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Deficient group processes such as conformity pressure can lead to inadequate group decisions with negative social, economic, or environmental consequences. The study aims to investigate how a group technique (called INFO) improves students' handling of conformity pressure and their collective judgments in the context of a transdisciplinary case study (TCS) for sustainability learning.

The improvement of normative functioning and output (INFO) group technique was tested in a field experiment embedded in a TCS. The INFO technique involves individual and group assessments of task difficulty. The experiment compares the performance of student groups assigned to control and experimental conditions in estimation tasks related to environmental planning and rail traffic.

The INFO interventions significantly improved the accuracy of group estimates compared to the control conditions. Applying the group technique could promote student's learning and facilitate the search for sustainable solutions in a TCS.

Results indicate that individually and collectively analyzing and discussing difficulties of a task as suggested by the INFO group technique can help students improve collective judgments on real world issues.

Group techniques are a prominent type of TCS methods as group processes are crucial for sustainability learning. First, this study applies the INFO group technique in a TCS in order to evaluate and further develop the technique.

This paper includes three analyses concerning: expert support in the selection of impact variables for scientific models relevant to environmental planning, the quality of students’ individual estimates of corresponding impacts before and after a group discussion, and the accuracy of artificially‐aggregated judgments of independent groups. Participants were students of environmental sciences at ETH Zurich. The first analysis revealed that during participation in an environmental case study, students’ individual estimates of impacts of variables which have been suggested by experts increased, as compared to the estimates of impacts of additional variables, which have been selected by the students. The remaining analyses consider group discussions on the strength of particular environmental impacts. The quality of the estimates was analyzed referring to expert estimates of the impacts.