Techniques for Teaching Scientific Reasoning and Problem Solving

Several years ago, the frustrations in teaching fresh-man chemistry courses had tested the limits of chemistry faculty. Like most introductory science courses, the freshman chemistry courses promised to introduce stu-dents to scientific methods of investigation and claimed to stress scientific reasoning and problem-solving. Like most (we suspect) introductory science courses, ours were not making good on these promises. To be sure, students who completed freshman chemis-try knew and could recall important information. Most of them could perform calculations and solve problems using the material they'd studied... so long as the prob-lem explicitly stated or strongly implied which concepts, theories, and formulae were to be used. However, if we posed more complex problems-problems which require