It is certainly true that in most undergraduate chemistry curricula students are much more often confronted with problems that have definite, deterministic answers than they are with problems that may have several answers or no answer at all. The chief exception to this is undergraduate research, which does involve students in questions to which their experimental answer is not going to be checked against the back of the book. Nisbett et al. provide some ideas for us to try. In some cases using examples alone, or teaching general logical rules alone, will suffice. We are at that stage in the textbooks and teaching methods of many of our undergraduate courses now.
Books are full of very specific examples of how to solve relatively simple problems.
Indeed, some students don't bother to read the book at all, because concentrating on the examples will make them successful on our tests. I think that there are many cases in chemistry teaching where we need to go much farther than the excellent examples we already have, and Nisbett et al. I ran the Nisbett paper by a psychologist friend of mine, and he took it one step farther. The really hard trick, after knowing abstract rules and being familiar with examples of applying them, is to know which set of abstract rules will work in a new situation. We need to present students with a broad range of situations where they can practice skills of choosing and applying abstract sets of rules to unfamiliar problems.