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2. DESIGN RESEARCH 
This thesis documents a cyclic design research project (Edelson, 2002). It includes three 
empirical case studies and a theoretical study. It seeks domain knowledge about holistic, 
inquiry-based and context-based socio-constructivist pedagogies of ESD in chemistry.
2.1. Research problem and main research questions 
The aim of this study was to investigate and describe a sustainability problem in chemistry 
education. This problem is the disconnection between socio-scientific systems and institutions 
and the daily lives of people (Louhimaa, 2002). The theoretical framework reveals the 
problem: there is a need to more frequently include sustainability aspects in chemistry 
education as it is traditionally uncommon to associate chemistry with ethics and morals 
(Kärnä et al., 2012; Lymbouridou, 2011; Vilches & Gil-Pérez, 2013).
The guiding theories behind this design research project were socio-constructivism (Lave & 
Wenger, 1991), context-based learning (Gilbert, 2006) and collaborative development of 
pedagogical methods (Pernaa, 2011). These theories were chosen based on previous 
theoretical analysis (Juntunen, 2011). The main concepts of this design research were 
sustainable development (Brundtland Commission, 1987) and education for sustainable 
development (Burmeister, Rauch & Eilks, 2012). Regarding sustainable development, green 
chemistry (Anastas & Kirchhoff, 2002) and life-cycle analysis (Blackburn and Payne, 2004) 
were the main focus. Regarding education for sustainable development, the concept of 
sustainability and socio-scientific issues (Sadler, 2011) were focused on. Pedagogical choices 
may promote environmental literacy (Roth, 1992), life-cycle thinking (Nair, 1998), inquiry-
based learning (Colburn, 2000) and socio-scientific argumentation skills (Albe, 2008).
The interactions of the main concepts of the research problems are illustrated in Figure 1. Due 
to the limitations of the resources in this study, environmental knowledge is not studied. 

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