Good morning everyone. I want to start out by saying that everything I talk
about this morning I did as a high school teacher. I taught high school for
seven years. One year in Illinois and then six years in Wisconsin and the
nature of science is something that can and should be done seamlessly with
teaching science. So this is not something you do in addition to teaching
science. It's something that is part of teaching science. So I want to talk about
what we mean by nature of science.
It addresses more than what I'll put up here but it includes issues like what
science is. It seems like it's a simple question but it's really more difficult
when you get down to what is science? What isn't science? How science works?
Epistemological foundations of science and what we mean by that is how do we
know what we know? We tell kids a lot of things but how do we know those things.
Ontological claims in science. Science says that there are atoms. Are those
atoms real? We now think they are but if you go back in the history of science
even Einstein for a number of for much of his career thought that atoms were
heuristic devices. That they weren't real. And so science makes ontological claims
about the natural world what really is there and that's part of the nature
of science. How scientists work? For example, we oftentimes wrongly teach kids
that scientists should be totally objective. Well, to what extent can and
should science be objective? Science is oftentimes portrayed as a
lone endeavor. Not as a collaborative endeavor. So how scientists work is
something that the nature of science addresses and then how society
influences and reacts to scientific endeavors. Again, I don't want to imply
that this is all of the nature of science but it gives you an idea what we
mean by the nature of science. We know from extensive research that
misunderstandings regarding the nature of science are widespread. You can see
that in everyday media and how people respond to science. We
know these misconceptions contribute to poor personal and public policy
decisions, negative attitudes toward science, unnecessary conflict between
science and religion and difficulties in teaching and learning science. Question
arises how do these nature of science misconceptions develop? Well first, we
have the media portrayals of science. The way science is spoken over the media
sends mistaken notions. Let me give an example. Just recently, I read an article
about why is it taking so long to get a covid19 vaccine and I'm
thinking myself - so long? They've only been at this a few months. The way that
media oftentimes speaks about science sends the view that science ideas
are developed rather readily and that we reach well establish
knowledge quickly when in fact they can take you know months, years, decades to
establish scientific knowledge. We know science textbooks distort the nature of
science. The way they convey the knowledge. My favorite example from a
high school text I used when I taught high school you know in 1953 Watson
Crick discovered DNA. Really? Just like that? Yeah. Again, it just it sanitizes the
process and it portrays science and scientists in a light that is not the way
it really works. We know that cookbook laboratory
experiences are ubiquitous in school and I'm not arguing that we shouldn't
have to give direction to students but if you think about the way we have
kids follow directions in the lab it and the way we have them write lab reports it
all really comes together to portray that scientists following a
linear step-by-step method when that's not the case. How we speak about science.
I think about you know we shortchange things when we say things like "what does
the data tell you?" And of course data doesn't tell scientists things.
Scientists have to interpret data. When we talk about words like theories and
laws. There's all sorts of ways that teachers and other sources the way we
communicate about science misportrays the nature of science.
And then there's these intuitive notions about how knowledge is developed and
accepted. To some extent nature science misconceptions makes sense. I'll give you
an example. Most people think that if you want to know how nature works you go out
and look at nature. Well, sometimes yes. But oftentimes no. Oftentimes you have to
ignore what you see in nature to understand the natural world. My favorite
example is the law of pendulum motion. If you want to know how pendulum work,
if you're a physics teacher or a physical science teacher and you
teach about the law pendulum motion you might be surprised that that was
developed by ignoring how pendulum swing and by using mathematics. And as Galileo
was one to point out, you'll never figure out pendulum motion by watching
a pendulum swing. So we have rationales for learning about the nature of science
and for teaching about it. I want to emphasize that we don't teach
the nature of science just to help kids understand the nature science. Teachers who
understand the nature of science are in a far better position to understand
students difficulties learning science ideas and the tenacity of their
misconceptions. There has been a number of books written about how science ideas
if you look at it from a straightforward view of the natural world, they don't
make sense. All you've got to do is look at nature and see it doesn't seem to make
sense. And you look at how scientists themselves had to abandon oftentimes everyday
thinking to understand the natural world. And so when you understand the nature
of science as a teacher, you can see why students have trouble understanding and
deeply accepting many of our science ideas. I don't want to say all the science
ideas but many science ideas are counterintuitive unless you understand
the nature of science. It assists teachers and understanding why telling and
showing do not compel students to change their thinking. It's not that telling and
showing aren't part of science but it's not going to be sufficient.
And we have research that points out that students who understand the nature
science they understand the complexity of scientists' struggles. And so knowing
that scientists struggled to piece this all together, the students themselves are
more likely to persevere because they know this is not
straightforward. I love the history of science to illustrate much about the
nature of science because you see scientists and with our common knowledge
today we think well it's straightforward DNA is of course the double helix but if
you read Watson's double helix books they don't know what answer is of
course. So they're trying to figure it out and they're really having a hard
time doing this. And so again, I want to emphasize that we can really use the
nature science to leverage when our students struggle to help them
understand that scientists struggle. We know that when the nature of science is
taught well, that it can improve students attitudes toward an interest in science
and science education. Many students find they don't want to major in science
because it does look like it's creative. There's a lot of things they don't you
know understand how science really works. If they did understand it, they'd be
more interested perhaps in science careers and also in science education.
We know that understanding the nature of science plays a significant role, not the
only role but a significant role, in socio scientific decision making.
Mitchell's written a book called Unsimple Truths and talks about how
policymakers and citizens oftentimes use naive views about the nature of science
and therefore they make poor decisions regarding socio scientific decisions. A
recent article came out about how the public and policymakers wrongly think we
have to wait for certainty in science before we can act and that's disastrous.
If you're looking at certainty as an absolute truth by the time that comes
about is oftentimes it's well past when we had to make the decisions and so that
plays out in covid-19. It plays out in climate change.
If we had made decisions on climate change 30 years ago when it was becoming
pretty clear but people kept pointing out that it wasn't certain and here we
are 30 years later in a much much poorer position. And again, we know that's
important for truly understanding important science ideas. If we want the
kids just to memorize stuff then the NOS doesn't play such a huge role but we
really want them to understand it because I'll come back to pendulum
motion. Why is pendulum motion dependent upon
conditions that can't exist? You have to have a point mass. You can't have a
string. You can't have friction. And Galileo's contemporaries even said what
are you doing Galileo? Because in the real world, there aren't point masses. You
need a string for a pendulum and there is friction. But if you work with what
Galileo put forth and this is what we teach kids that the pendulum depends
only on the length of the string and gravity that depends on those impossible
but idealized conditions. But then you ask the question, why do we use an idea?
And I don't have time to go into that right now but you can get kids to buy in
real quickly why that's needed and they more deeply understand pendulum motion.
The same is true with biological evolution and many other science ideas.
If we really want kids that deeply understand the science content, the
nature of science plays a key role. So what do we do for research? And this is
going to be very important to think in your your work with your workshop. We know
that implicit instruction that faithfully reflects how science works
does not change students NOS understanding. And this means that, for
example, even research has been done where you put teachers and students in
laboratories to work with scientists that does not tend to change their
understand the nature of science. Now that's not surprising because it's all
implicit. It doesn't mean that those experiences aren't important and the
experiences that you're gonna have with scientists are very important. But the
key is if we want to change nature of science understanding, we have to overtly
draw their attention. So in cases where teachers and students have been put in
labs, where overt nature of science instruction occurred alongside those
experiences it has been shown to assist in
understand the nature science. And that's what the second point is. Learners'
attention must be directed to NOS ideas in a way that mentally engages them in
thinking about those ideas. We know that multiple contexts with extensive
scaffolding is important. I'll illustrate that in the next slide. But we do know
that teacher implementation of accurate and effective nature of science
instruction has been problematic. And it's been problematic because teachers
have so much on their plates. They seem to be being asked to do just another
thing now. It's problematic because many teachers have not read much about the
NOS. They've not taken a NOS course. So on this next slide I want to talk
about how the nature of science can be part of everyday science instruction. I'm
going to break this into three broad categories. Many of you may have done
black box activities. These are ubiquitous. Students have to try to
figure out how something works that they can't see or what something's like on
the inside. Those experiences are valuable for
introducing the nature of science ideas. But of course, it takes time away
from instruction regarding science content. And so you can only do so much
with blackbox activities. We also look at black box activities really
don't change students NOS ideas because as students are apt to point out,
scientists aren't working on black boxes. They're working with a natural world. And
so now we get to everyday science instruction. You can think about the
activities you have students do from elementary through university where you
have students have to make more decisions because a student who's
actually collecting data and has to make sense of it comes face to face with the
data doesn't tell them what to think. They've got to make sense of the data.
They come face to face that they're not following some step-by-step method. It's
an iterative process that has many different approaches. These experiences
are important and notice that these take place in the context of teaching
science content. So they're seamless with teaching the science
content if a teacher overtly draws students attention to NOS issues in
these experiences. But in research, I've done it and it's becoming better
established because I put forward a concept paper this is not sufficient
because students can always say yes we're struggling with these things but
scientists are smarter than us. Scientists have better lab equipment.
Scientists have equipment that actually shows pictures of the atoms which is
not quite the case and so we need to bring in the work and words of scientists.
And I know working with scientists in your project, this is something I hope
you'll do is pay attention to how the scientists work and pay attention to
their words. It really assists students in understanding the nature of science when
scientists speak accurately about the nature of science.
Einstein was fond of saying that scientists don't have a scientific method.
Peter Medawar, a Nobel laureate, he wrote a piece called is the scientific paper
a fraud? And he wasn't talking about do scientists cheat? He was saying that if
you look at the way papers are written in articles, they
misrepresent how science really works. Because of course the article is giving
you a straightforward view of all the information whereas in the real work of
scientists it's not that straightforward. And so bringing the work and words of
scientists can assist students in understanding the nature of science. And the
scaffolding back and forth between these different things is crucial. What I mean
by that is if you're bringing in the work and words of scientists, you can say
to students how is that like your work when you did the black box activity?
Whatever that might be. How was that like the work that you did in the lab
or activities that you did in class? And you go back and forth along that from
black box activities to the work and words of scientists. You can scaffold to
the laboratory activities. Any one of these directions you can and should do. I
realize this is very little time and I want to make sure you have additional
resources and so I've given many resources for
distribution. For those of you teaching elementary, I want you know this is just
as relevant for that particularly misconceptions can be promoted by you
know putting up posters and rooms that you know the scientific method. And
so in elementary school, I always tell people it's important not to convey
misconceptions and that's true of the high school teachers as well because
there's posters at the high school level that talk about the scientific method.
We've been fighting that for fifty years now. We're making progress but it's
just something we really similarly can't get rid of. But elementary teachers also
are in a great position to have kids do activities and draw their students
attention to the many methods that the kids can use. Draw their students
attention to how they're collaborating together.
Draw their students attention to how people of all cultures do science. And
then you bring in the work and words of scientists to bolster that. And so I
don't want I taught high school so I draw so off of my own examples teaching
kids but I don't want to think it's just something done to high school or middle
school level. It's really something that starts at elementary and should go all
the way to the university. And I'll leave you with this, I worked with University
faculty in science to assist in teaching the nature science as part of a very
large Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant that we were working to actually
get more authentic laboratory experiences in undergraduate science
courses and to show you and this is just anecdotal but to show you how the
misconceptions run all the way up to university we're trying to get students
to do real research and so they're assisting faculty in research as
undergraduates. And one student commented "I didn't see the purpose of all this.
What are we doing this for if they don't really already know the answer?" It's like
well that's why they call it research but anyway I thank you for your time and
I wish had more time with you. But I think I did exactly 20 minutes.
That was great Dr. Clough. Thank you so much.