Sustainability as a life purpose among first-semester students at a private university in Malaysia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to the global sustainability crisis, education for sustainable development has become a pressing priority for universities in emerging nations, but nurturing students’ commitment to sustainability remains a challenge. Guided by the theoretical concepts of life purpose and sustainability, this descriptive study explores how first-semester students at a private university in Malaysia integrate sustainability into their life purpose statements. From analysing the life purpose statements of 1,506 students across 22 science and social science disciplines, three purpose profiles have been identified: purposeful (39.4%), dreamer (9.5%), and self-oriented (29.1%), with a balance (22%) that did not submit their life purpose statements. The finding indicates that nearly half of the students are prosocial and likely to be committed to sustainability. Among the 943 students with prosocial purpose profiles, the majority (68.9%) expressed support for social sustainability, 23.9% expressed support for economic sustainability, and a minority (5.5%) expressed support for environmental sustainability. This study also reveals distinct purpose profiles and dominant commitment to social, economic, or environmental sustainability among students from various disciplines. The four interview responses exemplify how students with different purpose profiles perceive their roles towards sustainability. This study discusses the importance of sustainability among university students in an emerging nation. It contributes to the sustainable higher education agenda of emerging nations by underscoring the need to enhance environmental sustainability education across various disciplines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".