Using green and sustainable chemistry practical activities in Hungarian classrooms: barriers and opportunities

2.1 Green chemistry

The world’s first green chemistry program, the Alternative Synthetic Pathways Grant Program, was launched in 1991 by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In Europe, the first green chemistry program was launched in 1993 in Venice by 30 universities. The rapid expansion of this area of chemistry is also driven by the realization that environmentally and health-friendly products and technologies are the most cost-effective in the long term. ¹⁰

Anastas and Warner ¹¹ summarize the objectives of this area of chemistry in 12 points, which are mainly focused on reducing or eliminating the production and use of substances that are hazardous to the environment. This list is also available in Hungarian, ¹⁰ and a link to them was shared with the teachers involved in this research to help them answer the questionnaires properly.

2.2 Sustainable chemistry

The most cited definition of sustainable development comes from the 1987 UN report “Our Common Future”. This states that sustainable development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” ¹² Thus, we can say that “sustainable chemistry should use resources, including energy, at a rate at which they can be replaced naturally, and the generation of waste cannot be faster than the rate of their remediation.” ¹³

However, this is a complex issue, which is why 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were set at the 2015 UN Summit, with a further 169 sub-goals. ^{14 , 15} Therefore, sustainable chemistry can be understood as chemistry that addresses SDGs.

We should underline that green chemistry and sustainable chemistry are two different concepts, something can be green but not sustainable, or sustainable but not green. ¹³ Hence, this project uses the concept of green and sustainable chemistry (GSC), which “refers to chemistry, that satisfies the principles of green chemistry along with the SDGs” ¹ Since GSC can offer solutions to many global environmental problems, its integration into education is crucial, as well-trained people are needed to develop and implement innovations: chemists, workers, policy makers and citizens. ¹⁶

2.3 Green and sustainable chemistry in Hungarian education system

Recognizing the importance of the GSC, several countries have already integrated its principles into their curricula. ¹⁷ Sustainability education was already linked to chemistry in the first Hungarian curriculum in 1995, ¹⁸ and it remains so in the current 2020 curriculum. On the one hand, the current curriculum declares the students’ commitment to sustainability as an educational goal, on the other hand, it states that without a solid knowledge of chemistry, our lives cannot become sustainable. The 2012 curriculum prescribed the teaching of the efforts, importance and principles of green chemistry, ¹⁹ nevertheless the current curriculum only mentions it implicitly when referring to the chemical aspects of global problems, giving the production of new materials as an example. ²⁰

Not only the curriculum requirements emphasize the importance of environmental education, but teachers must also demonstrate competence in environmental education in order to progress in the Hungarian Teacher Qualification System. ²¹ Therefore, green and sustainable chemistry are parts of the requirements for teacher training in Hungary, ²² and since one of the authors of this article is involved in preparing the country’s future training and graduation requirements, we can share that the plan is to increase their weight from four to six credits.

In connection with this IUPAC project, we should also highlighting that the Hungarian curriculum encourages teachers to teach chemistry through easy-to-do experiments. ²⁰ Nevertheless, there is also a research gap at international level regarding teachers’ use of GSC practical activities. ¹

Due to the space limitations of a paper, we can only address some questions from the survey. In this article, the focus is on the questions of the survey related to the frequency of use of green and sustainable chemistry experiments, what helps and what barriers prevent their use.

4.1 Descriptive statistics

Teachers were asked to rate the frequency of the different activities on a Likert scale (5 = never, 4 = few times per year, 3 = once per month, 2 = once per week, 1 = more than once per week). Table 2 shows that participants use practical activities the least frequently; in fact, 11.8 % stated that they never use such activities in their work.

Teacher demonstrations are performed significantly more often, with only one respondent stating that they never demonstrate such experiments. Videos of chemistry experiments are used with similar frequency, with only three participants marking the “never” option in this case.

Figure 1 shows that among the barriers that prevent teachers from using practical activities more often in the classroom, the lack of time in class received the highest number of marks, while the lack of laboratory equipment and chemicals was the second most common and the lack of time to prepare experiments outside class was the third. Knowledge of appropriate experiments was the least mentioned.

Figure 1:

Frequency of barriers to more frequent use of practical activities in teachers’ responses.

On average, 29 % of Hungarian respondents’ chemistry experiments are related to the field of GSC, with a median = 22 %, a lower quartile of 14 % and an upper quartile of 40 %. Teachers were asked to rate on a Likert scale how important various factors were to them when choosing a GSC practical activity (0 = not at all important, 3 = moderately important, 5 = very important), the descriptive statistics are provided in Table 3. Respondents considered the least important aspect to be that the experiments should be clearly linked to a local environmental problem; the other factors received similar ratings. GSC experiments being more interesting for students and practical activities as a way of introducing GSC were the same, while the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills were ranked as the most important.

4.2 Statistical tests ^{26 , 27}

Mann-Whitney U tests were calculated to gain a better understanding of the effect of time on activity selection, as this seemed to be the most important issue for our respondents, but we limited our analysis to the three most common activities (practical activity, teacher demonstration, or video experiment). This was possible because the questionnaire covered three different aspects of the time factor. Table 4 shows that there was only one significant difference: teachers who indicated the barrier of “not enough class time” used significantly fewer practical activities in their work.

Additionally, Kendall’s Τ coefficient were calculated to analyze the correlation between the usage frequency of different activity types. Only one significant result was found, which indicated that teachers who used more teacher demonstrations applied more practical activities, too, as Table 5 shows.

No significant correlation was found between the number of years of teaching or chemistry teaching experience and the frequency with which practical activities, demonstrations or video experiments are used in teaching or the proportion of experiments related to GSC (see Table 6). There was also no significant difference between the highest level of degree and the frequency of use of different activities (see Table 7). Teachers with a PhD were excluded due to the small sample size.

4.3 Open ended questions about usage of practical activities

The open-ended questions were analyzed simply, with responses that were identical or very similar being grouped into a single category. The categorization was carried out by two researchers, who then compared the resulting categories and corrected them in case of major differences, resulting in the following reliability coefficients (k_m,Q9 = 0.71, k_m,Q10 = 0.8, k_m,Q16 = 0.8), these values are above 0.6, so they are acceptable. ^{28 , 29} The following sections will focus on those categories that were not included in the quantitative questionnaire.

5.1 Comparison with international data

The statistical analysis of the Hungarian results can be seen in a bigger picture compared to the snapshots presented at 16th ECRICE. ²⁴

According to teachers’ responses, the global average frequency of student practical activities in chemistry lessons was once per month in September of 2024, while in Hungary the average responses indicate a slightly lower frequency, with a mode value of a few times per year. However, teacher demonstrations and experiments shown on videos are slightly more frequent. The proportion of teachers who chose the “never” option showed similar differences, with 6.3 % internationally and 11.8 % in Hungary in the case of student experiments, 6.1 % and 0.8 % respectively in the case of teacher demonstrations and 7.0 % and 2.3 % respectively in the case of video of chemical experiments.

The Hungarian data show a pattern parallel to European snapshots in terms of why chemistry teachers do not use more experiments in the classroom. The order of frequency of the factors was almost identical, with lack of time, laboratory equipment and curricular issues being the main factors marked, with the only difference being that in Europe, lack of confidence in handling chemicals was ranked last. Let us remember that these are the problems that have been identified in literature.

In Hungary, we found that teachers who identified lack of teaching time as the main barrier to practical activities used significantly fewer student experiments than those who did not consider this a barrier. At the same time, the number of practical activities showed a positive correlation with the number of teacher demonstrations, so we did not find what we expected before performing the calculations, namely that respondents replaced student experiments with teacher demonstrations due to lack of time. Nevertheless, we still believe that time is the key factor behind the phenomenon that teacher demonstrations are more common than practical activities.

It is also worth pondering the teacher’s comment on the use of household materials to avoid accidents during student experiments. This parallels the intents of green chemistry to use less hazardous chemicals. Experiments in the field of green chemistry can also help teachers who fear possible accidents to use more practical activities in their work.

Figure 2 shows that Hungarian respondents use a lower proportion of GSC experiments than the European average (mean_EU = 34, mean_HU = 29, med_EU = 30, med_HU = 22), but the quartile is smaller than the European range (int_EU = 10–50, int_HU = 14–40), so the sample was more homogeneous. There was only one notable difference between the Hungarian and European scores on the choice criteria of the GSC experiments, with an average of 3.6 for the importance of local issues in Europe, compared to 3.1 in Hungary. Therefore, an important question for further research is whether the fact that Hungarian chemistry teachers have rated local environmental issues as less important in their choice of GSC activities is not a reason for the fact that they use fewer experiments of this kind in their work.

Figure 2:

Comparison of the percentage of experiments related to GSC.

At the same time, the homogeneity of the Hungarian responses also meant that statistical tests did not reveal any significant differences between groups with different levels of experience. This might suggest that more experienced teachers also trained themselves in the field of GSC, as younger teachers studied these topics at university.

5.2 Limitation

Around 5 % of chemistry teachers in Hungary responded to the questionnaire, which is a good ratio. However, convenience sampling was used, so the sample cannot be considered representative, which limits our results. Furthermore, the population pyramid is top-heavy, which may explain why no statistical calculations have led to significant results.