Each human act reflects on environment and therefore has an impact on it. Human race has been striving ever since for continuous development, which led to prosperity of our lives. On the contrary, our economic growth has taken its toll on the environment. Consequently, a balance between environmental care and economic growth is needed. Green chemistry represents a chemistry concept, which promotes progress and improvement of processes and products in direction of sustainable development. Educating students about this kind of experiments inspire and encourage conscious usage of materials, recognition of hazardous features and suitable eradication of waste products. Last but not least, proper education leads to awareness about sustainable development, which impacts wellbeing not only of nowadays’ society, but also of future generations.
Main purpose of this master thesis is to study whether a series of experiments with aspects of green chemistry is suitable for implementation in middle school chemistry class. The study aimed to provide the following: if and how interest, chemistry grades, gender and prior knowledge influence knowledge achievements. For the purpose of this study, series of specially designed and optimized experiments had been designed. Series of experiments consist of three parts: demonstration of pectin extraction from citrus peel, extraction of essential oils from citrus peel by means of distillation and lastly, microencapsulation of extracted essential oil in pectin microspheres. Meanwhile, students are acknowledged with main concepts of green chemistry.
In this mixed methods research, 70 third grade upper secondary students from secondary school in Ljubljana had been participating in the quantitative part of the research and from the mentioned ones, 5 students were chosen for the qualitative part of the research. Students solved the preliminary test and fulfilled an individual interest questionnaire, before conducting series of experiments. Having finished series of experiments, students filled knowledge test and situational interest questionnaire. In a period of three months, students filled knowledge post-test in electronic form and lastly, a month after that, interviews with five students were taken. All the collected data were analyzed with SPSS program.
Results are showing, that students successfully passed preliminary test, where they achieved more than 50 % of all points on average, but their achievements on post-test were poor, where most of them did not score more than 50 %. A correlation between students’ higher situational interest and higher test scores is statistically significant. Additionally, 70 students’ most common misconceptions about selected topic and in-depth study of five students’ conceptions and misconceptions about microencapsulation and extraction of pectin and essential oils from citrus peels are presented.
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