Green Goggles: Designing and Teaching a General Chemistry Course to Nonmajors Using a Green Chemistry Approach

A novel course using green chemistry as the context to teach general chemistry fundamentals was designed, implemented and is described here. The course design included an active learning approach, with major course graded components including a weekly blog entry, exams, and a semester project that was disseminated by wiki and a public symposium. Results include self-reports of gains in knowledge of both general and green chemistry concepts as well as how they are related, and that the project and wiki participation contributed most to their learning gains in the course. Other qualitative results include attitudinal changes and increase in critical thinking skills. Course improvements for future offerings are also reported.

Full citation: Prescott, S. (2013). Green Goggles: Designing and Teaching a General Chemistry Course to Nonmajors Using a Green Chemistry Approach. Journal of Chemical Education, 90(4), 423–428. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed300538d