Chemistry with a Story: Bringing Clinical Vignettes into the Lab

In psychology and medicine, students practice clinical reasoning with vignettes: short, realistic scenarios that ask them to interpret and solve the problem using skills that they’re learning in their course. Noah, a course designer at Stemble with a background in psychology, has been bringing that format into chemistry. Instead of a standalone calculation, a vignette puts students in a role, hands them data to work through, and asks them to make a call and explain their reasoning. Chemistry educators have used related approaches for decades. The data supporting them is encouraging: realistic cases have been linked to gains in critical thinking and communication. Context-based teaching also tends to improve students’ attitudes toward science.

An Example Vignette

Students in a first-year lab course have just learned a semi-micro qualitative analysis scheme for identifying metal ions. Their vignette opens in Barrie, Ontario. Several children from the same neighbourhood have arrived at the emergency department with stomach pain and a strange metallic taste in their mouths. Public health traces the cases to an area that draws its drinking water from Kempenfelt Bay, near an old industrial site that once stored silver, strontium, iron, and aluminum salts.

The student is the city’s environmental chemist on duty. The high-end instruments are tied up, so they run the classical scheme they learned in the lab on a raw water sample and record what they see:

After adding 6 M HCl and centrifuging, a white precipitate formed. The precipitate dissolved when 4 M NH₄OH was added, giving a clear solution… When KSCN(aq) was added to an acidic portion of the solution, a deep red colour appeared.

From there, the task has two parts:

1. Students match each ion to the statement that best fits their evidence.
2. They brief the emergency team in two to four sentences. The briefing says which ions are present, gives one observation supporting each, and states whether the city should move toward a do-not-drink advisory. The prompt asks them to write it the way they’d actually send it to their supervisor and the health unit.

The chemistry is the same as in a standard unknown-ion problem. What changes is the work around it. Students have to decide which observations matter, connect their results to a real decision, and communicate their findings to a non-scientific audience – all skills that students would encounter in day-to-day chemistry careers.

Vignettes aren’t new to chemistry. They sit within a long tradition of case-based and context-based teaching and one early advocate described good chemistry cases as “well-written vignettes.” What Noah brings from psychology is a compact format: a realistic scenario, a focused set of data, a clear decision to make, and a final written explanation. Vignettes help students see how the skills they’re learning could translate to a future career in STEM. They also open the door for interleaving, as they can be built to draw on ideas from several earlier labs, encouraging students to recognize which concept or method a situation calls for, rather than applying whatever they practiced most recently. As we build more of these, we’re excited to see how students respond, and how this format helps them see chemistry as a relevant skill used to make real-world decisions.