Science learning and learning science
Earlier this month Athena Andreadis discussed the increasing anti-science trend apparent in US culture and politics, and its implications for science fiction. Paradoxically, while public discourse is dominated by anti-scientific rhetoric and issues – global warming, evolution, vaccination seem to be the most common – US adults know more about science than they ever have.
Dr. Jon Miller at Michigan State University has devoted his career to studying civic scientific literacy (CSL). To be scientifically literate, an adult must understand basic concepts at a high-enough level to follow PBS science programs or the newspaper science section. Dr. Miller regards this as “the level of understanding of science and technology needed to function as citizens in a modern industrial society.” CSL has broad consequences since it is positively associated with support for basic scientific research and for intellectual freedom.
Basic scientific literacy includes both knowledge of terms and concepts and a grasp of the methods scientists use to understand how the world works. The latter point is one of my great frustrations with the way science is presented in the media. Science is a self-correcting process. While individuals may stick to particular ideas for a variety of reasons, scientific consensus changes over time as new facts are discovered and improved interpretations developed. Change is crucial to the enterprise. My favorite example of this is on They Might Be Giants’ new album, Here Comes Science. First TMBG plays their song about the workings of the Sun, then they perform a second song that says, in effect, “Our previous song was wrong – this is how we now think it works. Isn’t science cool?” Media articles about difficult scientific topics often present this changing understanding as a reason not to listen to scientists at all: “First scientists said this, then they said that, so who knows what to believe? Let’s just ignore them all.” CSL allows people to understand the reasons that scientists change their minds and the possible consequences of new knowledge.
The proportion of scientifically-literate adults in the US has increased dramatically over the 20 years that Miller has been studying this: 10% in the late 1980s, 17% in 1999; 28% in 2005. (Improved, but abysmal – nearly 3 out of 4 adults can’t read and understand a popular science article.) In general women, older, and less-educated adults are all less scientifically literate. The best predictor of CSL was having taken a college-level science class. High school science classes were not nearly as effective. The US is the only major nation to require general-education courses for university graduates and has correspondingly higher CSL scores, above Europe and Japan. (I was unaware of this: in the US a history major must take at least one science class, but universities in other countries do not have this sort of general requirement.)
Informal science education was another strong predictor. CSL was correlated with reading books, websites and magazines that discuss scientific issues. It wasn’t covered, but I would also expect reading science fiction to be positively correlated with CSL. Miller’s recommendation is to improve middle school and high school science education, so that all high-school graduates are both functionally and scientifically literate. But what about other less-traditional approaches? Is there a way that science fiction authors can contribute? And how can research into science literacy and teaching feed into fiction (beyond the hoary old “secret cabal of [white, male] smart and educated people secretly running the world of ignorant sheeple”)?
The obvious first answer is that childhood spent reading science fiction has led many people into professional or amateur scientific pursuits. (Does that give us a responsibility to ensure that our science is accurate?) There are other formal SF-science teaching endeavors, like Mike Brotherton’s NSF-funded anthology of astronomical stories. While I’d love to get NSF funding to write fiction, I’m also intrigued by some recent research into other ways that people are learning to think like scientists, possibly without even realizing it. Constance Steinkuehler and Sean Duncan analyzed the World of Warcraft online forums and classified discussions based on the ways the participants approached problem-solving. The players wanted to solve a problem, and used both experiment and the results of other players to do so, and even modeled the problem mathematically and tested their hypotheses. Steinnkuehler and Duncan found high-level reasoning: “Eighty-six percent of the forum discussions were posts engaged in ‘social knowledge construction’ rather than social banter. Over half of the posts evidenced systems based reasoning, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument.”
Understanding the ways that scientists approach problems is a crucial part of scientific literacy, and here it is being developed and used far outside the traditional educational system. The scientific method is an organized way to learn things about systems, and that’s what these WoW players are doing. Is it possible to expand on that, to link in-game problem solving back to formal science education, inside or outside the classroom? There are academic teams exploring these possibilities, including the River City Project and Quest Atlantis, although using computer games as instructional tools is nothing new. Second Life has interactive science exhibits sponsored by university and government labs.
I see two avenues for extrapolation here, both giving rise to all sorts of SF ideas. What are the consequences of the presence or absence of scientific literacy in the population? It’s possible to develop both gloom-and-doom and highly positive scenarios. What possibilities exist for improving understanding of science concepts and methods? Here again there are two areas to consider: real-world SF contributions to science education and enthusiasm, and fictional possibilities. Wouldn’t it be great fun to write virtual reality simulations that would let people be the first scientists on a new world? Or to design their own worlds with plausible interconnected geography, climate and ecology? Is that science fiction, or science possibility?
Test yourself
These are the questions used in 2005. Do you know at least 22 of the answers?
Define or explain:
DNA
experiment
molecule
neuron
stem cell
a probability of one in four
to study something scientifically
How often does the Earth go around the Sun?
Which travels faster, light or sound?
True or false:
All plants and animals have DNA.
A nanometer is equalto 1/100th of an inch.
Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.
Astrology is a scientific discipline.
Electrons are smaller than atoms.
For the first time in recorded history, some species of plants and animals are dying out and becoming extinct.
Global warming is increasing primarily because the level of direct radiation from the Sun is increasing.
Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.
Humans have somewhat less than half of their DNA in common with chimpanzees.
Lasers work by focusing sound waves.
More than half of human genes are identical to those of mice
Nuclear power plants destroy the ozone layer.
One of the effects of global warming will be that some species of plants and animals will thrive and other species will become extinct.
Ordinary tomatoes do not have genes but genetically modified tomatoes do.
Over periods of millions of years, some species of plants and annimals adjust and survive while other species die and become extinct.
Stem cells occur only in plants.
The center of the Earth is very hot.
The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.
The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
The greenhouse effect causes the Earth’s temperature to rise.
The primary human activity that causes global warming is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
The universe began with a huge explosion.
More information
Miller, Jon D. 2002. Civic scientific literacy: A necessity in the 21st century FAS Public Interest Report 55:3-6. (available online)
Miller, Jon D. 2004. Public understanding of, and attitudes toward, scientific research: what we know and what we need to know. Public Understanding of Science 13:273-294. (available online)
Steinkuehler, Constance and Sean Duncan. 2008. Scientific habits of mind in virtual worlds. Journal of Science Education and Technology 17: 530-543. (abstract only; full-text by subscription)
Excellent post.
I teach a course on “Science and Science Fiction” where I try to inculcate some basic science literacy, so I see a lot of this. Rather than teaching “what’s wrong with Star Trek” etc, one of the main emphases is that science is based upon experiment and observation. Even with this emphasis, it is extremely hard for students to be able to discuss critically statements such as “it’s just a theory” and to distinguish between concepts that are indeed mere hypotheses (such as tachyons) and Theories that have substantial empirical evidence (such as quantum mechanics, relativity, and evolution).
Thanks, Calvin. I used to teach intro biology for nonmajors at the college level. Like you, I got to see students struggling with the “how it works” part, especially understanding that the pop-culture use of “theory” is very different from the scientific use of the word. That’s why I find it so fascinating to see the same sorts of tools for investigation developing in a non-scientific context, among people who may otherwise say that they don’t like or aren’t interested in science.
The true or false section (too lazy to write definitions):
True,
False,
False,
False,
True,
False,
False,
True,
False,
False,
True,
False,
True,
False,
True,
False,
True,
True,
False,
True,
True,
True.
How’d I do?
Anyway it’s not so much general scientific illiteracy that’s causing all the skepticism of evolution and global climate change, it’s memes.
Zarpaulus, I’d agree in principal (although for myself I find the word meme a bit overused). More precisely, I’d say people unconsciously appeal to “narratives about scientific progress,” which Sarah in her post already noted. One narrative is “it’s just a theory.” It’s frustratingly easy to get students to parrot the phrase “it’s just a theory” and damned hard to get them to think about evidence. Another, related narrative–the one Sarah pinpointed–is “all scientific theories eventually get overturned.” To illustrate this in my class, I use the scene in Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper, where in the future we learn that tobacco and fatty foods are considered the key to good health.
More sobering, I’ve heard people use this exact argument against evolution: “Five hundred years ago people believed the world was flat; now we believe the world is round. Just because people believe in evolution now, but in five hundred years they won’t.” This argument fails on several levels. First, it’s not true that 500 years ago people believed the world was flat; it’s been generally known and accepted since Aristotle that the world is round. (Columbus merely miscalculated the distance to Asia; the “meme” that everyone thought the world was round came from the biography of Columbus by Washington Irving, you know, the guy who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle.) Second, it’s unlikely that in 500 more years people will revert to believing the world is flat–unless war or plague flatten civilization to the Bronze Age.
But people just echo these scripts, these narratives about science, without thinking…
I’m with Calvin about the term “meme” being overused to the point of white noise. I discussed the term’s many problems in my book, the chapter that discusses language.
And as both Sarah and Calvin pointed out, although science is supple and self-correcting (although its practitioners are all too human), some things are objectively true: the roundness of the planets and stars, the heliocentric organizations of our solar system, plate tectonics, evolution. As I’m fond of saying to people who argue that it’s all subjective, they’re free to test electromagnetism by touching a high-voltage live wire… and gravity by jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.
Zarpaulus, I’d say that it’s more inability or unwillingness to think critically about what they’re being told. Greater scientific literacy would require both improved factual knowledge and a greater ability to understand what’s being claimed. If someone tells you something and you don’t have the knowledge or skills to evaluate the claim, you’re likely to believe whatever fits your preconceptions. Not that having knowledge and skills is a guarantee that they’ll be used, but it’s a step in the correct direction.
And I think you get 100% on the true-false questions. * <- gold star
Great post, indeed.
I think that both scientific illiteracy and the traditional US dislike of authority play a role in the problem that science has with non-scientists. But an even more powerful contributor is its refusal to give answers that purport to be definitive, since scientists always add the caveat “according to the best of our knowledge”.
The problems that evolution, etc, face are unique to the US, among developed countries. That doesn’t mean that there are no skeptics in, say, France. However, they know better than to parade it in public and, in particular, run for public office on the strength of it.
One of the True-or-False questions is actually an exemplar of “no soundbite answers”:
More than half of human genes are identical to those of mice.
The answer is, it depends at what scale you look. Functionally, it’s true. Structurally, it’s false.
Thanks, Athena. That question’s a good example of how things get more complicated the more you know about them. At the level of understanding that the questioner is expecting, mice and humans have a lot of genes in common. But the more you learn about genetics the fuzzier the answer gets.
So why do people think science is too confusing?
I think I can answer 28 correctly. Not bad for an English major. To put that in context, my college didn’t have general requirements, but did encourage variety. I took two semesters of psychology (one with labs) and one semester of astronomy. I was very interested in my high school chemistry and physics classes, but didn’t do at all well in them. In spite of that, I’ve kept an amateur interest. I like a lot of science in my science fiction. And one of the non-fiction books I’m reading now is “The Physics of the Buffyverse”. It still has me scratching my head at times, but memorable examples, even far-fetched ones, help. I suspect I would enjoy your class, Calvin.
See? College science classes and seeking out popular science materials. Not to mention reading this blog: doing our part for civic scientific literacy since 2010!
Interesting stuff. I think I got all the true/false ones, which as a non- scientist is encouraging, although I find biology easier to get a grip on than physics or chemistry.
I think that here in the UK the fact that people tend to pick either science or arts when selecting A Levels at 16 is a disadvantage, and that a broader curriculum would help. And more oppotunity for ‘hands on’ practical science & experiment s within schools.
A broader curriculum is a good thing, I think (says the liberal arts major scientist). People need a broad basic education in all sorts of things to be productive members of society.
The tendency at least in the US to only teach things that can be put on standardized tests has been hard for science as well as arts. There’s a lot more emphasis on memorizing facts than on doing and understanding science. Has this turned off a whole cohort of potential scientists because they don’t get to do the exciting bits?
A broad but reasonably deep curriculum in both sciences and humanities is crucial. Also, colleges in the US often have to compensate for high school deficiencies. High school education in my country had/has:
1) uniform requirements — none of the “parents demand evolution taken out of biology textbooks” or “math requirements waived for students who get angsty when they see quadratic equations”;
2) no “optional” courses, whether you’re a jock or a nerd: everyone gets six years of math, chemistry, history, essay writing, etc;
3) stringent exams during the year and at the end of it — and not multiple choice, either;
4) long hours — my school day had nine 50-minute periods. You may learn stuff by hanging out at the mall or in the video arcade, but it’s a sure bet you will learn more by being in school;
5) respect for teachers — they enjoy high social and financial status.
Like all systems, this is not perfect. People do cram and forget a lot, but such regimes foster discipline, a receptiveness to learning, and relative uniform levels of knowledge across society. In the end, learning (as a continuous and positive attribute) gets the attention and respect that is given to it by social consensus in each culture.
Good article. I, too, like a little more science in my science fiction.
As for scientists “changing their minds” and people who have a problem with it, I want to ask, don’t you know more today than you did yesterday? About anything? Ever change your mind based on new (and better) information? Ever actually go searching for new and better information?
I’m afraid the answer is no for a lot of people. Sadly.
Weekly science dose with NPR Science Friday is a fun way to add a bit of *science* to your week
The attitude of skepticism that laypeople have towards science stems exactly from the fact that they don’t actually understand the scientific method, and more broadly, the notion of an ever-expanding paradigm of knowledge.
The truly educated mind is far more skeptic of someone/thing which claims to have “all the answers” and “100% certainty”. Good reasoning warns us that these claims are often dangerous and untrue.