The Columbia Teachers College online journal TC Record popped up with *temporary* — as in go read this week — free access to this commentary today:
Too many of
our citizens simply don’t understand how it is that researchers figure
out what’s going on in the world. It’s this misunderstanding about how
science is done that has been and continues to be exploited by various
business and political interest groups.. . .What should be done?
More science isn’t the answer, especially in the current climate of standardized testing, where additional facts will only exacerbate the problem, reinforcing in students’ minds the identification of science with certain knowledge.
Neither is greater emphasis on the nature of science likely to help as long as such instruction remains limited to a monolithic picture of how science is done. . .
Should we teach the facts about global warming and other subjects like evolution? Absolutely. But we need to teach what we know about these subjects along with the various, specific ways these facts came to be. We need to help students understand the variety of methods and techniques that scientists use to explore the diverse phenomena in the world—that is, the process of knowledge construction as it’s actually practiced . . .this aspect of science education is one that has been and continues to be overlooked, and this “inconvenient truth” is sure to have grave consequences for the future.
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