To help meet the sustainability needs of our ever-changing world, there has been much momentum over the past two decades to incorporate the principles of green chemistry in the training of future chemists. Chemistry educators have answered this call through the development of a wide array of curricular materials and laboratory activities designed to challenge students to learn about the connection between chemistry and the sustainability of the environment around them. Despite progress in developing these resources for higher education, green chemistry curricula are often framed as a finite set of concepts rather than epistemic practices that facilitate students’ productive engagement in green decision-making. Further, very little is known about how students learn core concepts and ideas related to green and sustainable chemistry and assessment of students’ knowledge-in-use involving these ideas is scarce in the chemistry learning environment.<br/> <br/>To combat these challenges, it is essential to design evidence-based curricula that better support student learning through the integration of green and sustainable thinking into the chemistry classroom. Our approach involves the implementation of case studies embedded within the second-year undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory course. We apply a design-based research cycle to these case studies in which we integrate theories about how people learn with evidence from the chemistry classroom about the knowledge, resources, and tools that students use to demonstrate green decision-making. In this presentation, we share our findings from the first case study in which students utilize information about environmental and human hazards, cost efficiency, and percent yield to decide which of three synthetic routes best satisfies the green metrics proposed by a pharmaceutical company. Based on preliminary qualitative exploration of students’ decision memos, our team has uncovered how students incorporate their understanding of mechanistic pathways and green metrics into their arguments. Ultimately through our design-based curricular development, we hope to coordinate theory on how students learn and our evidence to elucidate instructional supports for student learning of green and sustainable thinking.

Investigating green and sustainable sensemaking through the evidence-based design of organic chemistry case studies

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ACS Fall 2022

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