The role of anthropomorphisms in students' reasoning about chemical structure and bonding

The audio recordings were replayed and transcribed verbatim. Anthropomorphisms were scattered throughout the transcripts but we found eight sequences in which the anthropomorphisms appeared as part of more elaborate efforts to produce chemical explanations. These sequences were then subjected to detailed analysis using Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA). PEA is an established framework for analyzing how students' learning proceeds through action in the classroom, and what can be changed in order to support their learning ( Lidar, Lundqvist & Östman, 2006; Wickman & Östman 2002; Wickman 2004; Kelly el al. 2012).

PEA includes four main concepts in order to operationalize how students proceed through a learning activity: encounter, gap, relation, and stand fast (Wickman & Östman 2002). Encounter is an operationalization of what it is that students meet and interact with in an activity, such as encounters with written assignments, textbooks, teachers, or peers. The remaining three concepts operationalize how students respond to an encounter. Thus, in encounters, students are said to notice gaps and fill them with relations to what already stands fast. For instance, an encounter with a chemistry textbook may give rise to a gap concerning the meaning of ionization energy, which, in turn, may be filled with the relation "ionization energy – amount of energy required for removing an electron". In order for this relation to fill the gap, terms such as energy and electron need to stand fast, which means that the students do not question their meaning. Otherwise, new gaps may emerge concerning the meaning of these terms. It may of course be that a gap is not filled with any relations, or that those that are established are not working in the sense that they do not help the students proceed. The gap is then said to linger. Gaps that are not filled in a certain encounter may of course be filled in upcoming ones.

After analyzing how students deal with different encounters during the learning activity, i.e., which gaps they notice and which relations they establish to fill them, it is possible to analyze to what extent these gaps and relations lead towards the ultimate purpose of the activity (Wickman, 2004), which in this case was to explain concepts and phenomena related to chemical structure and bonding. Theoretically, we could imagine an instance in which students notice all the relevant gaps and fill these gaps with entirely appropriate relations, such that their reasoning leads directly towards a chemically acceptable explanation. At the other end, we may imagine a group of students failing to establish any working relations to fill the gaps that they notice, or noticing gaps not even close to the issue at stake, or establishing relations which do not connect to accepted scientific knowledge. Normally, however, students' reasoning falls somewhere in between these two endpoints. Thus, although students notice relevant gaps and fill them with working relations, there may be additional gaps that need to be noticed and filled, and the noticed gaps may need to be filled with additional relations. Thus, identifying the gaps that are successively noticed and the relations established to fill the gaps, enables a moment-by-moment analysis of the direction that the students' reasoning takes in relation to what they are expected to learn, and what gaps and/or relations that are potentially missing from their emerging reasoning.

In summary, Practical Epistemology Analysis amounts to analyzing (1) how students' reasoning actually develops during a learning activity, and (2) analyzing how their reasoning could develop differently through other, or additional, gaps and relations. Here, the first part of the analysis was guided by the following two analytical questions:

What gaps did the students notice?
What relations did the students establish to fill the noticed gaps?

The second part of the analysis was guided by the following three analytical questions:

To what extent did the established relations lead towards a reasonable explanation?
What additional gaps would the students have needed to notice?
What additional relations would the students have needed to establish?

Consequently, we first identified which gaps the students noticed in each of the eight sequences (analytic question 1) as well as which relations the students established as part of producing their explanation (analytic question 2). Since our interest was how anthropomorphisms may contribute to students' explanations of chemical structure and bonding, we made an operational distinction between two kinds of relations which we labeled anthropomorphic and technical, respectively. We defined an anthropomorphic relation as one in which a chemical phenomenon was related to words for describing human characteristics, such as "satisfied" and "happy". We defined a technical relation as one in which a chemical phenomenon was related only to chemical terms, without ascribing human characteristics, such as "noble gases – have full valence orbitals". Third, we analyzed what was missing from their reasoning, and which additional gaps and/or relations might be added in order to produce a more satisfactory explanation (analytic questions 3-5). Notice that the point of departure for the analysis was those instances in which students included anthropomorphisms in their reasoning in the first place. Thus, these anthropomorphisms were part of the emerging explanations, and were therefore retained as we analyzed what else the students needed to establish. In this way, we were able to produce tentative hypotheses concerning how anthropomorphisms may support students' reasoning about chemical bonding.