Linear thinking, which generally has brought us to the current level of activity, seems not to be adequate to the tasks facing an increasingly globalized society. Many, if not most, current curricular processes are the result of linear thinking. We believe that educating students with materials and approaches to understanding using such linear processes does not help our students cope with the developing global environment. Accordingly, we have pursued the development of a systemic approach to teaching and learning (SATL) which treats subjects from an integrated and global viewpoint with the expectation that students would benefit from this approach when they entered the global world society.

We introduce here the systemic approach to teaching and learning organic chemistry aimed at second-year students studying with the Faculty of Science. Earlier we had demonstrated the success of this approach in teaching the subject of carboxylic acids and their derivatives to secondary school students.*

As an illustration of the process, we have created a course in organic chemistry for second-year students taught by the faculty of science at Zagazig University, Benha, Egypt. The systemic-based teaching materials were presented in 28 hours of lecture distributed over 14 weeks; two tests at the beginning and at the end of the experiment were administered to the students who were in the course. The experiment began with a base-line examination (September 1999) to establish the level of understanding of students of the materials to be taught to them and the experiment ended with the final examination (December 1999). The final examination results indicated, as might be expected, that students beginning the course of instruction knew very little of the material to be studied. However, the final examination results showed a higher degree of success in experimental classes than in the control classes.

The statistical data, which showed a high (t) value (40.49) for students taught by the SATL method, indicated that the results of the final examination of the experimental group are significantly improved after applying the systemic methodology. However, the results of the final examination of the control group showed low (t) value (0.66), indicating no improvement in the student results after applying traditional methodology. The raw data and the statistical analysis of same is presented and discussed.