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There are multiple questionnaires in the literature that try to gather university students’ perception about sustainable development (SD), but they are mainly focused on determining the students’ knowledge and attitude about sustainability. As the existing questionnaires did not fit the type of analysis that is intended to carry out, a new questionnaire was developed, adapted to the aims and context (engineering students) of the pretended study. The questionnaire contains two scales; one to determine the level of insertion of sustainability and the other to measure the importance that students give in their training process to the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. This new instrument requires a validation process to ensure its content – validity, reliability and clarity. The aim of this paper is to describe the validation process.

This paper shows the validation process of a questionnaire designed ad hoc to measure the students’ perception on SD inclusion level in three current engineering degrees, at the Engineering School of Bilbao (EIB) that belongs to the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). The questionnaire validation process was conducted in three stages: experts on the subject provided their advice to ensure the study objectives, a small number of students contributed to clarify the statement of the questions, and thus, to increase the reliability of the questionnaire and finally, a larger number of students completed the survey to analyse the internal consistency of the two scales in the questionnaire with the Cronbach’s alpha test.

As a result of the entire validation process, an appropriate scale has been obtained to measure the importance that students give to the three dimensions of sustainability, economic, environmental and social, and to the sustainability overall. Furthermore, an appropriate scale to measure the insertion level of sustainability in engineering studies has been developed. However, the insertion scale needs a revision in the items of social and economic dimension to be valid to conduct disaggregated studies by dimensions.

The surveys published in the literature try to determine the knowledge and attitude that students have regarding SD. However, this new questionnaire, whose validation process is described in this paper, aims to know how engineering students of the EIB perceive the level of insertion of SD in their academic programs, from a frequency perspective, and the importance they give to it, both personally and professionally, given to the analysis a holistic perspective. Thus, the questionnaire can be used by higher education institutions to design strategies for inserting SD in engineering studies.

This paper aims to propose and examine the relationship between students’ perception of service quality and dimensions and their academic achievement.

Based on the resource-based view, a conceptual relationship between service quality and dimensions and academic achievement is proposed and tested with a sample of 380 STEM university students who attended secondary schools in a region of Spain.

Service quality and four of its dimensions (i.e. empathy, reliability, responsiveness and assurance/confidence) could contribute to students’ academic achievement. The expected effect of tangible elements on academic achievement was not supported by the data. Results were controlled for student’s personal factors that have proven important in explaining academic achievement in previous studies (i.e. need for cognition, need for emotion and self-efficacy).

Previous research has extensively studied factors affecting students’ academic achievement. However, the direct relationship between service quality and student’s academic achievement has been rarely proposed and examined. Service quality has been mostly viewed as a precursor of student satisfaction and loyalty. This research views service quality as a school higher-order capability that supplements students’ capabilities.