Education for sustainable development (ESD) is in a phase of mainstreaming in higher education institutions (cf. Michelsen, 2015). This process is significantly impeded by existing conflicts about and unclear definitions of sustainable development (SD) in different academic disciplines that in effect weaken the process of organizational change. Following Lipscombe (2008, p. 566) “there has been an explosion of definitions as the concept has spread and been reshaped across sectors, disciplines and between places”. Various conceptions of the term SD exist among different academic disciplines, in everyday language, among governmental policies and non-governmental organizations. As Gow (1992, p. 51) notes: “sustainability is like happiness – everyone believes in it and everyone has a different definition”.

In HESD, students are introduced to the scholarly and political discourse on SD. Here, they encounter and engage with different and competing concepts of SD. One of the key aims in HESD is to promote students’ capacity to navigate this discourse, to enable them to critically appraise differences in these concepts and to support them in developing a deep and sophisticated understanding of SD. We know from other fields such as conceptual change research that pedagogical approaches need to consider and adapt to existing conceptions of learners as they represent a crucial starting point for any transformative learning. That is why it is important to research students’ conceptual understandings of SD when they enter university. Following Borg, Gericke, Höglund and Bergman (2014), we refer to these initial conceptual understandings as ‘preconceptions’ that relate to the degree to which individuals associate a particular set of ecological, socio-cultural, and economic aspects as integral parts of the concept of SD. This term takes the complexity of the aforementioned aspects into account and acknowledges the growing consensus on holistic approaches toward SD in the literature (Giddings, Hopwood, & O’Brien, 2002).

This study presents an empirical analysis of preconceptions of SD among 1-year students. It addresses three research gaps. First, it contributes to a terminological clarification and consolidation by reviewing related constructs using terms like conceptions, perceptions, understandings or associations. Second, it includes students from a broad spectrum of disciplines and therewith provides an extension of existing studies that have so far been confined to specific domains like engineering and business education. Third, it provides a quantitative account of students’ preconceptions and therewith complements qualitative approaches that have been used by existing studies on student conceptions of SD.

Based on existing research, the main assumption underpinning this study is that there are differences in student preconceptions that can be attributed to sex, prior exposure to ESD in school, extent of non-formal educational experiences after school and prior to university (e.g. travels and work placements vs. immediate transition from school to university), and disciplinary focus of the elected major program (e.g. humanities vs. business administration). The resulting research questions are:

- Which preconceptions of SD exist among first year undergraduate students?
- How do individual characteristics and prior learning experiences relate to undergraduates’ preconceptions of SD?