Team-based projects incorporating eco-friendly packaging and conservation principles to improve students' sustainability awareness in environmental chemistry courses
Keywords:
Conservation principles, eco-friendly packaging, sustainability awareness, team-based projectsAbstract
It's clear that understanding sustainability is super essential for dealing with the environmental problems we face now and will face later. But we still don't know how to teach it in colleges, mainly in environmental science and chemistry education classes. This study tries to create a lecture program for environmental chemistry using team projects focused on eco-friendly packaging and saving resources. This is because we need better ways to teach sustainability. The study uses a research and development method, following the ADDIE model (which is just a way to plan how to prepare something). They got info from 124 college students in environmental chemistry, and the program they made has lesson plans, how the team projects should work, and ways to grade them. The effectiveness of the program was assessed using normalized gain (N-Gain) and paired sample t-test analysis. While the program demonstrated high validity (92.5%) and practicality (95%), and produced a moderate improvement in students' sustainability awareness (N-Gain = 0.6, p < 0.05), certain limitations remain. The research was conducted within a single institution and over a relatively short period, limiting the generalizability and long-term insights of the findings. Future research should explore the scalability of this approach across diverse educational settings and investigate the sustained impact of such programs on students' attitudes and behaviors towards sustainability.
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