Author(s):
This project fulfills a need for engaging students in a second-year organic chemistry laboratory in green and sustainable decision-making, elicited through the use of prompts that are Engineering Practices using the students’ underlying chemistry understanding. This approach is in contrast to treating green chemistry as a set of abstract concepts and leverages theories of how people learn and evidence-centered assessment design (ECD). The guiding question of the implementation phase has been what ideas students use in their decision-making and can this engagement in Engineering Practices be reliably characterized. This question will address questions about expectations for student performance in systems/sustainable thinking, inform on how to balance chemistry content with socio-scientific issues, and provide implications for curricular change to support sustainable thinking. The outcomes have been a scaffolded set of multi-week case studies to engage students in well-constrained sustainability problems to more open-ended problems, with a strong emphasis on students’ use of Constructing Explanations, Defining Problems, and Designing/Evaluating Solutions based on green chemistry data. The broader impacts are a ready-to-adopt curriculum, a design architecture to empower others to elicit similar evidence, and information on a learning progression for sustainable thinking within the undergraduate chemistry curriculum.
Coauthors
Elizabeth L. Day, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas, Mengqi Zhang, Michigan State University, East Lansing MI, Hunter S. McFall-Boegeman,, Missouri State University, Springfield MO
