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THE EFFICACY OF A GREEN CHEMISTRY LABORATORY-BASED PEDAGOGY: CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES OF MALAYSIA PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

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ABSTRACT

Every day, climate change due to greenhouse emissions, pollution and other environmental degradation appears to make the news. Rather than doing something about the environment, namely in the developing countries where populations frequently are less educated about the long-term impact of human actions, they tend to disregard these problems. There is therefore a need particularly in developing countries to increase the potential for understanding and acting in sustainable, environmentally friendly ways. In this paper, we report quantitative and qualitative results of shifts in environmental value orientations among 110 Malaysian pre-service chemistry teachers during their enrolment in a green chemistry course. We find that the pre-service teachers’ environmental value orientations become more ecocentric and less homocentric and egocentric. Ecocentrism and ecocentric values support the development of behaviours that will assist them and the students they teach in leading environmentally sustainable lifestyles. We conclude that our green chemistry course constitutes (a) a suitable context for supporting pre-service teachers in their development of ecocentric values and (b) an effort to educate the pre-service teachers in leading sustainable lifestyles.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800, Penang, Malaysia

    Mageswary Karpudewan & Zurida Ismail

  2. University of Victoria, MacLaurin Building A548, Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4, Canada

    Wolff-Michael Roth

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  1. Mageswary Karpudewan
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  2. Zurida Ismail
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  3. Wolff-Michael Roth
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Correspondence to Mageswary Karpudewan.

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Karpudewan, M., Ismail, Z. & Roth, WM. THE EFFICACY OF A GREEN CHEMISTRY LABORATORY-BASED PEDAGOGY: CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES OF MALAYSIA PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS. Int J of Sci and Math Educ 10, 497–529 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-011-9295-y

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