Analysis of Senior High School Students’ Understanding and Application of Green Chemistry in Palu City, Indonesia, for Instructional Media Development
This study of 343 senior high school students in Palu City, Indonesia, reveals that while their overall understanding of green chemistry is moderate, significant variations across schools are driven primarily by classroom instructional factors rather than individual dispositions, providing a critical baseline for developing targeted game-based instructional media.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Chemistry often carries a reputation for being an abstract, difficult subject, a collection of formulas that feel disconnected from the real world. Yet, the discipline holds the key to solving some of humanity's most pressing challenges, from cleaning up industrial waste to designing materials that do not poison the soil. To bridge the gap between the laboratory and the planet, scientists developed a framework known as green chemistry. This approach is built on twelve guiding principles that encourage chemists to prevent waste before it is created, use safer materials, and design products that break down harmlessly after use. The goal is to weave these ideas into the way chemistry is taught, ensuring that the next generation of students sees the subject not just as a set of rules to memorize, but as a tool for protecting the environment. However, for these ideas to take root, educators need to know if students are actually grasping them, and whether the quality of that understanding depends on where the students go to school.
In the city of Palu, located in the central part of Sulawesi, Indonesia, a team of researchers set out to answer these questions. They focused on 343 high school students, aged roughly sixteen to eighteen, attending eight different public and private schools. The researchers wanted to see how well these young people understood the twelve principles of green chemistry and whether they could apply that knowledge in their daily lives. To do this, they gave the students a survey consisting of thirty-one statements. The students were asked to rate how much they agreed with each statement, covering five different areas: what they knew, their attitude toward learning, how they acted in the classroom, their feelings about the environment in daily life, and their actual habits outside of school. The survey was designed to be precise, mapping each question to specific green chemistry principles, such as designing chemicals that are safer to handle or creating products that degrade naturally.
The results revealed a picture that was both encouraging and revealing. Overall, the students showed a moderate level of understanding and application of green chemistry. They were generally aware of the concepts and held positive attitudes toward the subject. However, the data showed that this understanding was not evenly distributed. The students were strongest when it came to the idea of designing safer chemicals, a concept that feels intuitive and directly related to avoiding harm. In contrast, they struggled the most with more technical principles, such as preventing pollution in real-time or designing chemicals that break down completely after use. These difficult concepts often require a deeper, more specialized understanding of how chemical processes work, which suggests that while students grasp the general idea of safety, the finer technical details remain elusive.
Perhaps the most significant finding of the study was that the school a student attended mattered more than the student's personal background. The researchers found clear and measurable differences in test scores between the eight schools. Students at some schools demonstrated a significantly stronger grasp of green chemistry than those at others. When the researchers broke down the data, they discovered that these differences were almost entirely concentrated in areas related to the classroom, such as what the students knew and how they behaved during lessons. The schools had a powerful influence on what happened inside the classroom walls. In contrast, the students' attitudes and habits outside of school, in their homes and communities, were much more similar across all the different schools. This suggests that while a school can effectively teach a student how to think about chemistry in a lab, it has far less control over the habits and resources a student has once they leave the building.
The study also looked at how the different parts of the students' understanding related to one another. The researchers found that the five areas they measured were all strongly linked. A student who knew a lot about green chemistry tended to have a positive attitude toward it and was more likely to try to apply it in class. This indicates that the students' understanding formed a coherent whole rather than a collection of separate, unrelated facts. However, the link between what happened in the classroom and what happened at home was slightly weaker, reinforcing the idea that the school environment is the primary driver of learning in this specific subject.
These findings have direct implications for how chemistry education can be improved, particularly in Indonesia. The researchers noted that most students in the study owned smartphones and were already using them for learning, which suggests that digital tools could be an effective way to reach them. More importantly, the data points to a specific need for support. Because the differences between schools were so pronounced in the classroom-related areas, a "one-size-fits-all" approach to teaching green chemistry would likely fail. Schools with lower scores, particularly those where students struggled with the more technical principles, would benefit most from targeted interventions. The study concludes that by using this detailed diagnosis, educators can design learning materials, such as interactive games or apps, that specifically address the gaps in knowledge. This ensures that the effort to teach sustainability is not just a general lecture, but a precise tool that helps every student, regardless of which school they attend, to understand how chemistry can serve the planet.
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