Reasoning through uncertainty: expert chemists’ analogical thinking on a novel problem

Chemistry education has begun to consider disciplinary practices as complementary to traditional instruction of content knowledge. A challenge in this, however, is that our understanding of the latter is far more developed: given a canonical question, it is more obvious to instructors whether a student's reasoning is correct than if it reflects productive approaches to sensemaking. In this study, we investigated how expert chemists approach sensemaking when challenged with a novel question. Here we focus on a prominent aspect of the results, the experts’ pervasive use of analogies, defined as explicit references to previous knowledge from other situations. The findings reinforce the importance of analogical reasoning in disciplinary expertise. Descriptions of how chemists’ reason in novel situations will help educators recognize the productivity of students’ sensemaking independent of its correctness.