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Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2004 ( C© 2004)

Integrating into Chemistry Teaching Today’s Student’sVisuospatial Talents and Skills, and the Teachingof Today’s Chemistry’s Graphical Language

Clarisse L. Habraken1

Today’s out-of-school learning is dominated by PC games, videos, and TV. These media providechildren with optimal conditions for nurturing their visuospatial intelligence. In chemistry andbiochemistry, over the past 125 years, thinking has shifted from the logical–mathematical to thelogical–visuospatial. In chemistry visuospatial thinking has never been so dominant as today.Thus in chemistry, a truly international, pictorial language has evolved. Yet, the foundingand growth of chemical education as a separate discipline has resulted, albeit unintended, inan alienation of chemistry educators from these dramatic changes in chemistry. By confiningthemselves in their teaching of chemistry to the logical–mathematical and the verbal, teachersand chemical educators are conveying a false and abandoned conception of chemistry in theclass rooms. And, they fail to address the most important developed intelligence of our young.

KEY WORDS: chemistry; chemistry teaching; multiple intelligences; heritability; visuospatial thinking;graphical models; chemistry’s pictorial communication.

INTRODUCTION

A number of scholars studying from a variety ofperspectives (science education in general, chemistryeducation in particular, intelligence, and children’s“visuospatial world”) seem to be converging on anissue that belongs squarely on the agenda of the sci-ence education reform community. That issue is theincreasing utilization of a set of visuospatial talentsboth by research scientists and by those brought upon a TV and computer diet. In the opinion of thisauthor, these talents remain underrepresented in sci-ence (especially chemistry) textbooks and curricula.A. Runge et al. (1999) are perhaps the most critical. Inthe concluding section of their paper Hands-on Com-puter Use in Science Classrooms: The Skeptics AreStill Waiting they say “perhaps we need to rethink thecontent of our science curricula in more fundamen-tal ways.” “What is more remarkable,” they write, “ishow far we seem to be from where we want to be interms of student learning and attitudes.”

1University Leiden, Gorlaeus Laboratories, P.O.B. 9502, 2300 RALeiden, The Netherlands; e-mail: habraken@chem.leidenuniv.nl

Three years earlier, in presenting the 1996Brasted Lecture titled Chemistry Teaching—Scienceor Alchemy, Johnstone (1997) questioned the value ofcurrent chemical education research altogether. Thiswas a truly courageous act by the doyen of chemi-cal education in Europe. In his concluding remarkshe said: “The fact that students are still, despite ourbest efforts, voting with their feet and getting out ofchemistry, should be telling us something.” In the fol-lowing discussion I shall, like Johnstone, restrict my-self to chemistry. This is both because I am a chemistand, because chemistry is the central science, i.e., link-ing physics with biology. In order to identify factorsinfluencing students attitudes and preferred ways ofknowing, I also propose to look outside chemical edu-cation research and science education in general. Weneed to take account of young people’s wider world.

GRAPHICAL COMMUNICATIONIN CHEMISTRY

The ascent of graphical computer technology didnot just boost visuospatial thinking in out-of-school

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learning. It has also dramatically accelerated picto-rial communication in chemistry. After more than a100 years of talking chemistry with pencil and pa-per, with chalk and blackboard, the computer screenis now taking over. When chemists (or biochemists)talk about insulin or morphine, vitamins or chloro-phyll they certainly are not thinking in terms of sym-bols and numbers, write the ETH chemistry profes-sors Luisi and Thomas (Habraken, 1996; Luisi, andThomas, 1990). Formal pictorial presentation of asubstance is essentially a form of scientific model-ing, a way to represent the substance in a conciseway on paper (Hoffmann and Laszio, 1991). Under-standing and solving scientific problems by no meansalways signify the necessity to put a theory into anabstract mathematical form writes Alexander vonZelewsky (Zelewsky, 1996). Chemists cannot talk toeach other without the use of drawings (Ege, 1999)and, increasingly so, by using computer-generated pic-tures and molecular models (see Fig. 1). Because, inchemistry, the picture has become more than this;it has become a way of thinking and the dominantway of thinking. The utility of the graphical repre-sentation (see Luisi, and Thomas, 1990) lies in thefact that it provides a kind of three-dimensional (3D)fingerprint for each different chemical compound.Each substance has its own spatial individuality anduniqueness.

The structural representation is more than just agraphical molecular identity tag. Information about,among other things, color, physical state, solubility,and, most importantly, chemical reactivity can be con-veyed by formalized pictures alone.

Fig. 1. Chemistry’s pictorial language.

Fig. 2. The beginning of pictorial writing in chemistry.

As is well known, pictorial thinking and commu-nication in chemistry has a long history. In 1874 van’t Hoff published La chimie dans l’espace in whichhe proposed that the four groups around a carbonatom are arranged in a 3D tetrahedron (Brock, 1992;Habraken, 1997). Most importantly, these 2D repre-sentations of 3D molecules were introduced way beforethe days of X-ray crystallography!

In 1890, Alfred Werner (Hantzsch and Werner,1890), the founder of coordination chemistry, furtherdemonstrated that the three different forms of thedioxime of benzil (mp 212–214◦; 164–166◦ and 243–244◦; see Figs. 2. and 3.) were an example of van ’tHoff’s cis–trans isomerism, thus demonstrating picto-rially that the different melting points found for thethree dioxime derivatives with identical elemental for-mula came from structural differences (Smith, 1966).

Van ’t Hoff and Werner’s 2D representations tounderstand chemical and physical properties of 3Dmolecules mark the beginning of the growth of graph-ical writing in chemistry. Today’s molecular modelsconvey the structural and, more recently, also the elec-tronic individuality and uniqueness of chemical enti-ties. Thus, the word model in chemistry has a totallydifferent meaning than is usual in the humanities andthe social science.

Today, scientific papers and articles in chemistryare composites of graphical notations, and symbols,words and numbers. The picture actually “speaks.”Today’s chemistry’s papers and posters, i.e., as com-posites of words and drawings produced according

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Fig. 3. Evolution of Chemistry’s Pictorial Language.

to international conventions and rules. Thus, differ-ences in chemical and physical properties (for exam-ple, melting or boiling points, color and solubility, nu-cleophilicity, and electrophilicity) are understood andconveyed. The history of the three benzil dioximes(see Fig. 3.) is, in fact, an example from chemistry ofJames Robert Brown’s “simple but profound moral:we can proof things with pictures” (Brown, 1996).

Not surprisingly when questioned on how theyscan or browse scientific journals, chemists say theyconcentrate on the pictures (Habraken, 1996; seerecent issues of, for example, Inorganic Chemistry,Angewandte Chemie International English Edition,Chemical Society Reviews). Today’s molecular mod-els depict bond angles and bond length ratios confirmthe experimentally determined values. The evolutionfrom the first primitive drawings of 125 years ago to to-day’s computer-generated drawings is a clear demon-stration of the simultaneous evolution of a science andits scientific language.

OUT OF SCHOOL LEARNING

Today’s methods of communication dependmore and more on images, less on words and numbers.This is the thesis of The Telling Image: The Changing

Balance Between Pictures and Words in a Technologi-cal Age (Davies et al., 1990). After 5 centuries in whichreading and writing drove pictorial communicationinto the background, the picture has again become themain means for “reading” and “writing.” Now, Davieset al. (1990) point out, the balance is being redressed.Nowadays PC games, videos, and TV shape both chil-dren’s perceptions and their way of thinking. By being“talked” to visually, from early on, the young aregrowing up feeling comfortable with thinking visually.The basic characteristic of the use of multimedia is theuse of a hierarchically structured macrolanguage, inpresenting the global picture by simultaneously usingcolors, sound and movement, structures and shapesas well as words and numbers (Habraken, 1996).

Howard Gardner in Frames of Mind. A Theoryof Multiple Intelligences (1983) and Multiple Intelli-gences (1993, 1998) reminds us that there is a pluralityof intelligences and that not all students learn in thesame way. In science, spatial intelligence involvingvisual memory, visual imagination, and mentalprocessing of visuospatial information has long beenacknowledged. Famous examples are how Kekulecame across the hexagonal structure of benzene, andhow Watson and Crick ferreted out the structure ofDNA by using visuospatial intelligence. Gardner says

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in this society we are nearly “brainwashed” to thinkof intelligence exclusively in terms of those capacitiesthat are used in solving logical and linguistic problems(Gardner, 1993).

The “viewing skill” which today’s children havedeveloped (and which may be linked to shorteningattention span) is an ability to process visual informa-tion very rapidly. So writes Rushkoff (1997) in Chil-dren of Chaos. A television image that takes an adult10 s to absorb, he writes, might be processed by achild in one second. Certain MTV videos and Satur-day morning cartoons are utterly incomprehensibleby adults, who must, in a step-by-step fashion, trans-late each image as well as its subcomponents into alanguage they can understand.

Much earlier in 1987 James Flynn discovered thesteadily rising IQ scores of young people observedover the years and since called the Flynn Effect. “Arewe getting smarter?” Leaving aside whether IQ istruly a proxy for intelligence, scientists can not ex-plain what has made IQ scores take off. WilliamDickens of the Brookings Institution teamed upwith Flynn to investigate the mystery of this effect(Dickens and Flynn, 2001). Their explanation, as itturned out in an interview (Begley, 2001), also shedlight on the forces that shape intelligence. This ex-planation, recently published in Psychological Review(2001), is that “People’s IQ are affected by both envi-ronment and genes, nature and nurture, but . . . theirenvironments are matched to their IQs.” In otherwords, genes do indeed have an important effect: theycause people to seek out certain life experiences.

In fact, young people’s interactive and thuscreative and innovative use of computers is not atall different from the chemist’s use of computers. Inexploratory experiments this observation has beentested in projects conducted in research institutions.Senior high school students were assigned to performhands-on computer molecular modeling experimentsusing professional molecular modeling software, i.e.,modeling programs designed for research chemiststo use in their research. Each student then wrotea report under the title “School Chemistry vs.Chemistry in Research” (Habraken et al., 2001). Thefollowing quotations are a selection taken from theirreports:

On chemistry:Chemistry then is not just calculating stupid acid–base reactions and equilibria and number-jugglingonly.

What exactly happens with all those descriptions andsymbols? I want to see it!

Not that we don’t believe the authors but we just cannot imagine what it is.

On computers:This provides real spatial insight and understanding.It gives a clear view of molecules and structures.Chemistry becomes visual: isomerism, distances, an-gles; charges and reactions become clear.A fun program and broadly applicable. For exam-ple on problems concerning conformations of 1,2 di-chloroethane.

Student’s suggestions:Present projects like this one to students in lowergrades who have yet to decide on their senior highschool program.

Today’s screen-agers—children born into a culturemediated by television and computer—are interactingwith this world in a fashion with which their parentsand teachers cannot compete (Rushkoff, 1997). Con-versely, the learning style favored by their parentsand their teachers does not build on their skills.

THE MESSAGE FOR EDUCATORS

What is the message here for educators? First,that the emergence of “science education” as a dis-cipline separate from science has not improved thepopularity of science (Deutsch, 1999; Johnstone, 1997;Runge et al., 1999). In these separate disciplines, sci-ence education research has focused entirely on themethodology of teaching while the hard core of whatis taught has not been addressed. As a result, much oftoday’s chemistry has not been integrated into today’ssyllabi. Nor is chemistry’s pictorial language directlytaught.

Compounding this is the availability to both edu-cators and scientists of computer graphics technology.From calculating machines and text-writers, and at abreathtaking pace, computer technology has devel-oped into the means of choice for transferring andexpressing information visuospatially. Never beforewere children born into such a culture, mediated bytelevision and the computer, and altering dramati-cally out-of-school learning (Rushkoff, 1997). It maybe true that PC games, video, or TV do not teach chil-dren the “correct” things. The point is that they doteach (Smith, 1993), more importantly, that they pro-vide children with optimal conditions for nurturingtheir visuospatial intelligence and talents.

More to the point of chemistry education,never before has visuospatial thinking been sodominant as in today’s chemistry. Over the past125 years, thinking in chemistry has shifted from the

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logical–mathematical to the logical–visuospatial. Oneunintended outcome of the founding and growth ofchemical education as a separate discipline has re-sulted in an alienation on the part of chemistry edu-cators from the dramatic changes which have takenplace, and are continuing to do so, in chemistry.The hidden issue here is, that by confining them-selves in their teaching of chemistry to the logical–mathematical and the verbal, teachers and chemistryeducation researchers convey a false and long-sinceabandoned conception of chemistry in chemistry class-rooms. And they fail to address the most developedintelligence of our young!

So the message for educators is that what isimportant today is the degree to which both chemistsin chemistry and our young are now fully conversantin communicating, arguing, and thinking visuospa-tially. On the market there are powerful molecularmodeling software packages for PCs. These were de-signed both for use in chemical research as well as ineducation (Mistre group, 1997; Wavefunction, 1999).Only by incorporating this intellectual revolution inour student’s learning can chemistry be revitalizedin the classroom and, most importantly, in thelaboratory.

Hands-on science teaching must integrate exper-iments and understanding, reporting and “talking,”using chemistry’s pictorial language with the samemolecular modeling programs that are employed byworking chemists themselves.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to Roald Hoffmann for his con-tinuous encouragement. I thank R. F. Wife (ResearchDirector of SPECS and BioSPECS, Rijswijk, TheNetherlands) for innumerable stimulating conversa-tions over many years, and for his comments on earlierversions of this paper. I thank C. L. J. M. Cremers(Department of Linguistics, University of Leiden, TheNetherlands) and H. J. van Houten (Delphi Consult,Amsterdam, The Netherlands) for instructive discus-sions on the meanings and concept of the term “lan-guage.” I thank Pauline Cohen-Fernandes (LeidenUniversity) for preparing the drawings, RachelRodrigues (Texas A & M Uniniversity), and Kees(C.A.) van Sluis (Leiden University) for the finalpreparation of the manuscript. My special thanks goto John P. Fackler, Jr. (Texas A & M University) forour many stimulating conversations on chemistry ed-ucation on both sides of the Atlantic. My specil thanks

go Sheila Tobias (Tucson, Arizona, USA) for her sup-port over the years pursuing this study. Parts of thispaper were presented earlier in a lecture at the Gor-don Research Conference on Science Education heldin September 20–25, 1998 at Queen’s College, Oxford,UK and at the 17th Biannual Conference on ChemicalEducation, July 28–August 1, 2002, Western Wash-ington University, Bellingham, Washington, USA.

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