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3.2.4. Life-cycle thinking skills 
Learning about product LCA by conducting an open-ended, student-centred LCA project is a 
new educational approach created in this thesis. There are only few other papers published 

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that refer to LCA in chemistry education and most of them intended for educational purposes 
have been applied at the undergraduate level (Allen & Baskhani, 1992; Nair, 1998; Vervaeke, 
2012). This dissertation applies inquiry-based chemistry teaching of life-cycle analysis (LCA) 
and life-cycle thinking skills at the junior high school level.
In this dissertation, life-cycle thinking skills are defined as abilities that one is required to 
have in order to understand the life-cycle of a product, a process or activity and its 
environmental effect at each stage of the life-cycle, to a certain extent. Life-cycle thinking is 
recognising and evaluating the amount, quality and effects of the inputs and outputs of a 
product life-cycle and seeing the possibilities for improvement (see Figure 3., Section 3.1.2. 
and Fava et al., 1991). Exploring a system such as a product life-cycle creates possibilities for 
promoting the goals and competences of sustainable development in chemistry (see Section 
3.1.).
Novel chemistry learning should be more closely connected to socio-scientific contents (Bulte 
et al., 2006). A product LCA is a socio-constructivist and daily life-related, context-based 
approach in chemistry (Cantell, 2004, 73; Gilbert, 2006). Life-cycle thinking can be brought 
into the teaching of any product or material chemistry. This is important, because students are 
the most sluggish with practical tasks related to raw materials (Kärnä et al., 2012). This 
situation may be aggravated by the fact that was revealed in the initial analysis of this 
dissertation: in current chemistry study books, life-cycle thinking is still either completely 
absent or only glanced over. If LCA was presented at all, the topic was most often placed at 
the end of the book. The representation of LCA was one-dimensional and no inquiry-based 
tasks were present. (Juntunen, 2011) For the chemical industry, it is crucial that chemistry 
education promotes the students’ skills for cross-curricular co-operation and sustainability 
(Finnish Chemical Industry, 2011; Honkanen, 2013).
Studies about SSI seem to support the notion that SSI are beneficial to the multifaceted skills 
required for more sustainable citizenship (Tundo et al., 2000). Previous studies on ESD and 
SSI have provoked debate about the potential of SSI in promoting higher order cognitive 
skills, such as competencies in communication and evaluation (Zeidler et al., 2005; 
Feierabend & Eilks, 2011; Burmeister & Eilks, 2012;