL’s Theory of Change (ToC), which defines long-term goals for assessing change in soil literacy and articulates how targeted educational resources and learning activities are expected to contribute to societal changes towards caring for soil and produce impact.

The main goal of this study is to analyse how different higher education learning environments, designed under the Soil Literacy Assessment Framework and CURIOSOIL’s Theory of Change, contribute to improving soil literacy and fostering responsible soil stewardship among higher education students. In this presentation we will discuss the impact of the four complementary educational approaches of CURIOSOIL to identify which approaches are most effective for specific dimensions of soil literacy. We will investigate how scalable (MOOCs), immersive (CBL), and modular (micro-credentials) learning environments support distinct but complementary soil literacy processes and discuss how these could facilitate the integration of soil topics into non-soil-focused degree programmes. This study is expected to generate data-driven insights into how soil literacy can be designed, measured, and scaled in higher education.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors acknowledge co-funding from the European Union under the Horizon Europe Programme, through the project CURIOSOIL Grant Agreement No. 101112875 and the financial support of CESAM (UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020+LA/P/0094/2020) by FCT/MCTES, through national funds. We also thank project partners for their contributions.