Systems thinking for sustainability in chemistry education using life cycle inventories of aspirin synthesis

Abstract

As part of a chemistry education research project, this study was designed to assess the effectiveness of an intervention using Life Cycle Inventories (LCI) of pharmaceutical production in introducing systems thinking for sustainability in chemistry education to first year engineering students. Aspirin synthesis was used as an exemplar drug and system. To accomplish the research objective, the research followed a case study design and collected qualitative data. All first-year engineering students taking the 2022 CHM 171 module participated in the one-time intervention. The CHM 171 module is offered by chemistry department on behalf of the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (EBIT) of the University of Pretoria. The research participants were drawn from a population of students who had given consent to their data being analysed. This gave rise to 130 individual pre-practical exercises, 85 pre- and post-practical quizzes, and 20 group worksheets being analysed for research purposes. The intervention was centred around a single 3-hour practical session. The data were collected at three points in time: pre-, during, and post-practical. At the beginning of the intervention, the participants were assigned a pre-practical exercise and a pre-practical quiz to collect data on their prior systems thinking skills. The participants then worked in groups during the practical session, where they were introduced to the concepts of life cycle inventories followed by systems thinking. They answered various questions in their groups, covering different dimensions of systems thinking for sustainability. After the practical session, the participants then worked individually on a post-practical quiz, similar in nature to the pre-practical quiz. The post-practical quiz was used to gather their systems thinking for sustainability skills post-intervention. Rubrics, designed through inductive thematic analysis, were used to score participants’ responses for the pre-and post-practical quizzes. The Systems Thinking Hierarchical (STH) model was used for the deductive thematic analysis on the pre- and post-practical quizzes, and the group worksheets, to determine the systems thinking skills shown in the participants’ responses. Quantitative analysis was performed on the pre- and post-practical quizzes to determine if there were any changes between the scores of the two quizzes. A paired T-test revealed that the participants’ systems thinking skills had improved moving from the pre- to post-practical quizzes. The deductive analysis using the STH model showed that the quality of answers had also improved in the post-practical quizzes, and the group worksheets, revealing a move from simplistic reasoning to holistic thinking. The results reveal that the LCIs of aspirin synthesis can be used to introduce systems thinking in chemistry education. Implementation into the curriculum is important as it aids understanding of systems thinking and sustainability.