Remembering competence: Retrospective self-assessment of sustainability learning four years after a higher education course

This article examines how participants in a discontinued sustainability course at a Swedish university characterized their learning four years after it ended, and what remembering itself reveals about the limits of retrospective evaluation in sustainability education research. Drawing on a single-case study, it revisits ten semi-structured interviews with five students, three instructors and two staff members reflecting on a course that had ended four years earlier. Rather than treating recall difficulties as noise, the article repositions them as a central finding. Participants struggled to separate this course from similar courses taken concurrently, and their competency ratings diverged sharply from one another and from the original synthesized account. Contrasted against contemporaneous course evaluation data, the interviews show that retrospective accounts reorganize, conflate and disagree rather than simply fading. The article argues that single-case retrospective designs should report this heterogeneity explicitly and offers methodological recommendations for studies relying on long-delayed recall.