A 25th Anniversary with SATL in chemistry education: Systemic Approach to Teaching and Learning (SATL), Systemic Assessment (SA) and Systemic Thinking (ST)

Abstract

About 25 years ago, Fahmy & Lagowski, set up SATLC to face; globalization has become a reality we live in with its positive and negative impacts on our lives, the world challenges such as Global climate changes, terrorism, world economic crises, environmental pollution and the widespread of systematization in activities such as tourism, commerce, economy, security, education etc.., So, SATL became a must and countries are in an urgent call to prepare their citizens to be able to think systemically and creatively. SATL provides inter-relationships between concepts, methodologies, and disciplines. It leads to Systemic Thinking [ST] and enhances the quality and quantity of chemistry education. During the last twenty-five years, the 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 indicated that a greater fraction of students was exposed to systemic techniques in the experimental group, achieved at a higher level than the control group taught by conventional linear techniques. The same results have been reached in the experimentation of chemistry units in other countries (e.g., Pakistan, Albania, Slovak). Also, Fahmy & Lagowsky used SATL techniques to create a new assessment strategy known as Systemic Assessment [SA] that not only reflects the SATL strategy of instruction but, perhaps, also probes other aspects of student knowledge. SA was used to assess students’ achievements after being exposed to SATLC. SA is used to enhance Systemic Thinking [ST]. Also, ST is one of the important learning outcomes of SATLC & is very important in the preparation of systemic creative thinkers for Systemic Decision-Making [SDM]. [African Journal of Chemical Education—AJCE 13(4), December 2023]