Tracing Sustainability Knowledge from Course Aims and Content to Learning Outcomes: An Element-Level Analysis of an Interior Architecture Curriculum

Curriculum studies in sustainable design commonly map themes or Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but such mapping does not show whether specifically named disciplinary knowledge remains identifiable in formal learning outcomes. This study therefore examines how sustainability-related knowledge is represented across course aims/content and learning outcomes in a publicly documented 2025–2026 undergraduate Interior Architecture curriculum. Across all 70 course records, aims and content from 67 records yielded 1168 named knowledge elements; 169 sustainability-related elements in 17 courses met conservative inclusion criteria across seven domains. Each element was coded as preserved, generalized, displaced, or not represented. Independent re-unitization of a predefined 14-course validation sample yielded Krippendorff’s unitizing alpha of αU = 0.84, while independent recoding of all 169 included elements yielded 81.7% pre-adjudication agreement (Cohen’s κ = 0.725); final adjudicated transformation classifications were used for analysis. Overall, 45.0% were preserved at equivalent specificity, 30.2% generalized, 4.1% displaced, and 20.7% not represented. Preservation was highest for materials, water, resources, and circularity (77.8%) and indoor environmental quality, health, and safety (69.6%) but lower for climate/energy performance (22.2%) and heritage/adaptive reuse (20.7%). Leave-one-course-out estimates ranged from 41.1% to 48.3%. The study distinguishes curricular presence from outcome-level specificity and provides a transparent element-level diagnostic for examining how sustainability knowledge is formally recontextualized across curricular fields without treating documentary visibility as evidence of teaching or learning.