Evaluating evidence from a historical chemical controversy: A study in a French high school

Enriching students’ critical thinking skills should be an explicit aim in chemical education. One reason for this is that “students entering college chemistry courses typically have received little instruction or encouragement to practice critical thinking skills” (Kogut, 1996, p. 220). A second reason is that “maintaining social cohesion is often the imperative that channels learners working in groups, rather than critical thinking” (Taber, 2015, p. 19). Therefore, promoting critical thinking should be a research goal in chemical education (Zhou et al., 2012; Zoller & Pushkin, 2007). In this regard, Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig (2012) point out that “evidence evaluation is an essential component of critical thinking” (p. 1002).

Evaluating evidence is part of the reasoning process in chemistry (Barke, Harsch & Schmid, 2012) and should be considered to be a component of chemical literacy. Evidence serves three purposes in the progress of this science: (i) it helps the chemist to better understand a chemical phenomenon; (ii) it helps to support or refute chemical laws, theories, models, etc.; and (iii) it plays a crucial role in making informed decisions involving chemical content, such as may be encountered in socio-scientific issues and scientific controversies. In order to fulfil these three purposes, there must be proper evaluation of evidence. Indeed, chemists continuously evaluate evidence. For example, they frequently assess evidence from infrared (IR) spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to examine the molecular composition of substances. Analogously, citizens need to be prepared to evaluate and use evidence to make informed decisions in everyday situations that involve science, for instance issues to do with air quality, genetic engineering, human reproduction, and so forth.

In this research, a historical chemical controversy was used as a source of evidence. “It should be realized that the place of history is not only to make a conceptual point but also to introduce the humanistic element into the process of learning science” (Klassen & Froese Klassen, 2014, p. 1523); consequently, the central argument of this paper is that evidence evaluation by students can be promoted when the opportunities they have in the chemistry classroom are explicit and deliberately planned by the teacher. By adopting a concrete and specific approach, this investigation sought to address the following questions:

Could a historical chemical controversy be useful in promoting students’ assessment of evidence relating to experimentation in science and scientific communication?
What are the opportunities for and obstacles to the use of historical chemical controversies for enriching students’ assessment of evidence?