Science, Religion, and Science Education

I say, and I will be lambasted for this, that knowing the Krebs cycle may or may not be important to someone who is never going to be an actual scientists.

I won't lamblast you for it, and I'll take it one step further. Strike the "may or may not be" and replace it with "is not". If you work in finance, or manufacturing, who gives a rats patooie how big an electron is. I sure as heck don't know how to run a manufacturing line, nor do I know economic principles. "Quantum finance"? I never heard of it until this weekend when I was talking to someone on a plane, but it's supposedly the "new wave of the financial world". I'll leave it to people who want to know about that stuff, to know that sort of stuff. Meanwhile, just tell me how I should properly invest so I can eventually retire. So, if that's the case why should they be able to explain what a black hole is, or tell me what Avogadro's number is?

Perhaps you can help clear up a little bit, but weren't outcome-based-education objectives an attempt to move away from this problem?

It seemed like to me that the outcomes were more directed towards learning "process" as opposed to rote memorizations. In "Surely You Jest, Mr. Feynmnan," one of the essays dealt with teaching physics in Brazil. The students knew the exacting details of physics concepts, because they memorized them, but when he attempted to teach them to use process to approach problems they were stymied.

Anyway, I barely understood what OBE was all about, so correct me if I am wrong in that it was an attempt to move away from waht you refer to as accretitive. I only know that it drove both Michelle Bachman and Cheri P-Y crazy, so there must have been at least a little good to it.

There is simply no longer room for the accretitive method. We need a whole new approach to making science education actually work.

Funny you should mention that.

The basic physics curriculum has changed rather dramatically during my lifetime. When I was an undergraduate, the basic sequence was pretty much historical: we learned things in the order that our ancestors discovered them, with whole loads of unlearning at each step. There simply wasn't time for relativistic physics in the undergraduate sequence -- it had to wait for graduate level studies.

My kids? Special relativity is an integral part of the intro physics sequence. Second-semester freshman or maybe first semester sophomore at the latest. Electricity and magnetism are introduced in a relativistic context. There just isn't time to rehash and unlearn it all any more.

And that's a good thing. History is good, but the place to cover it is in the "history of physics" survey classes. They are a good subject for secondary education, to put things in context. By the time someone is taking organic chemistry, or microbiology, the time for redoing the work of Pasteur and Koch is long past.

Likewise secondary ed. Good stuff out there on massively redoing the secondary math program, too, to emphasize statistics rather than geometry and calculus. Works for me, and I'm one of the few people who actually uses calculus from one year to the next.

The one aspect that you don't mention is that there should be some awareness of the different "markets" for secondary education. The "college prep" track is more than the basic program with twice as much homework covering the same material. There should be a distinct difference in content as well.

exactly the same problem they ran into in Germany: German secondary education went until 13th grade until recently; which was then decided was putting German graduates at a disadvantage compared to other Europeans, so now there's this thing called G-12; and it resulted in a lot of burned out students, because instead of actually re-designing the curriculum, they just squished it into one fewer years

*facepalm*

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1Don't get the wrong idea. Adhominially speaking, I still think CPP is a pretty shady character.

Reposted without comment.

TomJoe @ 1 wrote:

I won't lamblast you for it, and I'll take it one step further. Strike the "may or may not be" and replace it with "is not".

I'm no scientist, but a minimal understanding of the Krebs cycle helped to reveal why many Internet claims about using fumaric acid to treat psoriasis were nonsensical. And it's been my experience that many "alt med" claims would be laughed off the marketplace if people had a basic understanding of physiology, chemistry or even physics.

We certainly can't expect everyone to learn everything, but I do think we should aim high. Perhaps like with vaccines, there exists a point of knowledge saturation within a society in which "herd immunity" kicks in and ridiculous ideas are only held by a tiny minority, thanks to most people either knowing the Krebs cycle (for example) or at least being willing and able to look it up and understand it when some quack talks about it.

Much of what I've been thinking about in terms of these results and the new book goes back to one of the comments from one of the SkepchickCon panels. It came from the woman who was thoroughly focused on getting kids outdoors as a proxy for unstructured play. She talked about how kids, in the absence of conforming influences, are curious and question everything--until they get to school, where questioning behavior becomes unacceptable and gets labeled as disruptive.

There are a number of reasons why it is difficult to handle self-directed children in classrooms. There are too many of them. We don't give kids enough recess to burn off extra energy anymore. Etc. But this idea that there is a certain set of facts that children must know at a particular time is a big part of the problem too. It's where teaching to the test comes from.

Mike, yes, the Profiles in Learning were an attempt to teach kids the skills they need to learn and create on their own and to understand how learning is relevant to their own lives. And yes, the conservatives hated it, some because it didn't come with easy tests to make sure it was working, some because they didn't like the idea of kids taking charge of their own educations, despite the fact that that's what they'll be doing for the rest of their lives.

The Profiles were also mocked generally for being so different from what everybody else did in school growing up. Of course, we don't live in the same world we lived in when I was in school. We live in one much better suited to me. I don't have a ton of facts memorized. What I do have is passing familiarity with a large number of topics (born of years of idle curiosity) and excellent search and synthesis skills. It's amazing how smart that can make a person look, but that's really the biggest requirement for functioning well in the digital age.

Ever since I can remember, good teachers have always lamented that it is important to learn how to think and yet how do you measure someone's ability to think and compare it with others' ability to think? The problem of teaching kids to think becomes especially difficult when you have huge classes. How can you possibly address each student who doesn't quite understand something?

Just to complicate things, not everyone is capable of the same level of thinking. I have met many excellent mechanical technicians who simply cannot understand abstract concepts. I often find even dealing with engineers can be quite frustrating; they would ask me to explain why I want part of an instrument designed in a certain way but most of the time they simply cannot understand and I just tell them "do it because I said so". This is especially true if what I request deviates from what their engineering manual suggests should be done.

I completely agree with you. One of the things that worries me most about citizens and science is people who have no idea how to evaluate a proposition such as "vaccinating my child may not be a good idea" in terms of scientific research as opposed to hearsay. Reading and evaluating scientific literature of various kinds is one thing on my curriculum list for middle and high school.

Then of course, someone has to go out and create the resources. As you say, materials are frequently rehashes of past materials - radical change is not part of the regular delivery schedule.

There are two concepts that are frequently mixed up when talking about this question, 'science' and 'the scientific method'.
If we are talking about 'science' then this is obviously a huge topic that nobody, not even a nobel prize-winning scientist will have a comprehensive knowledge about (it includes methodologies, disciplines and enormous lists of 'facts'.
The second concept - 'the scientific method' is such a simple one that it should be something that everyone in the public CAN and SHOULD know.
I would define it in simple terms as:
"The way we determine whether an idea about the natural world is wrong".
Defined in this way it is (or should be!) immediately obvious as to why it is useful for mankind - and allows us to distinguish it from pseudo-scientific or supernatural methodologies (faith, revelation etc).

Old talk ("What Is Science") given by Richard Feynman to a national teachers org. here:

http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html

I like that definition, Sigmund. Especially when someone tells me that science is imperfect because the process can't be used to explain everything, as if that is somehow an inadequacy compared to religious explanations.

I am excited about the school that Bing will be going to for his last for years of schooling because Avalon focuses on "process" as much as learning facts. The students engage in cross-disciplinary projects, requiring them to not only learn the accretive (I looked up the word in the dictionary) facts but also how to incorporate them.

It's a positive example of how charter schools can work, and they interact with professors from Hamline University.

@MadScientist
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother." -variously attributed to Einstein, Feynman, Proverb and someone named Ruth Rudner.

The body of potentially useful scientific knowledge is just too vast to expect an average student to learn it all. If the average American can't find Boston on a map, what makes you think they could ever achieve an understanding of or even care about the Krebs Cycle? The teaching of all these facts also gives the impression that they were somehow brought down from on high and encourages a reliance on "great men" and authority figures, which, unfortunately, for many turns science into some kind of belief system.

A better approach, as pointed out by many commenters, is to teach logic and rationale argument-how to make one and how to detect one that's not- and the hallmarks of good scientific investigation.

I can tell the difference between a paper on "Heisenberg-limited Unambiguous Phase Estimation" and "The Time Cube" not because I know anything about photons or interferometry, but because I recognize the use of logic, experimentation, falsification, peer review and signs of crackpottery.

And it's been my experience that many "alt med" claims would be laughed off the marketplace if people had a basic understanding of physiology, chemistry or even physics.

And that "basic understanding" is what isn't being taught. It's much more of a process and how-do-we-find-out thing than it is a garbage bag full of isolated facts (e.g. the Krebs cycle.)

Without the overall structure, the facts are too volatile anyway.

I second Sigmund -- teaching kids how to arrive at answers in a sound scientific manner is much more important and vital to our efforts than teaching kids minutiae to memorize by rote and regurgitate when surveys come along. That said, there are some basics that should be covered (e.g. scale), but to teach every grade school kid atomic theory in its entirety might be going a bit too far.

Science class should teach the scientific method so much it becomes boring, and reinforce that method in every single experiment done in the classroom, to the point where kids can develop a hypothesis, an experiment, and draw conclusions from the results in their sleep. My experience in science classrooms involve the teacher doing it all, skipping many steps or glossing over why we did what we did in what order to the point where the "neat fact" supercedes the method by which we arrived at it. Flash-freezing and smashing a banana with a hammer is neat, but when that's the point of the experiment, rather than it being an illustration of something bigger like the scientific method itself, then a teaching moment is missed.

Dave W [6]: You make a good argument that everyone should come out of school knowing the Krebs cycle so that when the policy issues relatedto it come up they are ready for that. The problem is that a similar argument can be made for almost everything.

In her research lab mode, my wife studies the very finely detailed activities of little pieces of two specific molecules found in cells using extraordinarily expensive equipment. From a policy point of view it would b nice if the high school students could learn about how this equipment works so they would understand why it is so expensive, and what these molecules do so they can connect the funding to the objective (which in the end is all about their health). But she also works in a building complex with over a thousand different research labs and each lab represents multiple such stories.

What is needed is an approach that prepares students to address these issues, not to address each and every possible issue. And again, this is not far from what educators are thinking, but when standards and cirriculum is written, it is not what we get.

I definitely do not think that science classes should be teaching the scientific method as such until it becomes boring. Too often, teaching "the scientific method" becomes a matter of writing the x number of steps of the method down as part of a test. The trick is that the teacher shouldn't be doing "it all" in the classroom, but rather in preparation behind the scenes. Teachers need this preparation time. It is the students who ought to be experiencing the joy of discovery and analysis. Giving the students exposure to the wonderful examples and core concepts Greg Laden talks about above takes real effort by a knowlegable teacher. Sadly, a garbage bag full of isolated facts is a frequently utilized teaching short cut.

I've never seen one and I've never been there (respectively), but I know with utmost faith that there are electrons in the middle of Tibet. Lord Rutherford told me so!

For my senior year in high school, I took chemistry in a wonderfully well-equipped lab/classroom (in Silicon Valley) emphasizing hands-on learning - and I hated it (only âDâ I ever received). It was all exercises and regurgitation - no theory, no Big Picture, no sensa wunda. My conclusion at the time was that they were training future lab techs; now I suspect they were trying to satisfy college teachers bemoaning unprepared students. Or maybe it was just the only way the teacher (a track coach the rest of the time) knew how to proceed.

IOW - :P

Great post, Greg. I couldn't agree more. This is something I have heard many times in lectures on campus on teaching, in conversations with colleagues, etc. It's obvious to educators, particularly those with expertise in HOW to educate (not just us chumps with the expertise in whatever field of science we're in). This is why I am doing a major revamp of my gen-ed science course for non-majors to put the focus on teaching critical thinking skills and the scientific method rather than the particulars of my field. But with very little funding and a large lecture, there are many challenges to teaching this way. It leads me to wonder if we keep moving back to this accreditation model because academic institutions think it is less costly (at least from a financial, not a for-the-good-of-society sense). It is far easier to pass out scantrons and have my students do multiple choice quizzes and exams than figure out how to have them grapple with how one forms a question, understands implicit assumptions, and defines a hypothesis... let alone test it and analyze the results.

I tend to think the problem breaks down to teachers being no different than most of society and most of society engages in fuzzy thinking, if not outright magical thinking as a baseline. As the lovely and brilliant Juniper likes to explain to me, we are all about "common sense" as a baseline, rather than logic and reason. Reason is a threat to those common sense ideas and especially to magical thinking, so it is no surprise that tertiary level educators are unlikely to go for teaching critical reasoning and the ones who are, are strongly discouraged from doing so - to the point we have policies that make it all but impossible...

This is a great post, and great comments too.
When I was in school (middle and high) I had straight As in all my classes, including science classes, but I feel like I didn't really learn science. I certainly was never taught about evolution. What was I taught? Well I remember talking about the moon's gravity; the difference between a mixture and a solution; rocks; and in grade 11 biology it was the human digestive system. For all of these topics I remember being given a lecture, doing an exercise, then either being given a quiz or being asked to write a paragraph or two about 'what we learned'. I always had a hard time with that last one because I was never really sure what it was that we had just done other than stir around some salt in different temperatures of water.
Surely there is a better way.

I think the best way to teach science is to teach the facts by demonstrating the scientific method. I've always learned best when a teacher explains the history of a concept, and also the specific tests that were done to make discoveries. It demonstrates how the scientific method works while also teaching specific facts that students need to learn. Teachers should explain a test that a scientist did, then explain what the results mean and why. For example, teachers could explain Mendel's experiments with pea plants and then explain what it means about inheritance. That way, students learn about inheritance, but they also understand why we know it. I think a lot of teachers already do this, but just not often enough.

Gaythia:
I definitely do not think that science classes should be teaching the scientific method as such until it becomes boring. Too often, teaching "the scientific method" becomes a matter of writing the x number of steps of the method down as part of a test.

No teaching should be boring and badly done. The fact that many of us learned the scientific method in the boring way, though, does not mean that it inherently a boring thing to teach. Quite the contrary. I think my wife has some great tools she uses in teaching this sort of thing. But as you say, that does certainly involve a lot of prep time!

DuWayne:I definitely do not think that science classes should be teaching the scientific method as such until it becomes boring. Too often, teaching "the scientific method" becomes a matter of writing the x number of steps of the method down as part of a test.

This is why everyone must read Charles Sanders Peirce

Great post, Greg. I've long been arguing that we need to have secondary-level students learn more science process and less science facts. Or to say it another way: I'd be much happier to have college freshmen showing up knowing nothing about the carbon cycle if they had a good idea of what exactly constituted a fact in science or some notion of the nature of "proof." I personally think we'd be ahead of the game, but that's just me.

Thanks for the fucking link, holmes!

I agree with the comments on the scientific method. When I was in 9th grade, the process of testing hypotheses by making observations, using that evidence to form theories, designing experiments to test those theories, publishing the theories in peer-reviewed journals so that others could test them, etc. was drilled into me. The systematic way to acquire real knowledge is near and dear to all scientists, but I think most high school graduates can't assess the validity of an idea in a way that wouldn't make a scientist cringe. I am the exception, not the rule.

I am still in favour of streaming of students, at least from 10th grade onwards. The end of 9th grade is a good place for a student to decide if she is more interested in the sciences or the arts. The latter should get a general history of the development of ideas in a chosen discipline along with some serious critical thinking skills (maybe one science course of their choice per year, or two courses over 3 years, or something). The former should take science course where they can do the labs and discover the history hands-on, along with a healthy dose of theory to explain various behaviors. Both streams should end with scientific literacy, but the less rigorous especially requires teachers not only teach a subject, but teach a worldview. The students will not have large and detailed backgrounds in specific information, but they will be able to apply the rational, scientific way of thinking to their life. This is where we fail the children by teaching to the test. Science is everywhere, but its relevance is dwarfed by mere trivialities in the grand scheme.

Who is Krebs and why is his bicycle so important to science?

Krebs and his bicycle got my aunt a job once. Aside from that, I know of no one who uses it. And I'm a freakin biochemist, supposedly.

This notion that there is one thing that is the scientific method is inaccurate (there's a lot of back and forth between evidence gathering and hypothesis formation).
The notion that "The Scientific Method" can be reduced to a formulaic checklist and knowledge of it can be evaluated meaningfully via a multiple choice test question is pernicious.
If you want people to be able to do science or at least to evaluate it, and if you want them to be 'critical thinkers' or whatever education-buzzwords are currently standing in for 'not excessively gullible', you have to instill a love of questioning. Particularly the question "how do you know that?", with all the myriad ramifications thereof.
Everything else is just garnish.

Becca: exactly why I said we should drill it into them until it's so second-nature it becomes boring. And I absolutely did not mean teach it in rote memorization, checklist format. I mean teach the concept time and time again until the kids are like, "yeah, yeah, we get that, let's get on to writing a hypothesis and experiment proposal already!"

Particularly the question "how do you know that?"

Science: applied curiosity.

Critical thinking: formalized curiosity.

I am rather curious what you were intending on quoting, in your response to me - because you actually just reiterated Gaythia's quote...

Greg @ 16:

Dave W [6]: You make a good argument that everyone should come out of school knowing the Krebs cycle so that when the policy issues relatedto it come up they are ready for that. The problem is that a similar argument can be made for almost everything.

That's why I appended "or at least being willing and able to look it up and understand it." And I wasn't talking about policy, but was coming more from a defend-yourself-from-the-conmen angle.

For a long time I've thought that schools should be more invested in teaching kids how to obtain knowledge than in teaching kids facts and dates.

It came from the woman who was thoroughly focused on getting kids outdoors as a proxy for unstructured play. She talked about how kids, in the absence of conforming influences, are curious and question everything--until they get to school, where questioning behavior becomes unacceptable and gets labeled as disruptive.

I think the roots of the anti-science and anti-intellectual attitudes go back to early childhood experiences, as Stephanie Z's excellent comment above implies (at least in my interpretation). If a young child is repeatedly punished and labeled as a discipline problem, for being curious, asking questions, and engaging in creative, unstructured play, what is the likelihood that he or she will be particularly receptive to science-related learning, regardless of the teacher or the teaching method? Forget the child of extraordinary intelligence and resilience (a group which apparently includes most bloggers and their commenters) - I'm talking about your average kid, or perhaps even a child with below-average intelligence, due to inadequate nutrition or exposure to teratogens. Maybe even a child with abusive or neglectful parents.

Thing is, a lot of children fall into this category, with a less-than-optimal development environment, not conducive to learning or creativity or even adequate brain myelination. If you deny that this is so, then I will politely suggest that you must live in the privileged enclave of Richfuckistan, and that your contacts and interactions with people of different socioeconomic groups is pretty damned limited. Limited, perhaps, to the times when you seek them out to coiffeur your lawn and shrubberies, or to dust your lame-ass intramural softball trophies from graduate school and launder your prized collection of ironic webcomix T-shirts or whatever.

And oh, yeah, I totally understand the moral discomfort and guilt that acknowledging such disparities and injustices can bring, as I'm kind of a "to the manor born" type of gal myself, with academician parents who sent me outside to play and made sure the house was filled with books and art supplies. But there's really no excuse, IMHO, for pretending that environmental and experiential differences throughout early childhood won't influence learning abilities and receptiveness to new ways of thinking later in life. I'm not saying that such hurdles can't be overcome, but the problem is not a simple one, and its extent, even in the US, is pretty daunting. To me it makes endlessly discussing blogosphere ego controversies and arguments about whether Pluto is a planet or whatever seem pretty petty and insubstantial.

This post is taking my breath away. Absolutely wonderful.

Shouldn't that be "same old-same old?"

Which style guide are you using?