Of course those of us teaching chemistry might dispute the contention that everybody knows too much about everything. Students’ responses on homework, lab reports, and exams unfortunately provide far too many counterexamples. Nevertheless, there is much truth in Bacall’s words, and we ought to consider them carefully as we think about helping students to learn—and to learn how to learn.

Imagination is as essential in learning chemistry as it is in doing chemistry. That’s a good thing. Our subject involves imagining things that we cannot see, feel, smell, hear, and taste, and using our imaginings to predict what will happen in the world that we can see, feel, smell, hear, and taste. Chemists have gotten very, very good at such imaginings, and much benefit has accrued to society as a result. Learning chemistry affords students a broad range of opportunities to exercise imagination and creative ways of thinking. This is a strong argument that chemistry can be an important part of a liberal education.

If imagination is important in doing chemistry, then we should consciously and explicitly encourage students to develop their abilities to imagine. Most human abilities can be improved with practice, and imagining is almost certainly among them. So we should ask ourselves what opportunities we provide for students to practice using their imaginations. Conversely, we should ask whether we may be doing too much of students’ thinking for them and whether we perhaps should leave more to their imaginations.

For example, in textbooks we commonly provide worked examples with carefully written explanations of how an exercise was approached and an answer was obtained. Those who adopt textbooks sometimes count the number of examples per chapter as a means of deciding which book to adopt. But such examples leave little or nothing to the student’s imagination and provide little practice in thinking unless we as teachers go well beyond simply providing similar exercises on exams. If all a student is expected to do is use worked examples as templates to be stored in memory and brought out for use with little or no reflection regarding their applicability to a given problem, then the examples have not served to develop a student’s ability to think and imagine.

We also have developed wonderful abilities to create visualizations—some animated—of the nanoworld of atoms, molecules, and ions. Visualizations are undoubtedly useful as models of how the nanoworld behaves, and they definitely can enhance instruction and learning. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that students need to develop their own abilities to imagine and visualize what atoms and molecules are doing. Helping them to do so requires our active creativity, and that involves more than putting together a PowerPoint presentation with lots of molecular–structure graphics.

Another way that we fail to take advantage of students’ imagination and creativity is by presenting chemistry as if it were a closed subject. We act as though everything is known and all loose ends are tied down, which makes our subject seem devoid of challenges and not very interesting. To counter such an impression we could tell some stories of research where the results are not all in and challenge students to come up with ideas. Or we could allow students to see us behaving as scientists by posing a problem to which we do not know the answer and working on it with them as participants in trying to find a solution. This is done in undergraduate research, of course, but it could also be done in classrooms and teaching laboratories.

Much of our success in helping students develop their imaginations will depend on how we assess whether they have learned. If assessments reward rote learning and uncritical use of a repertoire of algorithms, then students will react by concentrating on these aspects and they will not spend time developing higher-level skills such as imagination and creativity. It is difficult to come up with assessments that successfully address higher-level skills, but we need to work as hard as we can to develop them. Often assessments that require students to apply creative and imaginative approaches to problems have a short half-life. Once the answer is known, it can simply be memorized and imaginative thought is no longer needed. Therefore, when we produce good assessments of creativity, we need to communicate those successes as widely as possible.

In a recent editorial in Chemical and Engineering News, Dick Zare clearly stated what our aspirations should be (1). “We need to give each student the opportunity to explore and to pursue the answers to open-ended questions. In that way, we will find and nurture the next generation of independent thinkers, some of whom will become our scientific leaders.” We ourselves face many open-ended pedagogical questions. We will need all the imagination and creativity we can find if we are to address them successfully. Let’s work harder to avoid telling students too much about everything, and instead encourage them to become independent thinkers.

Literature Cited

1. Zare, Richard N. Chem. Eng. News 2005, 83 (Jan 31), 3 (accessed Mar 2005).