Our group is pleased to announce the publication of the article “Analytical Judgment in Chemical Education: Connecting Evidence, Reasoning, and Decisions” in the Journal of Chemical Education. The paper is co-authored by Paulo R. M. Correia (EACH-USP), Marília Soares (Programa de Pós-Graduação Interunidades em Ensino de Ciências, USP), Thiago R. L. C. Paixão (IQ-USP), David T. Harvey (DePauw University, USA) and Ian M. Kinchin (University of Surrey, UK), and is available as an open-access article.
Anyone who has taught an analytical chemistry laboratory will recognize the situation that motivates this commentary. Students carry out procedures carefully, operate instruments, perform calculations correctly and use the vocabulary of the discipline with ease. Yet when asked what their results mean, whether a deviation from an expected value is acceptable, or what should be done next, many hesitate, restate what they did, or attribute everything to “experimental error”. Procedural fluency, in other words, does not translate automatically into the ability to make sense of analytical outcomes.
The paper argues that this difficulty is neither trivial nor simply a matter of insufficient practice or content knowledge. It persists because the form of reasoning involved is widely enacted in analytical work but rarely named or taught explicitly. For experienced analysts, interpreting results and deciding on their basis has become internalized and automatic, which makes it hard to perceive how demanding this step is for learners. The authors propose the concept of analytical judgment, defined as the disciplined interpretation of analytical evidence under conditions of uncertainty to support justified decisions, as a way of making this dimension of practice visible.
Using a recurring calibration example, the article shows how analytical judgment develops as students move iteratively between abstract disciplinary concepts, such as accuracy, precision, bias and uncertainty, and concrete situations in which data are produced under specific conditions and must be interpreted in relation to their intended use. A table in the paper maps the key dimensions of this reasoning (evidence, uncertainty, interpretation, decision and justification), the typical student responses observed when each dimension is not mobilized, and the corresponding implications for teaching.
Rather than prescribing a particular instructional method, the paper calls for a shift in how familiar laboratory situations are used pedagogically, so that interpretation and decision making become explicit objects of teaching alongside the procedural and conceptual knowledge on which analytical practice depends. It extends the group’s earlier work on threshold concepts and on AI-supported flipped laboratories in analytical chemistry education.
Reference: Correia, P. R. M.; Soares, M.; Paixão, T. R. L. C.; Harvey, D. T.; Kinchin, I. M. Analytical Judgment in Chemical Education: Connecting Evidence, Reasoning, and Decisions. J. Chem. Educ. 2026, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.6c00556. Open access (CC-BY 4.0).