Constructing and communicating knowledge about chemistry and chemistry education

Astute readers of the journal may have noticed that Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP) has a striking new image on its cover (see Fig. 1). The new cover design offers a subtle resonance with the Royal Society of Chemistry's own new logo (the detail at the bottom left of the cover), but the resonance that interested me was that apparently occurring between the minds of the two figures as ideas are communicated between them.

Fig. 1 CERP's new cover design: sharing chemical knowledge.

There is ambiguity in who is represented by the figures in the image. Perhaps they are teacher and student and the image represents the processes of teaching and learning that are at the core of educational work (Pring, 2000). Or perhaps the heads belong to classmates, co-constructing knowledge through peer interactions in the classroom. Then again, perhaps the image is less about the educational processes that make up the foci of studies in the journal and rather is meant to reflect the communicative role of CERP itself? Our figures may be two members of the Chemistry Education Research community learning about each other's latest results by reading the accounts in CERP. Or perhaps one of the figures is not an active researcher, but a teacher of chemistry seeking to learn from the author of a research study to inform the chemistry education that occurs in his or her own classroom.

Each of these interpretations concerns something which we take for granted in everyday life, but which those of us working in education know is highly problematic: the ‘sharing’ of ideas. A key developmental process in all young children is the acquisition of what is known as ‘theory of mind’ (Wellman, 2011). Youngsters become aware of their own mental experience and come to conjecture that some of the regularities in their environment (such as ‘mummy’) experience mental lives like their own. This discovery is essential to normal social functioning. As part of our internal mental models we develop of the world in which we live, we model the mental experiences of others. As we grow up, we learn to ‘read minds’: to model what people are thinking and feeling, and so to predict how they will respond to the things we might consider saying or doing. We interpret various observable cues to infer what other people are thinking – and we plan our own behaviour accordingly. Sometimes the cues offer quite strong clues to someone else's thinking, such as when a student confidently states that ‘I think all strong acids have a pH of 1’ or ‘I wish every lesson was chemistry’. Sometimes cues are not so clear – as when the student slowly nods ‘yes’ in response to the question ‘do you understand that?’, but presents a facial expression which suggests otherwise; or when a colleague unhelpfully replies ‘I would give it a decent time’ when asked how long a reaction mixture should be refluxed for.

Folk-pedagogy

A challenge for those of us working in education, at whatever level, is how the skilled nature of the work we do is somewhat undermined by the way teaching and learning are understood in everyday life (Taber, 2013). Good teachers, it is often thought, have strong subject knowledge which they can copy into the minds of their learners as if they are simply copying files from their own internal hard drive to suitably formatted student memory banks. The formula for good teaching would seem to be for correct information to be clearly communicated to receptive learners. As all teachers know, it is not so simple. Students' minds are not like empty vessels, sponges, photocopiers or computer memory. Despite this, it is easy to be seduced by the folk notion of communication between minds as a simple process of sending and receiving information so that knowledge in one mind becomes knowledge in another mind.

Minds are actually very mysterious (Claxton, 2005). Our best understanding is that mind is an emergent property of the complexity of our cognitive apparatus. Mind then is dependent upon brain, although that does not mean we can safely identify the two. To simply consider minds to be brains is akin to considering electrical conduction in graphite as being the sp² hybridisation of carbon. We can develop a model of electrical conduction in graphite based upon assuming a structural model of carbon – but the process of conduction is something quite different from the structure which facilitates it. This is why, no matter how fascinating brain scans showing areas of activity as people undertake different mental tasks may be, we are a long way from having a good understanding of how mind arises from brain. What such scans do show is that despite gross commonalities, each human brain has a unique architecture. Whereas computers are cloned in the millions, human brains come from the production line in runs of one, and each has its own unique operating system that is being constantly modified and updated as the system runs.

Yet in everyday life we have a folk model of mind which allows us to get on with our day-to-day business as though we have a perfectly good working knowledge of what mind is. We tend to think of mind and knowledge and memory in very simplistic ways. So commonly, we treat the mind as if it is a place where we can put information for safekeeping, to then access later. We know this process can go wrong (i.e., we forget) but we still tend to treat memories as something brought out of storage. Many social relationships have been put under pressure by this alternative conception when different people's definitive memories of events are found to be incompatible: “I clearly remember you said reflux over night”. This notion of memory is a misconception as the human cognitive apparatus does not seem to have evolved to be good at forming accurate memories of past events.

We seem to have cognitive apparatus which is good at keeping a reasonably coherent, and regularly updated, current model of events – rather than prioritising the storage of accurate and full memories of past experience. It seems our minds largely work by interpreting new information in terms of our current best guesses at how things are – and our memory works on much the same basis – often being reconstructed from fragments when ‘accessed’ (sic) in the light of our current understanding. It is an alternative conception to think that memory is held in a discrete and protected area of the mind as it seems that memories are often actually represented in areas of the brain that are also used to interpret new information and are subject to modification in the light of that new information. So as all teachers realise, just because we think we have taught something, and the students have learnt it, that does not mean they will know it now.

Where do you want this knowledge?

An important difference between the folk-science way of talking about cognition, and the more sophisticated treatment needed to inform educational work, is the recognition that knowledge is not something that can be stored (in the structure of the brain, or in journals such as CERP) but rather needs to be represented (Taber, 2013). That is, knowledge is the kind of ‘thing’ that is part of the mental level of description – we have ideas, develop hunches, carefully construct theories, define concepts, and so forth – and these are part of mental experience. It makes less sense to think we could find an idea or a theory in a brain (or indeed in a textbook or journal article). Of course part of our sense of continuity of experience as human beings suggests that once we have had ideas, we tend to be able to more readily have them (or at least, substantially similar ideas) again, and so there is a sense in which we seem to store our mental experience. Synaptic changes in the brain allow us to represent aspects of our mental experience, so that we can later have very similar mental experiences. A brain scan at fine enough resolution might reveal activation of particular neural circuits that correlate with our experiencing a particular idea. When those circuits are not active, and we are not experiencing the idea: the idea itself is not stored – any more than electrical current is ‘stored’ in a graphite rod when there is no potential difference to drive current through it. In both cases the structure offers the potential for the process (electrical conduction, or experiencing an idea) to recur under suitable conditions, but is not itself the process.

I use ‘represent’ here then rather than ‘store’ as neural circuits are not mental experiences (any more than a network of linked carbon atomic centres in some graphite is electrical conduction) but rather provide a substrate to facilitate mental experiences under the right conditions. The neural network has to be activated, and activated within a similar mental context, to recreate the original experience. This is not just a semantic distinction in terms of being picky about terminology, but rather an important ontological difference – ideas, understanding, knowledge, beliefs and the like are not the kind of entities that can be neural structures (Taber, 2013), just as electrical conduction is not the kind of ‘thing’ that can be a static molecular structure (Chi et al., 1994).

The case is simpler if we think of representation of knowledge in texts. We might think of an account of the electrical properties of graphite in a college text book, or an account of a study into leaners' understandings of the properties of graphite published in a journal such as CERP. We might be tempted to feel there is knowledge in the textbook, or the journal. This way of thinking fits with the folk-pedagogy which suggests knowledge can be transferred from one mind to another. According to this way of thinking the author puts their knowledge in the text, and the reader extracts the knowledge from the text – and so knowledge is transferred from one mind to another.

Yet we can see that much can go wrong here. At a gross level, perhaps the reader only reads Chinese script and the text is in English. Perhaps the reader has visual impairment and cannot clearly see the text. More subtly, the reader needs to bring interpretive resources to bear to make sense of the text and form meaning from it. To the extent that the reader has suitable resources (understanding of technical terms used, requisite concepts), and is able to recognise the most relevant resources to apply, it is quite possible that the reader re-constructs a meaning for themselves very similar to that intended by the author. If however the reader lacks key technical terminology and has to guess at the meanings of words; or holds key alternative conceptions about central concepts discussed in the text; or lacks the level of reading skill to decode dense complex text, then it is quite possible that they create a meaning from the text that is quite different to that the author intended to communicate. In the former case it may seem that knowledge has been transferred given that a good facsimile of the original knowledge is reconstructed: but in the latter case it is clear the process of communication between minds is not strictly about the transfer or copying of the contents of one mind to another. Knowledge may be represented in material form – but it cannot be stored and so unproblematically ‘transferred’ to others.

Constructivism and classrooms

We are familiar with thinking in these terms in relation to chemistry classrooms. It is widely accepted in the CER community, and indeed in education more generally (Taber, 2011), that learners have to construct their own knowledge and understanding, interpreting what they are taught so that it makes good sense in terms of their existing concepts and ways of thinking. Alternative conceptions may be experienced as just as trustworthy and authoritative as more canonical ideas; and a misconstruing of the teacher's explanation can make as good sense to the learner as the intended meaning. Indeed, when students begin from flawed or deficient understanding of prerequisites then their alternative constructions of teaching make much better sense to them than the intended message could do.

As teachers we respond to this through various pedagogic tactics. We use diagnostic assessment prior to, and formative assessment during, teaching. This may be simply constant questioning to check how we are being understood – perhaps when the technology is available using clicker systems (MacArthur and Jones, 2008). We remind learners of our starting points at the beginning of the lesson, and keep reinforcing relevant fundamental points throughout. We draw upon metaphors, analogies, models and images that we hope can help learners to make appropriate sense of abstract and challenging ideas. Ultimately we can do a lot to channel and check upon the learners' constructions of knowledge: but it remains their construction. This is back to ontology again: knowledge is something personal to an individual mind (Taber, 2013).

Yet again this seems inconsistent with much everyday experience. Surely, it could be argued, even if students have alternative conceptions, that does not undermine the existence of public bodies of knowledge. Surely, it might be suggested, all chemists must share the same concept of combustion, the same meaning for equilibrium, the same understanding of end point, and so forth – otherwise how could the community of chemists function?

Clearly it is easy to exaggerate the extent to which we are all unique conceivers of the world. All humans have similar cognitive apparatus (our brains are much the same at a gross level) and through our culture we are socialised into ‘sharing’ understandings. To a first approximation we might assume all professional chemists have much the same understanding of combustion, element, halogen and so forth. The similarities are strong enough to facilitate communication that is often considered ‘good enough’ – fit for purpose. To refer back to Fig. 1, we might argue that often there are structural similarities in different chemists' personal knowledge systems such that resonances may readily be triggered. By comparison with physical systems, we might suggest two chemists' knowledge systems are well enough tuned so that an oscillation in one mind can facilitate a matching oscillation in the other. That is what the image in Fig. 1 suggests to my own mind. The analogy here is apt. It is quite unlikely that two tuning forks forged to arbitrary dimensions would have the same resonant frequency. Rather resonance requires careful tuning between systems – or we would have to rely on the occasional fortuitous coincidence!

So chemists can regularly communicate effectively among themselves about chemistry, because through their extensive academic and professional development (and perhaps to some extent due to their being selected from among former classmates who never became chemists) their knowledge structures have become well-tuned. In the classroom, however, the teacher is working with students who are partly formed instruments that are often well out of tune in terms of how they understand chemical concepts.

Communicating research through journal articles

This leads me to consider the question of how we are to understand Fig. 1 in the context of authors and readers of articles in CERP. We might suggest that CERP is a means of communication between members of the CER community, and that such a community would be expected to be ‘well-tuned’ so that it in effect shares common understandings of the domain of CER. Communication here might be assumed to be less problematic than in the classroom situation, where the teacher faces an audience of learners that have not yet been tuned to resonate with the teacher's understanding of chemical concepts.

This seemed a reasonable argument above when applied to communication of chemical ideas among the community of chemists. We would expect most authors and readers of CERP to hold sufficiently similar understandings of basic chemical concepts to allow effective communication. Yet, beyond that, we must acknowledge the chemistry education community as being quite diverse.

For one thing, CERP is an international journal, and whilst chemistry may not be bound by national borders, the same is not true of educational systems. Authors who refer to SATS, K-12, GCSE or capstone courses may find only a minority of their readers experience the hoped-for resonance in their personal knowledge structures. More substantially, there are differences in assumptions about the way things are normally done within particular systems which provide part of the context of a research study. Authors cannot regard such local expectations as common knowledge. As an example, consider differences between the English and US systems. One common practice in US high school education is to teach different science subjects sequentially across different school years – something that is virtually unheard of in England. Similarly, the US has a tradition of liberal undergraduate courses, where students may be selecting a wide range of subjects during their degree, whereas in the English system students are usually expected to be subject specialists by undergraduate level. A reader in the UK (where most undergraduate students either select science subjects as majors – or avoid them completely during their degrees) may not appreciate that many US undergraduates take chemistry courses only because they are required to study some form of natural science as a condition of graduation. Contextual issues like this sometimes need to be explained before a reader can fully appreciate a study from an unfamiliar educational context.

One aspect of writing research papers then involves a pedagogic function. The author has to think about what the reader will already know, and what needs to be explained – and then how to best explain what may be novel in terms of what the reader can make sense of. This not only concerns peculiarities of educational systems, as the same is also true in terms of methodology. Unlike in most science journals, where the techniques used are often considered standard in the field, educational research draws upon a wide range of methodologies, and indeed theoretical perspectives. Not all educational researchers appreciate the key features of, for example, phenomenology or symbolic interactionism. Not all educational researchers appreciate the characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of case study; and not all fully appreciate how cluster analysis works.

Added to that, CERP is a journal that is not only aimed at researchers, but also at teachers wishing to inform their own practice by considering the implications of robust educational research. Authors therefore need to bear in mind that such readers (professionals as chemistry teachers; but lay people when it comes to research methodology and its jargon) may not appreciate what is meant by thick description, Rasch analysis, correlation coefficient, learning progression, a flipped classroom or theoretical saturation. Writing for the readership of a journal such as CERP is akin to preparing a lesson for a very diverse student class – one with a whole range of different backgrounds and levels of prior learning. Authors therefore need to make judgements about what can be taken for granted, and what needs to explained to readers. There is a balance to be found here. A journal article cannot explain every point from first principles, but it can only be understood as intended when the author's formulation stimulates the reader to construct a meaning sufficiently close to the author's own. A well-written article helps the reader fine-tune their understanding so it truly resonates with the author's understanding. That reflects one interpretation of our new cover image: CERP as an instrument that allows authors to represent their hard-won knowledge in a form accessible to our readers.

References

1. Chi M. T. H., Slotta J. D. and de Leeuw N., (1994), From things to processes; a theory of conceptual change for learning science concepts, Learning and Instruction, 4, 27–43.
2. Claxton G., (2005), The Wayward Mind: an intimate history of the unconscious, London: Little Brown.
3. MacArthur J. R. and Jones L. L., (2008), A review of literature reports of clickers applicable to college chemistry classrooms, Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 9(3), 187–195, DOI: 10.1039/b812407h.
4. Pring R., (2000), Philosophy of Educational Research, London: Continuum.
5. Taber K. S., (2011), Constructivism as educational theory: Contingency in learning, and optimally guided instruction, in Hassaskhah J. (ed.), Educational Theory, New York: Nova, pp. 39–61, Retrieved from https://camtools.cam.ac.uk/wiki/eclipse/Constructivism.html.
6. Taber K. S., (2013), Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education: Developing representations of concepts, conceptual structure and conceptual change to inform teaching and research, Springer.
7. Wellman H. M., (2011), Developing a theory of mind, in Goswami U. (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development, 2nd edn, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 258–284.

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