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

In this study, our interest was to contribute to a better understanding of howanthropomorphisms may support university students' reasoning in chemistry. We did this through a two-step analysis considering first how students actually invoked anthropomorphisms in their explanations during regular, problem-solving classes and, second, what would have been needed to make their explanations more acceptable. Two findings from this analysis seem both new and potentially important.

First, anthropomorphisms were primarily invoked alongside technical relations which together produced more or less chemically appropriate explanations. Previous studies of anthropomorphisms in science and chemical education have treated them more holistically, for instance as either anthropomorphic or causal (for instance Talanquer, 2013) and have consequently discussed their pros and cons from that perspective. The distinction invoked here, however, suggests that anthropomorphisms may indeed constitute part of an acceptable chemical explanation, if students manage to make them continuous with what we have labeled technical relations (Figure 1). This suggests that the idea of anthropomorphisms as "first heuristics" (cf. Dorion, 2011) employed by students, may be supplemented by considering the development of students' explanations to occur from those only containing anthropomorphisms, towards those in which anthropomorphisms are more and more tightly tied to relevant technical relations, without ever having to disappear.

Figure 1. A simple model for a chemical explanation constituted by the connection between both anthropomorphic and technical relations.

The second intriguing finding is that the invoked anthropomorphisms constituted potentially productive points of departure for rendering students' explanations more chemically appropriate. This led to the hypothesis that, apart from connecting students' existing anthropomorphisms to technical relations, their explanations may be rendered more chemically appropriate by adding anthropomorphisms. In our examples, we showed how this had the potential to clarify important distinctions and connections between concepts. These distinctions and connections, in turn, constituted potentially important components in the emerging explanations. Of course, we may also envision the option of deepening the technical relations invoked in students' explanations as well. However, here we specifically want to point to the less intuitive suggestion that a chemical explanation may be made more appropriate by deepening the anthropomorphic relations invoked.

Apart from some new angles on how to view and support university students' chemical explanations, our results also have implications for the assessment of students' reasoning in chemistry. One of the concerns in the literature on anthropomorphisms is that researchers and teachers alike may have trouble knowing what students have actually understood; for instance whether students invoke strong or weak anthropomorphisms (cf. Taber & Watts, 1996). Common suggestions are that students need to be encouraged to compare and contrast teleological and causal explanations, and in general acquire an awareness of what anthropomorphisms do (i.e., work as metaphors) and what they do not do (i.e., provide actual accounts of chemical phenomena) (cf. Taber & Watts, 1996; Talanquer, 2013). While we entirely agree with these suggestions, our results indicate that teachers (and researchers) may also choose to encourage students to explicitly make anthropomorphisms and technical relations (or, if you will, teleological and causal explanations) continuous with each other. We provided concrete examples of such explicit continuity in the three examples presented. Such an approach may relieve at least teachers, if not researchers, from the burden of deciding what students actually intend with a given anthropomorphism. Instead, the invoked anthropomorphism is employed as a means of successively producing, together with the student, as clear an explanation as possible, through encouraging explicit connections between different parts of the explanation - teleological as well as causal.

This study examined students' anthropomorphic reasoning in action during problem-solving classes during a first-year university course in general chemistry. As such, it supplements previous studies on the subject, all of which have investigated students' use of anthropomorphisms through interviews (Tabler & Watts, 1996; Dorion, 2011) or surveys (Talanquer, 2013). We thereby now know that anthropomorphic reasoning occurs reasonably frequently in authentic learning settings. At the same time, studying anthropomorphic reasoning in such authentic contexts may actually have contributed to the new findings presented here. Although this is a small, qualitative study, it thus presents evidence both of anthropomorphic reasoning in actual learning settings, and of potentially productive ways of making use of these anthropomorphisms in chemistry teaching. As such, the findings and suggested hypotheses are worth taking into consideration both for university chemistry teachers trying to help their students make sense of such difficult notions as chemical bonding, and for future research on students' teleological and anthropomorphic reasoning in science.