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Developing a Green Chemistry Focused General Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum: What Do Students Understand and Value about Green Chemistry?

Over the past several decades, green chemistry has gained prominence in chemistry education. However, the development of green chemistry curricula has not reached all levels of education equally, focusing mainly on elective and upper division courses. We deliberately focused our green chemistry curriculum redesign on a high enrollment introductory general chemistry laboratory course at the University of California, Berkeley. We developed over 30 new experiments that introduced students to green chemistry concepts and applications, while maintaining canonical general chemistry learning goals. The context of the curriculum and required course assignments encouraged students to use green chemistry principles to explore and solve real-world problems. After completing this redesigned course, we hypothesized that students would value green chemistry and feel more confident in their green chemistry knowledge. We developed new methods to measure students’ attitudes toward and understanding of green chemistry as a system instead of isolated reactions or processes. These assessments allowed us to better understand both the progression and limitations in student green chemistry and systems-thinking. Since over 2000 students complete the laboratory course each year, we used a combination of fixed response items and free response items from online surveys and in-class assignments and exams. This approach allowed efficient assessment of thousands of students, while still gaining valuable and nuanced views of student understanding and attitudes. These assessments indicated that the new general chemistry laboratory curriculum succeeded in providing an environment in which students learned green chemistry concepts and realized that chemistry has connections to their future courses and professions.