EDUCATOR’S CORNER On the night that the assignment came due, I put students
in pairs to exchange ideas they had learned about “What is science?” from their interviews, and then I guided the pairs into sharing with the class as a whole. The students had selected a great cross-section of science-based professionals that included medical practitioners and pharmacists, field biologists, chem- ists, science teachers in high schools and other colleges, several types of engineers, meteorologists and even a few geoscientists. What became evident was how few practicing scientists could articulate a coherent explanation of what science is or how it works. In addition, few students detected any deficiencies in the answers they were receiving. I then realized that many people, despite being competent practicing professionals with science degrees, cannot communicate the big-picture concept of what science is and how it works. I thought, “This should not be happening.”
To keep this column brief, we’ll fast-forward through almost
three decades as what I learned in that class assignment morphed into a passion for educating non-geoscience majors and citizens in what constitutes science and how it operates. During those years, I lead multidisciplinary teams to create and validate a Science Literacy Concept Inventory (SLCI - .
http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v17i1.1036) to measure under- standing of the process of science, and then utilized the instru- ment as one of two paired instruments to measure peoples’ self-assessment accuracy (see
http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1936- 4660.9.1.4 and
http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.10.1.4 for this research). This work led to contributions to the scholar- ship of mathematics and psychology. In science, a study that begins in one area advances understanding in unpredictable ways in other areas.
Relevance and Results College graduates who can distinguish science as one of
several legitimate ways of knowing can also distinguish non- sense and attempts to manipulate their opinions. Our studies indicate that our general education courses that are intended
Figure 1 does not imply that students are learning little in
these courses. They are learning plenty of content and skills specific to the science disciplines. However, Figure 1 focuses on students’ success, in general education science courses, in achieving the primary goal of understanding science. The fig- ure reveals that these courses have little impact. One reason is that instructors don’t usually work to impart an understand- ing of science, and the general education textbooks that we examined did a marginal job of attending to that goal. If we don’t emphasize teaching a primary objective, then the likeli- hood of students mastering that objective is small.
Key components of AIPG’s purpose include communicating
with the public and its elected representatives. When even col- lege-educated citizens are unprepared to distinguish whether a claim or statement presented as “science” is authentic or not, real communication with the public becomes difficult.
Doing General Education Better Improving starts in recognizing some core concepts that citi-
zens need for understanding the nature of science. Instructors
to impart that ability to educated citizens are not succeeding (Figure 1).
“
Key components of AIPG’s purpose include communicating with the public and its elected representa- tives. When even college-educated citizens are unprepared to distin- guish whether a claim or statement presented as “science” is authentic or not, real communication with the public becomes difficult.
Figure 1. Understanding the nature of science (as quantified by SLCI scores) as a function of college science courses completed. This sampling of 24,600 students includes all science disciplines, and the numbers of participants in each category appear in parentheses. The centers of the black diamonds show the means as known with a confidence of 99.9%. General science courses (one or two), on average, don’t produce mean scores that differ significantly from those who have completed no college courses.
www.aipg.org Apr.May.Jun 2019 • TPG 47
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