Alternative ways of teaching basic concepts of environmental chemistry for Advanced level students

Abstract

Educating the society about the environmental issues has become a current requirement of the country. Hence Environmental Education has been introduced to the school curricula of Sri Lanka under various subjects. Since the majority of environmental issues have chemical components and chemical reactions, basic concepts of environmental chemistry are discussed under the ‘Man and the Environment’ unit of A/L chemistry syllabus. So, this unit can be considered as one of the most important units in existing A/L chemistry syllabus, which specifies environmental themes related to the chemistry. As it is the last unit of the syllabus teachers do not have time to complete this unit in schools, therefore students are reluctant to learn it. As a teacher doing chemistry, this problem was faced by me so many years in my teaching profession. So my opinion is there should be an alternative way of introducing the concepts of environmental chemistry for A/L students, other than having a separate unit for it. This situation was encouraged me to do my studies to find out the problems faced by the teachers and students with relevant to the teaching and learning this unit and the solution to over come these problems. The main objective of the study was the introducing of alternative ways of teaching basic concepts of environmental chemistry for A/L students. As the first part of the study it was able to find out the problems which are faced by teachers and students relevant to the teaching and learning ‘Man and the environment. The solutions to over come the above problems, were the second part of the study, specially the units and the themes of the A/L chemistry syllabus which could insert the . Objectives of the ‘Man and the environment unit’. In addition to that priority was given to find out the attractive teaching methods of teaching themes related to the basic concepts of environmental chemistry for A/L students. By considering the problems, solutions, and other data, which were gathered from teachers and students the alternative ways of teaching and learning basic concepts of environmental chemistry, were able to find out.