6.1. Characteristics of Business School ‘Students and Research’s Respondents
The Mackenzie Presbyterian University is a confessional organization with a humanist orientation based on the philosophy of John Calvin.
The history of Mackenzie Presbyterian University (MPU) dates from the 19th century, when Presbyterian missionaries founded, in Sao Paulo, the “American School”. The foundation of the new school represented a turning point in Brazil. The school introduced a series of pioneering and innovative pedagogical and social practices. Among them, the end of racial discrimination in admissions (legally authorized by the government until then), the creation of mixed gender classes and the abolition of physical punishments [
77].
The 500 students contacted had a typical profile of the students’ population of the University, with a diversified profile concerning the socioeconomic condition. The majority of students were between 18 and 27 years old and were well-divided by gender: females (55%) and males (45%). According to university database, the employability rate of students who attended classes during the night was 76% while the students who study during daytime was 35%.
The final sample was similar to the description of the initial 500. Regarding the 165 students who composed the final sample, we characterized them as follows: (a) gender—four did not declare their gender, and the remaining were evenly divided between male (49.1%) and female (48.5%); (b) age—ranged between 21 and 26 (72.1%), followed by 27 to 32 with 18.8%, a small portion aged between 33 and 39 (5.5%), and one respondent aged over 40; five respondents (3.5%) did not state their age; (c) employability—a vast majority of the students were working, totalizing 82.4%; 23 respondents were not working (13.9%), and 3.6% did not answer.
The questionnaire measured whether students remembered the SSM discipline. Most of them (81.2%) said yes, while 18.8% did not. This information, added to the good return rate of valid responses (33%), reveals the formation of a bond between the pedagogical proposal and the students. The text fields contained voluntary manifestations such as ‘the course was the most interesting one in the semester, in my opinion’, ‘I always tried to reflect on the subject discussed in class, the professor made us think by holding debates’, ‘I think I wasn’t mature enough for the course content’, ‘nowadays I give much more importance to the subject and I would definitely dedicate myself more’, and ‘I was extremely interested in the content of each class’. However, a smaller number of negative manifestations appeared, from students who could not remember the discipline or had found the texts difficult and complicated, both because of their theoretical content and the language.
6.2. Evaluating Levels of Reflection
We drafted the Kember et al. [
1] questionnaire based on a field literature review and published empirical studies. After three stages of questionnaire application and statistical analysis, we examined the Cronbach alpha values for each scale to determine reliability (
Table 3). We did the same with the scales translated and adapted in this questionnaire; the values proved acceptable, higher than the original with the exception of daily, habitual action. The Habitual Action dimension aims to analyze how much the students know the content and teaching-learning strategy of the SSM discipline; it is a dimension of validation contrary to critical reflection. The Cronbach Alpha (0.531) shows that one must review these items in a future application.
Table 4 presents the statistic described by this item with means and standard deviations. The closer the average is to 1, the more the respondents agreed with the statement, that is, the more contributive it is for measuring the scale degree. The closer the average is to 5, the less the respondents agreed with the statement, that is, the lower the level reached by the construct. The Skewness and Kurtosis values are within the parameters.
The fact that the higher means related to the items of the Habitual Action scale of the Critical Reflection construct demonstrates that the content and teaching-learning strategies of the SSM discipline are not habitual nor created by students in an automated manner. The statement with the highest concordance percentage was HA_4 (44.2% concordance)—description ‘If I simply agreed with what the SSM professor said, I wouldn’t have to think much about the course and its content,’ showing that not becoming involved and using the work of colleagues led students to pass a course without incorporating its content. However, the other statements in the Habitual Action dimension demonstrate it was not quite that simple. The statements HA_1 (59.4% discordance), ‘When I performed activities during the SSM course, I performed them without thinking about them’, HA_2 (55.2% discordance), ‘During the SSM course I participated in the Sustainable Business game so many times that I played it without thinking about the game’s shared value proposal’, and HA_3 (36.4% discordance), ‘From what I recall, the theoretical content, for reading and analysis, of the SSM course did not make me think much’, had a higher discordance than concordance percentage and even indifference percentage in the case of items 1 and 2. See
Table 5. These results therefore confirm hypothesis Ha: Strategic Sustainability Management (SSM) discipline promotes content other than habitual action.
After that, the highest means belonged to the Critical Reflection scale, expressed by the items: CR_1 (60.6% concordance), ‘The SSM course led me to change the way I understand the notion of value as a business result’, CR_2 (41.2% concordance), ‘The SSM course challenged some of my most solid ideas’, CR_3 (46.1% concordance), ‘As a result of the SSM course I changed my conventional (non-sustainable) way of doing things’, and CR_4 (59.4% concordance), ‘During the SSM course I discovered flaws in things I believed to be right regarding business performance’. See
Table 6. These results therefore confirm hypothesis Hd: Strategic Sustainability Management (SSM) discipline promotes critical reflection on the content studied.
The four Critical Reflection statements presented a higher percentage of concordance than discordance. The fact that the percentage of neutral or indifferent responses occurred at a considerable volume of the responses is understandable. These results reinforce the challenge of promoting this level of reflection in a classroom context to attain TL. If this is difficult individually, it is even more challenging collectively as a social transformation learning goal. The means for the Understanding and Reflection dimensions alternate among the lowest, as presented in
Table 4. This happens because the response percentage in the concordance levels (1 and 2) was higher than for the other degrees of the Likert scale. Students’ perception of the Understanding and Reflection provided by the SSM course proved very satisfactory.
In the Understanding scale, the concordance percentage was very high, surpassing 70% for all four statements, which are: UN_1 (85.5% concordance)—‘When I took the SSM course I had to understand some of the concepts the professor taught’, UN_2 (76.4% concordance)—‘To pass the SSM course it is necessary to understand the content taught’, UN_3 (73.3% concordance)—‘I had to understand the content the professor taught to perform course tasks; such as the sustainable business game, theoretical questions, and business case analysis’, and UN_4 (70.3% concordance)—‘During the SSM course, I had to continuously think about the taught content (e.g., economic x ecological rationality, organizational paradoxes and tensions; co-opetition, stakeholder, shared value and others)’. See
Table 7. These results therefore confirm hypothesis Hb: Strategic Sustainability Management (SSM) discipline promotes content understanding.
In the Reflection scale, the most relevant items are: R_2 (83.7% concordance)—‘I like thinking about my work and considering alternatives that can provide shared value’, and R_1 (80% concordance)—‘Sometimes I question the way in which my work colleagues do something, and I try to do it in a way that generates shared value’, reaching over 80% of student concordance. The other items, R_3 (70.9% concordance)—‘I often reflect on the way in which I am practicing my manager profession, thinking about whether I could provide more shared value’; and R_4 (71.5% concordance)—‘I always reassess my experience as a manager, which helps me to learn better ways of generating shared value,’ also had a high concordance percentage, 70% range. The low percentage of students who disagreed with these statements caused this dimension’s mean to be one of the lowest, along with the Understanding dimension. See
Table 8. These results therefore confirm hypothesis Hc: Strategic Sustainability Management (SSM) discipline promotes reflection on the content studied.
The SSM discipline contributed to the understanding of and reflection on rationality based on shared value in the education of these future managers.
We can observe that an important advance made by the SSM discipline in the shared value teaching-learning has provided understanding of concepts not seen or not incorporated by the future managers and, especially, providing resources for reflection on business goals and the ways of teaching them. Contact with unfamiliar themes in the SSM discipline provides a review of presuppositions about business management and its aims, leading students to a more critical reflection through meaningful learning.
Table 9 synthetizes the means of the four scales.
The means results were coherent with the work of Kember et al. [
1], i.e., the means and average deviations for HA (3.24) and CR (2.66) are greater than the means of UN (2.06) and R (2.01). Carifio and Perla [
78], and Norman [
79] shed light on the debate over the treatment of Likert scales data on the type of variable, whether ordinal or interval character, and whether it is more appropriate to use non-parametric or parametric statistics for data analysis. Carifio and Perla [
78] (p. 1151) conclude that:
The debate on Likert scales and how they should be analysed, therefore, clearly and strongly goes to the intervalist position, if one is analysing more than a single Likert item. Analysing a single Likert item, it should also be noted, is a practice that should only occur very rarely. It is, therefore, as the intervalists contend, perfectly appropriate to summarise the ratings generated from Likert scales using means and standard deviations.
The reflection dimensions displayed contributions to the learning of strategy for sustainability. In other words, the shared value rationality mobilized students, also giving them a predisposition for replacing their presuppositions with transformational learning. Some exceptions were observable, both by the indicators marked as ‘1’—completely agree, and by text reports such as: ‘I began negotiating with win-win results in mind, avoiding zero-sum negotiations such as are so common nowadays’, which demonstrates that the students have been applying the concept in a manager’s professional environment.
The pedagogical shared value experience highlights aspects of the understanding and reflection dimensions; written reports illustrate the way in which this happens: ‘HR work and thinking about shared value is very helpful’, ‘I already had these concerns and the course intensified it’, ‘I would check the importance of information and its possible consequences’, and ‘I have always tried to reflect on the subject discussed in class, the professor made us think by holding debates’. The students described their difficulties in applying what they had comprehended and reflected on regarding shared value, such as: ‘My scope of activity does not always allow me to tackle the three pillars’, ‘It is possible to think about [shared value], but it is much more complex putting it into practice than in theory; and this is a complex content, and there will always be trade-offs’.
This result shows that, even when there is an effort to educate managers for sustainability and make students aware of the need to think about management from other perspectives, people consider the application in the business universe to be difficult. This fact may limit the efforts by disciplines such as SSM and other teaching-learning strategies for sustainability at universities.
6.3. Structural Analysis
We used Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to verify if the items of the four scales (Habitual Action, Understanding, Reflection, and Critical Reflection) measured the critical reflection construct. We used this technique to confirm a prior structure. We also tested a single factor model to verify if there was a single dimension for the items used.
The use of the EQS Program [
80] was necessary. The construction of the scales involved a four-factor model, so it was appropriate to test the fit to the Kember et al. [
1] model. The testing of a single factor model was necessary to check if there was only one dimension for the relevant items, which has not been confirmed. The model chi-squares statistic X
2 with an associated degree of freedom (df) and Bentler’s comparative fit index (CFI), whose parameters are shown in
Table 10 measured the extent to which the model was a good fit for the data.
We tested the standardized solution for the model (See
Figure 1). The average variance explained (AVE) tested the convergent validity for each scale, showing that three latent variables (Understanding—UN, Reflection—R, and Critical Reflection—CR) almost exceeded the recommended value of 0.5 or 50% [
81]. The negative signals and low explained variance could represent that Habitual Action is not compatible with the CR.
The difference between the composite construct reliability and a measure of variance extracted is that the standard loads are squared before they are summed. The appropriate values for this search and Kember et al. [
1] are in
Table 11. These show that some adjustments could turn the critical reflection survey more reliable, such as a review of the scale of habitual action, especially HA4 item with a value of 0.24. We chose not to maximize the Critical Reflection scale with item cleaning because, in this study, CR was not used as a variable in relation—dependent variable or independent, for example. Besides, one of the objectives of the research was to replicate the critical reflection measurement proposed by Kember et al. [
1].
Table 11 shows that the Average Variance Explained and Composition Reliability of the Habitual Action dimension was below acceptable, at least 50%. For this reason, we presented the reduced structural model without Habitual Action Scale.
Reduced Structural Analysis
The results of the reduced structural analysis, without Habitual Action, show small variation and a better fit model in all indicators (see
Table 12) when compared to the complete model presented with the four dimensions of critical reflection.
The average variance explained (AVE) tested the convergent validity for each scale, showing that the three latent variables (Understanding—UN, Reflection—R, and Critical Reflection—CR) had a somewhat better mode fit, see
Table 13.
In this study, we chose not to remove items in the questionnaire because the goal was replicating and validating the scale of Kember et al. [
1]. For future studies, we suggest that one make the adjustments before the data collection, as well as after.