INTEGRATING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IDEAS INTO CHEMISTRY EDUCATION THROUGH A REAL-LIFE DECISION-MAKING MECHANISM

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of integrating sustainable development ideas into chemistry education through a mechanism that supports students' real-life decision-making. Chemistry curricula increasingly reference sustainability and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet students often struggle to connect green-chemistry principles to concrete, everyday decisions, and classroom approaches rarely provide an explicit procedure for weighing competing sustainability-related criteria. Drawing on a multi-criteria optimization model of decision-making, context-led approaches to chemistry teaching, argumentation-based justification of scientific claims, and recent green-chemistry decision-making tools linked to the SDGs, this article develops and substantiates a four-stage mechanism — context selection, criteria identification and weighting, generation and rating of chemistry-based alternatives, and weighted decision with scientific justification. For each stage, the article proposes concrete instructional tools and illustrates their application through a worked example comparing packaging materials for a school cafeteria. The article is conceptual and methodological in nature: it proposes and theoretically justifies an instructional mechanism rather than reporting the results of an empirical trial. The article concludes with practical recommendations for chemistry teachers and outlines the design of an empirical study that would be needed to verify the mechanism's effectiveness in practice.