This study investigated students' meaning-making of polymeric concepts during modelling and discuss students' creation of visible representations in chemistry. The analysis combines a phenomenographic and social semiotic approach and leads to the finding and description of 21 different meaning-making processes. We refer to meaning-making as the…

This study addresses the use of epistemic criteria related to the scientific practice of inquiry in the context of environmental chemistry. In particular, it analyses the type of criteria that are used by pre-service teachers when assessing the adequacy of several scientific procedures for identifying microplastics in beach sand, as well as…

The active participation of citizens in scientific research, through citizen science, has been proven successful. However, knowledge on the potential of citizen science within formal chemistry learning, at the conceptual and procedural levels, remains insufficiently explored. We developed a citizen science project -- PVC: Perceiving the Value of…

Sustainability has become a prominent theme in society and can be considered as an integral part of scientific citizenship. This study investigates to what extent the production, use and re-use of (bio)plastics initiates students' reasoning and to identify the kind of content knowledge students put forward. The structure of students' arguments was…

"Sustainability" is a very general term and the question arises how to specify it within daily laboratory work. In this regard, appropriate metrics could support a socially acceptable, ecological and economic product development. The application of metrics for sustainability should be strengthened in education, because they do not belong…

Following collaboration between two chemistry lecturers and an academic developer an attempt was made to enhance the learning of students within a chemistry module through the adaptation of the delivery of content material. This paper reports a piece of practitioner led research which considered how effective the approach developed was upon the…

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a secondary school lesson plan for chemistry education on the topic Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The lessons focus both on the chemistry of plastics and on learning about the societal evaluation of competing, chemistry-based industrial products. A specific teaching method was…