Learning generic skills through chemistry education

The journal has recently released its call for submissions for the 2017 theme issue,† on the theme of ‘Development of key skills and attributes in chemistry education’. This raises the question of the nature of the chemistry curriculum and how we understand ‘key skills and attributes’ in chemistry. Curriculum is of course a cultural product, and liable to shift in response to social trends and fashions. I entered school teaching at a time when process skills were being considered extremely important in science lessons in the English context (e.g., Johnson, 1989). There was much emphasis on students developing the practical skills involved in using basic laboratory techniques, and also on science lessons as a context for learning such data handling skills as interpreting graphs. Indeed, certainly in lower secondary school, there was an impression that such learning of skills was more important than learning specific content, and the topics taught (which at that time were not prescribed by any central authority) could be largely seen as vehicles for teaching and learning basic skills that would support subsequent learning. Later, when a National Curriculum was introduced, the emphasis shifted to the learning of – a great deal of – scientific content (Kind and Taber, 2005). Although scientific investigations were prescribed as part of the curriculum, the teaching and learning of specific skills became subordinate to learning to carry out a form of investigation reflecting a notional scientific method (Taber, 2008).

In the University sector, a degree in chemistry might at one time have been understood almost exclusively in terms of developing knowledge, conceptual understanding, and laboratory skills, related to the subject matter of chemistry. Increasingly, however, in chemistry (as other disciplines) it has been recognised that there is a wider skill set that all students should develop. Whether a chemistry graduate continues to undertake academic research in the subject, moves into related industry, enters a profession where they will use their chemistry specialism (such as teaching), or decides to find work without any strong links to their specific degree subject, they will need certain skills to be successful. They will need to be effective communicators, be able to work in a team, be able to organise their work and keep to schedules, be able to find creative responses to problems, and so forth. Sometimes these more generic skills have been called ‘transferrable’ skills (Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight, 2016), because they need to be applicable across whatever contexts graduates move into – and indeed these skills are as much life skills as professional skills as they may be equally applicable to family and social life, and to involvement in the wider civic life of a community (Sheardy, 2010).

This notion of transferrable skills raises some interesting questions in regard to chemistry education, and chemistry education research (CER). The idea of transfer of learning is considered a major focus of educational work because of the way that it is often found that transfer is problematic for learners (Dori and Sasson, 2013). There is also the question of how the teaching of generic skills fits within disciplinary education, and even whether research into the teaching and learning of generic skills should be seen as a focus for CER.

Transfer of learning

The idea of the transfer of learning, with its subsidiary notions of ‘near’ and ‘far’ transfer (Dori and Sasson, 2013), has been of considerable importance to debates about educational aims and appropriate pedagogy. For example, it is a major confounding factor in the debate about effective pedagogy that has sought to compare what is labelled ‘direct instruction’ with a constellation of approaches variously labelled as student-centred, progressive, discovery, inquiry, constructivist, etc. (Kirschner et al., 2006; Tobias and Duffy, 2009). This is a complex area of scholarship, but it seems that when learning goals are very specific the most effective pedagogy often involves teacher demonstration, modelling, and then practise with lots of examples. So, for example, if a teacher wanted to teach students how to calculate the molarity of a solution or to effectively use a melting point apparatus then this might be the best way to proceed.

However, even in these cases there may be issues of lack of transfer of learning. A student who has successfully learnt to solve simultaneous equations in mathematics classes might well struggle to apply the same technique in a chemical context (say when balancing a chemical equation). Sometimes these problems may be related to working memory (WM) – if perhaps the student has learnt to apply the technique but in doing so is working at the limits of WM. Having to additionally disembed the mathematical task from the chemical context may exceed WM capacity unless the student has previously learned specific skills to help them organise and manage the task. That is, the task may require specific metacognitive skills as well as the mathematical ones. Similarly, transferring what was learnt in a topic-themed lesson in order to apply it in more open-ended contexts such as student-led enquiry may be challenging. This may again relate to WM issues, or lack of competence or confidence in the skill of selecting a suitable tool from a conceptual toolkit or repertoire (Taber, 1995).

Sometimes the barriers are related to how the learner structures their knowledge, especially if they compartmentalise their learning within particular subjects and topics. This may reflect their personal ontologies of the nature of knowledge. If for example chemistry and physics are seen as absolutely distinct subjects, with their own discrete contents and concepts, then it makes sense for a student struggling with their learning of some topic in chemistry to limit their mental search to their ‘chemistry knowledge’, which may lead to them ignoring other learning that is relevant because it is not perceived to be so. Thus the despairing response “I can't think about physics in chemistry, I have to think about chemical things in chemistry” to a suggestion that a student should reflect on the significance of work recently done in another subject (Taber, 1998, p. 1010). The student quoted here had undertaken practical work in physics to measure the wavelengths of lines in an emission spectrum a matter of days before (perceived as unrelated) work on ionisation energies in chemistry. Transfer of learning here seems to be impeded by the student's assumption that academic subjects should have self-contained and impermeable knowledge bases. It seems students may need specific support in learning to apply knowledge across science subjects (Sasson and Dori, 2015). This might well relate to a general tendency of the human cognitive system to associate learning with particular contexts (Solomon, 1983).

Of course chemistry teaching often does involve the learning of specific skills or knowledge elements that are best demonstrated and explained by a teacher, who sets up opportunities for practise – although perhaps importantly practise across a diverse range of contexts, and involving multiple forms of representation of the task. Yet much useful knowledge, even within the subject, cannot be treated in this way. As one example, developing expertise in planning synthetic routes relies on a strong knowledge base (about reaction types and conditions etc.) but engages higher order thinking skills and needs to be learnt by an approach that goes beyond meeting teacher presented examples and carrying out plenty of exercises (Flynn, 2014). Developing expertise here may be akin to learning chess – one can learn the basic rules of the game, but that is not enough to play successfully at a high level. Certainly much experience is needed, but learning is not about mastering single steps sequentially as much as being immersed in the experience and acquiring an intuitive feel for how and when particular strategies may be indicated. That is, expertise relies on tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1962), which cannot always be readily transferred between scientists (or labs) by step-by-step instructions (Collins, 2010). This was something Thomas Kuhn seemed to recognise when he characterised research training in science as a form of apprenticeship within a laboratory or research group that was already working within an established disciplinary matrix (Kuhn, 1996). Although such a model seems to be well established in post-graduate and post-doctoral development, research is only more recently considering how such an approach to pedagogy might inform undergraduate study in chemistry (e.g., Putica and Trivic, 2016).

Transferrable skills

Where direct instruction becomes very limited then is in teaching those skills which are more holistic, and which need to operate across wide ranges of contexts. So for example, it is important for chemistry students to develop critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, and creativity because these are attributes needed to be successful in chemistry. However, these are also skills that are valuable in any professional arena, and indeed in life more generally. For example, critical thinking has been considered (Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight, 2016, p. 73) to encompass a range of skills (“analysis, inference, evaluation, interpretation, explanation and self-regulation”) and dispositions (“truth-seeking, open-mindedness, being analytical, orderly, systematic and inquisitive; having good interpersonal skills, and the ability to judge soundness of information”) clearly of value in all aspects of life.

Despite claims of the relative failure of ‘progressive’ and ‘constructivist’ (but see Taber, 2011) teaching when narrowly measured in terms of specific educational objectives (Kirschner et al., 2006), such pedagogies have been found to support broad and important educational aims. So, for example, problem-based learning has been said to help develop students who are able “to think critically and are able to recognise and solve complex, real-world problems by identifying and evaluating information sources, [who] can work effectively in small groups, [who] can demonstrate versatile communication skills and [who] can use knowledge and intellectual skills to become independent and lifelong learners” (Overton and Randles, 2015, p. 251).

Certainly at school level, where chemistry has to justify is place in the curriculum (and the premium of teaching a laboratory subject with its additional costs), the rationale for requiring all young people (i.e. where most have no desire to study chemistry at high level, and where only a minority could sensibly become chemists in a functioning society) to study the subject has to explain the value of chemistry education for all. Certainly there is a strong argument that in a modern democratic society all citizens need some knowledge of chemistry to engage with the political process and to make choices in their lives as consumers. However another strong argument concerns the value of science subjects as contexts for developing generic skills and attributes. Studying chemistry can support the development of thinking skills, teamwork, communication skills, creativity, metacognition, etc. Moreover, the development of such skills and attributes is likely to be enhanced when they are learnt through a wide range of curriculum contexts (so chemistry, inter alia).

At degree level, at least in some national contexts, chemistry will be THE academic context in which undergraduates studying the subject get to practise and develop their transferrable skills. Chemistry graduates should have been supported by their undergraduate studies in developing critical thinking as much as history graduates; in developing teamwork skills as much as business graduates; and in developing their creativity as much as engineering graduates. Otherwise we disadvantage our chemistry graduates, and the organisations that will employ them.

Chemistry education research

A previous editorial (Taber, 2013) in this journal raised the question of whether research carried out in chemistry teaching and learning contexts should necessarily be classed as CER. It was suggested that some studies which explore generic educational issues within chemistry learning contexts should not be considered to be at core CER because they treat the chemistry teaching and learning as simply the background context, as a convenient research site for collecting data relevant to the wider issue. It was also suggested, however, that studies which explored a generic educational issue in a chemistry teaching and learning context, and in doing so engaged with what was particular about chemistry teaching and learning in relation to that generic issue, should be seen as part of the field of CER.

So, as a hypothetical example, a study that explored teacher questioning style and happened to collect data in a chemistry classroom or lecture hall would of itself only be collateral CER – that is a weak form of CER – even if the study was of high quality in terms of the expectations of educational research more generally. Yet if such a study linked the nature of the teacher questioning (e.g. requiring simple recall of learnt material or higher level cognitive skills; open or closed questions; opportunities for developing extended responses; opportunities for dialogic interactions between more than one respondent, etc.) with the particular chemical content being taught, and the pedagogic approach taken to make specific teaching points about chemistry subject matter, then it becomes embedded CER and more clearly part of the field of chemistry education. In the same way, studies which explore how – in particular – chemistry curriculum content and chemistry learning tasks support the development of group-work skills; or creative thinking; or communication skills (and so forth) can contribute to advancing knowledge, and so practice, in chemistry education.

The recent call for submissions for next year's theme invites articles exploring different aspects of the development of key skills and attributes in undergraduate chemistry education. The nature of key skills and attributes is then such that they are generic rather than relating to the specificity of becoming an expert chemist – that is, these are skills and attributes which are of central importance both within and beyond the professional practice of chemistry. This provides an opportunity for the chemistry education community to reflect upon how what is specific to an education in chemistry can (in addition to preparing future professionals for working in and with chemistry) make a particular contribution to the broader development of students, and so to their future lives and to the wider society in which they will work and live.

References

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Footnote

† http://www.rsc.org/globalassets/05-journals-books-databases/journal-authors-reviewers/about-journals/chemistry-education-research-and-practice/cerp-themed-issue.pdf

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