Curriculum has been theorised in lots of ways, but my favourite is Barnett’s, which (loosely) distinguishes three types of outcome: knowledge, skills, and character. Knowledge is probably the traditional academic outcome. A child does not know when the Battle of Hastings was; an adult (in the UK) does. Somewhere in the middle, this piece of factual knowledge was learned.

Chemistry has lots of knowledge in it, from the trivial to the complicated. But the dominant focus of the modern British curriculum is not knowledge but a skill: “problem solving”. An educated chemist will be able to apply their understanding flexibly to a chemical situation they have never seen before. There are plenty of criticisms of Problem Solving as an outcome, but it is a common ambition in formal education of ‘on paper’ chemistry. Practical chemical skills seem to attract much less critique: “graduate chemists should be able to set up a reflux condenser” is a skill outcome which most chemists would be on board with.

What about character? It is a much more vague category of outcome, and it often emerges when people take a step or two back from the detail of education. “Resilience” might be one way of expressing something about character which is being discussed a lot recently, for example. A respect for evidence, a certain attitude towards safety in the lab, taking personal responsibility for meeting deadlines: these are some aspects of character which I hope most graduate chemists would have. All of these could be considered parts of character, rather than knowledge or skills.

It is important to distinguish “character” from “personality”, though. “Character” speaks to something about a professional outlook: it is possible to have a respect for evidence and be a lovely person (or a terrible one). It’s possible to be a lovely person and have lots of respect for evidence (or very little respect for it). They are different ideas. For the Bourdieu fans, I am explicitly reaching towards “habitus” in my conception of character: the way a field manifests in a professional.

But how do you teach character? If I want to teach you knowledge, I tell you the knowledge and quiz you on the knowledge. If I want to teach you skills, I model the skills, make you practice the skills, and test you on whether you can perform the skills. Character? That’s much less obvious.

I want to use this blog to explore this issue by centring the specific question “how might I teach students to respect evidence?”

Model 1: Direct Instruction / Oath

Could you teach character like you teach knowledge? It seems like there is significant educational value in articulating the aspects of character a Chemist embodies, something which aligns well with direct instruction. “In this subject we value evidence” is something we rarely say out loud. While many people pick it up, it surely couldn’t hurt to lay it out clearly.

But at the same time, instruction situates the student in a very passive framing. This passivity is sometimes addressed through mechanisms like the oath: a public commitment to uphold certain principles. The Hippocratic Oath for doctors (popularly: “first, do no harm…”) is one ancient example of this, but the modern Code of Conduct is another: explicit principles of behaviour which characterise interactions in a community.

You could get graduate chemists to take an oath (“first, respect the evidence...”) Would it work? Sure, these things can’t see into someone’s soul and judge whether someone’s character is a certain shape, but they can hold expressions of character to an external structure of accountability: someone might not respect the evidence in their heart, but you can build “respects the evidence” into the publication criteria for a journal or the hiring criteria for a job. 

Model 2: Model and Practice

My guess is that the current way we teach character is probably by modelling. We learn by seeing how the people we respect behave when they go about doing things. Would this work for character? If we see a Professor respecting the evidence do we want to do the same?

Obviously-positive character traits like respecting evidence are a central aspect of every research group meeting I have ever attended. Supervisors are generally excited to see NMR spectra (and generally disappointed to see vacuum grease peaks). Centring evidence is completely fundamental to succeeding as a researcher, and it is modelled every day by professional scientists in the lab.

It’s a very obvious point, but this modelling isn’t always positive in the space of character. We can learn characters of overwork and discrimination this way, just as we can learn characters of balance and compassion. The (often damaging) character of productivity exhibited by many postdocs, for example, is not an accident: this is a common way that success is modelled by the ones who “make it” when navigating the extraordinary structural pressures of the early academic career.

So it’s interesting to point at the differences between the modelling seen in postgraduate and undergraduate training. Is respecting the evidence important to succeeding as an undergraduate? I’m not sure it is. Theoretical learning often emphasises the model over the data (we often ask students to predict reaction products rather than rationalise them, say), and common practices like giving marks for yields in the lab explicitly place value on a high number rather than a true number.

But perhaps this about specific cases rather than the bigger picture. It seems extremely possible to set an exam question which forces students to respond sensitively to the given data, if you write it well. It seems like there are all sorts of ways to grade lab work without associating marks with high yields. All I’m trying to do is emphasise how looking a little wider than skills and knowledge can help us see a slightly different approach to setting exam questions: “I want to set a problem, but it would be great if the problem demanded that students respected the evidence”. This seems like a productive vision for writing an exam question, one which opens up Chemistry as a combination of knowledge and skills and character.

There are also ways of doing this badly, though. An exam question set along these lines might easily become too big to complete in time. A question unaligned with the teaching would also be a bad idea - it’s not reasonable to test a student on whether they respect the evidence if all your teaching never surfaces this idea.

Model 3: Reflection

Can students learn character through reflection? It seems possible. Scenario teaching might be one way to do this, for example, and resources already exist for teaching research ethics like this. Constructing some range of scenarios – ranging from the cut-and-dry to the ambiguous – seems possible, and professional conversations about how to respond to authentic events can be the kind of chance which helps people see how to adopt characters which sustain the best values of our discipline. 

Reflecting on students’ own practice might be more problematic. Reflection often works best when past practice can be improved, and a moral hazard of reflection tasks is that disclosures might be (dis)incentivised in unproductive ways (What do you do if your teaching brings out a disclosure about cheating? What mark do you give if a student has a flawless character already?).

Conclusion: Assessment of Character

Which brings me to my last point. If you want to teach character and you also value constructive alignment, you need to seriously consider how to assess character. The appropriate assessment relates closely to what approach you take to teaching.

Assessing an Oath is presumably pass/fail. Model/practice can probably be worked creatively into existing Problem Solving skills assessments. Reflection assessments are now fairly standard in professional skills education within Chemistry, though I do always worry that the reflective style of writing is a genre which is not well understood by students.

Or perhaps you simply don’t assess character, trusting that aspects like respecting evidence are either taught already or taught later. I fear that they aren’t, though. And so I see real value in thinking a bit harder about who we want our graduates to be, as well as what we want them to know and what we want them to be able to do. I think we should probably think about character a little more.