Scientists need skills in visual analysis and critical thinking, but these skills aren’t being taught or practised nearly enough in our university classrooms.

One reason why science is hard to learn is because it relies on visuals and simulations for things we cannot see with the naked eye. In topics like chemistry, students struggle to translate complicated symbols to the atoms and molecules they are meant to represent.

Surprisingly, most university chemistry classrooms are not helping students with these tasks. Students spend lectures passively viewing slides packed with images without engaging with them or generating their own. Relying on innate ability, rather than teaching visual thinking and analysis skills, leaves many students feeling lost in the symbols and resorting to arduous and unproductive memorization tactics.

What can we do to help students analyze and learn from scientific visuals? Fortunately, we can look to the arts for inspiration. There are parallels between the skills learned in art history and those needed in science classrooms.

Feeling baffled by a work of art is similar to the experience of many chemistry learners. In both scenarios, viewers might ask themselves: What am I looking at, where should I look and what does it mean?

And while a portrait or landscape may seem straightforward in its message, these works of art are filled with information and messages hidden to the untrained eye.

The longer a viewer takes to look at each image, the more information can be uncovered, and the viewer can ask more questions and explore further.

For example, in the 18th-century painting Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop by Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch,

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