Exploring Mechanistic Reasoning in Chemistry

Science educators across the world recognize the importance of developing students’ ability to build arguments and explanations using scientific models. However, the type of mechanistic reasoning that we would like students to develop is challenging for many learners because it demands the simultaneous analysis of multiple factors operating at different scales. In this contribution, we summarize the major reasoning challenges that we have uncovered in our studies focused on the analysis of students’ ability to use structure-property relationships to build mechanistic explanations about chemical substances and phenomena. Our investigations have revealed that students at all educational levels often rely on implicit knowledge and reasoning strategies to simplify tasks. In particular, they tend to apply quick heuristics that facilitate decision-making and intuitive schemas that simplify the construction of inferences. The three most common types of heuristics used by the participants in our studies include recognition, similarity, and one-reason decision-making. The most dominant intuitive schemas elicited by our research are an additive property schema and a centralized causality schema.