The systemic approach to teaching and learning chemistry [SATLC]: a 20-years review

Abstract

About 20 years ago Fahmy & Lagowski set up SATLC to face (i) the world challenges such as Terrorism, world economic cries, environmental pollution...etc., (ii) the wide spread of the systematization in activities such as tourism, commerce, economy, security, education etc.., (iii) globalization became a reality that we live in and survive with its positive and negative impacts on our life. So, SATL became a must and countries are in an urgent call to prepare their citizens to be able to systemic and creative thinking. During the last twenty years SATL technique has been applied and evaluated in many different knowledge domains at all levels of education (pre-university, university, adult education), but the major teaching applications have been reported on chemistry topics in secondary and tertiary education. In chemistry, we have conducted a series of successful SATL-oriented experiments, at pre-university, and university levels of education. We have created SATL units in General, Analytical, Aliphatic, Aromatic, Green, and Heterocyclic Chemistry. These units have been used in Egyptian universities and secondary schools to establish the validity of the SATL approach on an experimental basis. The results indicate that a greater fraction of students exposed to the systemic techniques, the experimental group, achieved at a higher level than did the control group taught by conventional linear techniques. Also, Fahmy & Lagowsky used SATL techniques to create assessment items [SA] that not only reflect the SATL strategy of instruction, but, perhaps, also probe other aspects of student knowledge that might be learned during the classical linear method of instruction. Systemic thinking (ST) is one of the most important learning outcomes of using SATL. Finally, the above mentioned systemic activities [SATL, SA, ST] constitute the systemic components of any systemic educational reform [SER].