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...