Getting Serious about Useful Chemistry Learning: A Case for Attending to Epistemological Messaging

TL;DR

This paper argues for aligning chemistry education with real-life usefulness by focusing on how knowledge is understood and applied.

Contribution

The paper introduces a framework for chemistry education that emphasizes epistemological alignment with real-world applications.

Findings

Chemistry education should reflect the ways people use chemistry knowledge in daily life.

Empirical evidence from professionals can guide the development of useful epistemologies in chemistry courses.

Course design should communicate epistemologies that mirror students' post-school experiences.

Abstract

In this Perspective, I consider how
our field can take principled
actions to align our ways of designing and refining courses with our
oft-stated goal for chemistry learning to be useful in daily life.
To do so, I make three interrelated arguments. First, I argue achieving
this goal will require a particular focus on epistemologies: “[people’s]
systems of beliefs [tacit or explicit] about (1) the nature of knowledge
and (2) the processes of knowing” [
Educ. Psychol.
2011, 46 (3), 141
]. Specifically, this goal requires that students (tacitly) experience
symmetry between ways of knowing and learning valued in-class and
ways of knowing and learning useful in life beyond school. Second,
we should compile our sense of useful epistemologies from empirical
accounts of people and communities using chemistry to advance personally
or professionally meaningful goals: a claim that way of thinking X
is useful to dentists should be supported by observations of or interviews
with dentists, for example. Third, achieving this goal requires understanding
how our course designs communicate allowed epistemologies. Such understandings
will enable us to refine our courses such that they better approximate
aspects of students’ post-school daily lives.

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