EDUCATOR’S CORNER
should be aware of these and use their disciplinary content and reflective questions to keep students in constant contact with these concepts.
In measuring competency, the SLCI uses twenty-five multiple-choice items to address the twelve concepts that are important to general education. Here, we address the concepts by expressing them as outcomes through which students can demonstrate their understanding of the larger picture of sci- ence.
1. Define the domain of science and determine whether
a statement constitutes a hypothesis that can be resolved within that domain.
2. Describe through example how science literacy is important in everyday life to an educated person.
3. Explain why the attribute of doubt has value in science.
4. Explain how scientists select which among several competing working hypotheses best explains a physical phenomenon.
5. Explain how “theory” as used and understood in
science differs from “theory “as commonly used and understood by the general public.
6. Explain why peer review generally improves our
quality of knowing within science. 7. Explain how science employs the method of repro-
ducible experiments to understand and explain the physical world.
8. Articulate how science’s way of knowing rests on some assumptions.
9. Distinguish between science and technology by examples of how these are different frameworks of rea- soning.
10. Cite a single major theory from one of the science disciplines and explain its historical development.
11. Explain modeling, and provide an example of how science uses modeling to understand the physical world.
12. Explain why ethical decision-making becomes increasingly important to a society as it becomes increas- ingly advanced in science.
Most of these, especially Item 1, map easily into a superb
definition of science produced by earth scientist Arthur Strahler (1992): “Science is the acquisition of reliable but not infallible knowledge of the real world, including explanations of the phenomena.”
Strahler’s “real world” includes both living and nonliving
material and thus the realms of both the life and physical sciences. Implicit within learning by testing is science’s mean- ing of “hypothesis” — a testable statement about the physical world (Item 1). Accumulated evidence may eventually enable a theory (Items 5 and 10) that provides a unified explanation for several related hypotheses.
Item 1 also addresses another occasional question from students: “Why can’t I take a social science course like psy- chology for science credit?” One reason is that it is essential that an educated person know both how we understand the physical world and how we understand human behavior. A second is that behavioral sciences must operate differently because they have no equivalent to science’s natural governing laws. That the physical world has governing laws that we can discover and understand are two assumptions (Item 8) that underlie science. We cannot prove either; our acceptance of their validity rests on lack of any observations that disprove the assumptions. Universal laws account for the lab and field
48 TPG •
Apr.May.Jun 2019
instruments of science having much higher reliability and bet- ter reproducibility than the survey and testing instruments (like the SLCI) that measure human behavior.
Strahler’s “acquisition of …knowledge” encompasses ways
that we test to acquire knowledge. Geoscientists accumulate knowledge from acquiring field data (Item 4), from doing controlled experiments (Item 7), from creating and studying models (Item 11) and often through combinations of these. Item 4 (multiple working hypotheses) addresses a significant contribution of geology (Chamberlin, 1897) to scientific rea- soning. Employing multiple working hypotheses develops the capacity for articulating several possible explanations for an observed phenomenon. This capacity is essential to all critical thinking, and articulating multiple possibilities for explaining a phenomenon requires the capacity to doubt (Item 3) that a favored explanation is the best available. Multiple working hypotheses is often unappreciated in other science disciplines. There, instructors sometimes teach that controlled experi- ments are the only way to test hypotheses. If that were true, we would have no field sciences.
Field scientists realize that controlled experiments and
models don’t necessarily test the intended hypothesis. Instead, they generate a new hypothesis: the results obtained from the controlled experiment have the power to explain what we observe in the uncontrolled natural environment. Geologists learned how Lord Kelvin’s model for the age of Earth rested on highly reproducible experiments that yielded rates at which bodies of known mass cooled (Richter, 1986). However, geologists could not reconcile observations in the field within even the maximum ages produced from Kelvin’s lab model. A resolution came later with the discovery of radioactivity, but the case teaches that science’s way of knowing is an endless process of advancing understanding through accumulating new knowledge. Accumulating the knowledge needed to enable the theory of plate tectonics required centuries.
Freshman geology students can begin to understand sci-
ence’s process through an instructor’s guiding them to per- ceive their thinking when using a mineral key to identify an unknown mineral. The student should recognize that he or she cannot proceed directly to the “right answer” but instead reaches increasingly knowledgeable states by the process of eliminating unreasonable possibilities. Realizing that the most valuable first step eliminates the greatest number of erroneous possibilities is a major advance in understanding.
General education geology courses offer many opportunities
to teach citizens about the organization of science’s informa- tion systems and why the reliability of one’s own knowledge increases if one can replace reliance on tertiary sources like newspapers and websites, and secondary sources, such as Wikipedia and popular science magazines, with learning from primary peer-reviewed information sources (Item 6). Again, science literacy includes realizing that even the primary resources offer “reliable but not infallible” information.
Our studies revealed that the ability to distinguish science
from technology (Item 9) is the most difficult of the concepts. The difficulty arises because the distinction is so seldom con- sidered or taught (Wolpert, 1992; Nuhfer, Cogan and Wright, 2018). The distinction merits respectful recognition of these as “different from” one another instead of one as of “lesser value” than the other. What is important in education is for students to understand which of the two they are doing at the moment. An important breakthrough in thinking occurs when students realize that we discover the knowledge of science; we do not invent it. Technology invents useful products, and, as in art, the character of the product is unique to its designer/inventor. Science discovers valuable knowledge about phenomena that
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