The results presented here derive from a research project exploring 16-18 year old

Swedish upper secondary science students’ developing understandings of key

concepts for matter and phase change. In the Swedish educational context there is

limited prescription of what is taught at different grade levels, and students may only

meet scientific models of the submicroscopic structure of the matter some years after

considering the phenomena that these models have been developed to explain.

Students may develop alternative and sometimes idiosyncratic imaginative notions to

populate this ‘explanatory vacuum’. In this study we discuss one aspect of student

responses in a sequence of semi-structured interviews spread over a single school

year, viz. the common use of anthropomorphic language in student descriptions and

explanations of basic chemical phenomena – change of state, chemical bonding and

reactions. Such anthropomorphic language has been considered to have the potential

either to facilitate or impede progression in students’ learning in chemistry. In the

present study we found a high level of anthropomorphic language in students’

explanations. In some cases there were clear indications that our interviewees were

aware of the limitation of their anthropomorphic explanations, which could be

considered to take the role of temporary place-holder for technical ideas not yet

available. However, in many other instances anthropomorphism was used without any

indication of its limited explanatory power. In these circumstances anthropomorphic

explanations would appear to satisfy epistemic hunger, the human “need to ‘make

meaning’ and understand their surroundings” (De Jesus, Teixeira-Dias, & Watts,

2003, p. 1017), and take the place of canonical explanations.