Getting Serious about Useful Chemistry Learning: A Case for Attending to Epistemological Messaging

In this Perspective, I consider how our field can take principled actions to align our ways of designing and refining courses with our oft-stated goal for chemistry learning to be useful in daily life. To do so, I make three interrelated arguments. First, I argue achieving this goal will require a particular focus on epistemologies: "[people's] systems of beliefs [tacit or explicit] about (1) the nature of knowledge and (2) the processes of knowing" [Educ. Psychol.2011, 46 (3), 141]. Specifically, this goal requires that students (tacitly) experience symmetry between ways of knowing and learning valued in-class and ways of knowing and learning useful in life beyond school. Second, we should compile our sense of useful epistemologies from empirical accounts of people and communities using chemistry to advance personally or professionally meaningful goals: a claim that way of thinking X is useful to dentists should be supported by observations of or interviews with dentists, for example. Third, achieving this goal requires understanding how our course designs communicate allowed epistemologies. Such understandings will enable us to refine our courses such that they better approximate aspects of students' post-school daily lives.