Essential topics in science education

[Starman7]

I was somewhat disappointed by the fact that my high school science classes skimmed over some fairly essential science topics, mostly of the general what-is-science sort. Pseudoscience thrives because people don't know what actual science entails, quite often basing their arguments off of anecdote. So I thought I'd open a thread to discuss what topics do absolutely need to be taught in high school for a decent comprehension of science.

Those I have thought of so far:


The inadmissability of anecdotal evidence

Good sampling techniques, and the types of bad survey and sampling techniques
Random sampling vs. non-random
Polling vs. asking for volunteers
Misleading questions
Multiple-choice answers vs. open-answer (to allow for qualified answers)
Relevance of survey questions to the point of the survey

Precise nomenclature

Citing sources, and the ability to judge the reliability of a source
Ensuring the source is actually answering the question at hand

Correlation vs. causation

Impossibility of proving a negative

Constant update of theories, and constantly revisiting old theories

Skepticism and peer review

Statistics, large sample size

Double blind studies

Replicates and repeatability

Controlling for every conceivable factor

The "God of the Gaps" fallacy, or that science necessarily refutes religion

This is in a specific field, but I have to mention debunking some of the common myths of evolution, such as that evolution necessarily results in a perfect organism (appendixes anyone?), or that evolution necessarily requires a theory of abiogenesis.

[Kanastrous]

What about a History of Scientific Methodology course? Students should be armed with an understanding of why the Scientific Method is so useful, why scientific investigation is not some kind of Grand Conspiracy against religion, why fields like evolutionary biology developed from the observable world, how modern scientific inquiry developed, the techniques it replaced, etc etc etc.

[CaptainChewbacca]

What about a History of Scientific Methodology course? Students should be armed with an understanding of why the Scientific Method is so useful, why scientific investigation is not some kind of Grand Conspiracy against religion, why fields like evolutionary biology developed from the observable world, how modern scientific inquiry developed, the techniques it replaced, etc etc etc.

You can't do a whole course on that in highschool, but I usually spend the first week talking about that stuff.

[Surlethe]

The fact that if all the science you ever study is in high school, then don't know jack shit about science or how it works. I've become convinced that, in basic education, it is as necessary to give people a dim idea of how little they know as it is to teach them. The typical individual is so ignorant he doesn't even realize how ignorant he is; a blind man wandering in a forest is much less careful than a man with a tiny, flickering light. A science education should give a person a basic working grasp of the scientific method, some survey knowledge of established theories, and enough awe for what they don't know to make them exceedingly cautious in coming to definite conclusions.

[Archaic`]

It's not just the hard science courses which can help here. Social sciences including economics, history and even political science can help shed light on some of these things. In fact, I'd think that some of these courses might be better suited to getting concepts out there to the kids like sampling techniques and statistics (hell, even citing reliable sources), because the kids with no aptitude or inclination towards science might better see the relevance of these things to their day to day lives (and hopefully therefore actually remember them better) if it's pointed out to them that's how election polling or market research works.

On a slight tangent...it'd be amazing if the Mythbusters did a documentary special on the scientific method and explained points like these, with easy to understand examples for the layperson.

[adam_grif]

In high school, they should teach you basic critical thinking stuff (identifying bad arguments, induction vs deduction, black swan problem and so on), some statistics stuff (correlation v causation, sample sizes), a broad overview of the scientific method, and some Newtonian physics. Not necessarily equations, but they need to have a rough idea of how things move and behave. Most importantly, they need to be shown that what they know is only the tip of the iceberg, and hopefully pique their curiosity.

[Agent Sorchus]

Formal Logic. I know that you can't go too far into it, but it is one of the biggest deficits of many peoples understanding of the world. Even 3rd year college students in the sciences commit fallacies and don't even know it, because they have no idea of what it is. It is frustrating because in high school you spend lots of time supposedly polishing the argumentative essay with out an understanding of how to craft a proper logical argument. You can make all the arguments pro evolution, but so long as they can't recognize a proper argument if it was Godzilla in a gimp-suit you can't make any progress.

edit: there should also be some good overview courses covering all major sciences. IE not astronomy or geology. Yes they are sciences, but they don't have that much of a learning curve to enter into in college, and they are pretty self explanatory. The only reason they are still taught is to give the low fliers a pass on a sciences credit.

edit2: and by low fliers I mean people who really aren't into sciences in the first place.

[Packbat]

I hate to be that guy who posts an obvious XKCD link, but I think the primacy of experiment is a pretty essential point, and I don't know if it's being taught properly. As far as I can tell, the reason why science works and other methods of knowing don't is because science requires that an idea prove itself in the actual situation. It's a lot easier for a theory to sound correct than for it to stand up to tests designed to refute it.

For example: in Moneyball, Michael Lewis told a story about Voros McCracken looking at pitching statistics and coming up with a theory that pitchers could only control home runs, walks, and strikeouts. And then going out and testing it by checking pairs of pitchers whose HR, BB, and K totals were similar but whose number of hits varied. This isn't an experiment like letting a ball roll down a ramp and off the edge of the lab bench, like they did in my freshman physics class: McCracken made a test which would give qualitatively different results if his theory were wrong. McCracken picked a test like you'd come up with if you asked, "what would be almost certain to happen if my theory were true, but exceedingly unlikely if my theory were false?"

I think every student ought to have this principle in mind when they come up with bright ideas.

[dragon]

Applying logic to scientific ideas and questions.

[Lagmonster]

I'm going to say Buhlsheeeeet to the idea that we should teach high schoolers critical thinking and the like. It's not impossible, but it's a waste of time at that age.

Instead, and I'm sure someone will argue with me, you need to do what seems totally counter to the point of science and load kids up with stuff that they memorize and regurgitate verbatim. No questioning, no learning why it's true just yet. These are the facts, fuck you, just memorize it. Yeah, I know that's how religion works. Whatever your feelings on the matter, at least you can come back later and verify the scientific facts you were forced to memorize.

Very few people give a shit about science. They want to know what's true and what isn't without wasting time thinking about it; hence why people confuse scientific trivia shows for tests of intelligence. Yes, I know it would be nice to raise people to think critically and all that, and ideals are pleasant dreams, but kids do very well with rote memorization and that's the strength to which an educator ought to play.

Once you've impressed upon a kid that the conclusions of scientists are the only valid ones, and the kids have a fundamental grasp of what they are, they may be more willing to trust scientists even if they never rise to the point of being one. And no, I don't think you could achieve the same with a half-assed education in skepticism or what-not, because to paraphrase Twain, science gives us the opportunity to produce a shitload of wrong from a few facts, if you aren't actually sufficiently practiced at critical thinking.

[Simon_Jester]

Lagomonster, this sounds like a really bad idea. Do this, and:

-You risk stunting or alienating the minds of the students who really can think, who incidentally would make the best actual scientists in the event.
-You know damn well that people are going to forget or half-remember the shit they rote memorized in high school. To the point where hammering them with "trust anyone in a lab coat" is a useless lesson, because they can't tell real lab coats from fraudulent ones.
-You totally decouple performance in secondary school science from performance in science at the college level. Students who got good grades in high school physics or chemistry will almost invariably start doing well in college... then crap out within a few years because their carefully honed powers of memorization are useless for doing real science.

[Lagmonster]

Lagomonster,

Lagmonster. We are not from Caerbannog.

this sounds like a really bad idea. Do this, and:

-You risk stunting or alienating the minds of the students who really can think, who incidentally would make the best actual scientists in the event.

How big of a risk are you talking about? What about gifted programs that are meant to identify such kids in the first place? At what age you are convinced that it starts to make a difference in how they respond to a different educational model from the one they use through elementary school? Will teaching to a critical thinking model harm kids who CAN'T think? What about special education programs for them?

Saying that you might suppress a kid from thinking who already demonstrates aptitude at thinking merely by making their elementary science education model one of textbook memorization, sounds reasonable at first blush but demands some kind of confirmation, no?

-You know damn well that people are going to forget or half-remember the shit they rote memorized in high school. To the point where hammering them with "trust anyone in a lab coat" is a useless lesson, because they can't tell real lab coats from fraudulent ones.

I'm not precisely advocating turning scientists into priests. I'm suggesting, perhaps poorly, that if you say, "study the evidence with these skills and see where it leads" to an unprepared neophyte, they could end up anywhere. But if you lead them by the hand to the conclusion and demonstrate the mechanisms that other people have done all the real hard work for, you may impress upon them the idea that scientists produce reliable results.

I agree that this will not arm them with the ability to distinguish science from pseudoscience. That's not the point; the point is to teach them science.

-You totally decouple performance in secondary school science from performance in science at the college level. Students who got good grades in high school physics or chemistry will almost invariably start doing well in college... then crap out within a few years because their carefully honed powers of memorization are useless for doing real science.

I absolutely agree that some kids who are only good at memorizing text will crap out at the college level. But I also don't believe that the average fourteen-year-old is mentally equipped to handle the kind of complex critical thinking that advanced sciences demand. They're GOOD at memorizing material. I haven't the confidence that it takes anything but a more mature mind, armed with a good work ethic, to master the kind of critical thinking we'd like to expect from adults.

[Kanastrous]

Lag, I can't decide if you are a pessimist or merely a realist.

[Packbat]

-You totally decouple performance in secondary school science from performance in science at the college level. Students who got good grades in high school physics or chemistry will almost invariably start doing well in college... then crap out within a few years because their carefully honed powers of memorization are useless for doing real science.

I absolutely agree that some kids who are only good at memorizing text will crap out at the college level. But I also don't believe that the average fourteen-year-old is mentally equipped to handle the kind of complex critical thinking that advanced sciences demand. They're GOOD at memorizing material. I haven't the confidence that it takes anything but a more mature mind, armed with a good work ethic, to master the kind of critical thinking we'd like to expect from adults.

Are you sitting on a body of evidence I am not aware of for this?

Besides, it is my impression (based on such things as "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart) that Simon Jester is understating the extent of the problems caused by rote memorization teaching. Think: if one of those clever fourteen-year-olds you believe don't exist walks into science classroom and discovers that it consists of memorizing rules and applying them in a pure rote fashion, that fourteen-year-old won't say, "Aha! This must be stuff I need to know!" That fourteen-year-old will say, "Physics sucks!" And it will take extraordinary luck to reverse this impression and salvage the possibility of a great researcher from this disaster.

[Kanastrous]

Thinking back on my own (hahaha) education, for my part I remember that if a teacher wanted to get me interested in something to the point where I'd actually make an effort to learn it they needed to give me some idea of its utility outside the classroom. Okay, sometimes this was apparent without the need for the teacher to make that effort (if you've been to the supermarket checkout line with your folks you can see why arithmetic is useful) and sometimes the material was interesting on its own merits. But I think that the I'll never need this information in 'real life' attitude is a real roadblock and I would imagine that part of teaching would be addressing it.

I've been very lucky; on the occasions where I've taught my students were generally mature and really wanted to learn what I had to teach. I'd hate to be stuck with a room full of recalcitrant people who are actively disinterested in the curriculum...

[Lagmonster]

I absolutely agree that some kids who are only good at memorizing text will crap out at the college level. But I also don't believe that the average fourteen-year-old is mentally equipped to handle the kind of complex critical thinking that advanced sciences demand. They're GOOD at memorizing material. I haven't the confidence that it takes anything but a more mature mind, armed with a good work ethic, to master the kind of critical thinking we'd like to expect from adults.

Are you sitting on a body of evidence I am not aware of for this?

I'm not an educator; But are you planning to argue that kids aren't actually good at memorizing things, or that 14-year old are smarter on average than I believe?

Besides, it is my impression (based on such things as "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart) that Simon Jester is understating the extent of the problems caused by rote memorization teaching. Think: if one of those clever fourteen-year-olds you believe don't exist walks into science classroom and discovers that it consists of memorizing rules and applying them in a pure rote fashion, that fourteen-year-old won't say, "Aha! This must be stuff I need to know!" That fourteen-year-old will say, "Physics sucks!" And it will take extraordinary luck to reverse this impression and salvage the possibility of a great researcher from this disaster.

Don't be a dick. I didn't say that smart kids don't exist, I said that I don't believe the average high school student will be able to use rational thinking skills effectively in a science curriculum, and that (by implication, to reach the widest audience) science class should focus on giving kids answers. By all means, identify the smart kids and put them in a critical thinking skills course. Hell, put everyone in a critical thinking skills course. But the OP's idea of a science class, to my mind, borders on the ludicrous and presents challenges that an immature mind won't, by my opinion, cope with. Go ahead and prove me wrong.

[Starman7]

Perhaps you might be right about the majority of kids, I was probably rare in that I really did care about science all the way through school. However, I believe that schools need to focus on the kids who do care about learning, rather than bore them to death with classes taught to the slowest students in the school. Admittedly, it'd be up to a teacher to figure out which ideas can be successfully taught, but the idea of teaching what science really is, rather than just glossing over it, is my main point.

Furthermore, if we're just going to hammer "science tells us this" into kids, we're no better than the religious types; we need to show them how we got there, and how to differentiate science from pseudoscience. Even if the students don't get the details, at least hopefully they will understand what makes science work, and that it holds itself to a higher standard of truth than do faith-based arguments.

[Packbat]

I'm not an educator; But are you planning to argue that kids aren't actually good at memorizing things, or that 14-year old are smarter on average than I believe?

I'm not an educator, either. (I'm probably in a worse epistemological position than you, actually - homeschooled.) But it's my impression that there is a lot more variability in the skills of high-schoolers than is acknowledged by lowest-common-denominator thinking.

Don't be a dick. I didn't say that smart kids don't exist, I said that I don't believe the average high school student will be able to use rational thinking skills effectively in a science curriculum, and that (by implication, to reach the widest audience) science class should focus on giving kids answers. By all means, identify the smart kids and put them in a critical thinking skills course. Hell, put everyone in a critical thinking skills course. But the OP's idea of a science class, to my mind, borders on the ludicrous and presents challenges that an immature mind won't, by my opinion, cope with. Go ahead and prove me wrong.

No, you have a point. Most of the stuff proposed in the OP is currently university-level material, often for good reason. But I'm not just being a dick - the school system is not good at identifying smart students, so far as I have heard, and that means that it is important that some of these ideas make it into classes that everyone takes.

(It's also important that these subjects be taught by non-idiots, but that is a separate rant.)

[Packbat]

P.S. The "idiots" link seems to be dead at the moment of this posting, but the text appears in the Google cache (again, at the moment of this posting). It's not actually substantive, of course.

[Lagmonster]

No, you have a point. Most of the stuff proposed in the OP is currently university-level material, often for good reason. But I'm not just being a dick - the school system is not good at identifying smart students, so far as I have heard, and that means that it is important that some of these ideas make it into classes that everyone takes.

Schools may not be good at separating good students from bad ones and changing their educational model accordingly. Teachers may be pricks. Changing the science curriculum to be more demanding doesn't necessarily solve either of those problems. The foundations of science, to me, are the shoulders of the giants we stand on. There will be time at the advanced level to learn WHY f=ma, but at the beginning it's most important simply to learn that it does, how to understand the kind of math needed to use the equation, and how to take measurements so as to have accurate data going in and coming out.

As an aside, while I allow for the relevance of critical thinking in a science education, whenever I hear "must teach more skepticism!" from a skeptic, I sometimes worry that they aren't concerned with teaching kids science, but with teaching kids to defend themselves against pseudoscience and other dishonesty. It's an admirable goal, but not under the guise of a science education.

[Kanastrous]

Seems that a good science education would train one against pseudoscience etc without making it into a skepticism-for-its-own-sake kind of exercise...

[Simon_Jester]

Lagomonster,

Lagmonster. We are not from Caerbannog.

I sit corrected. Honest mistake.

this sounds like a really bad idea. Do this, and:
-You risk stunting or alienating the minds of the students who really can think, who incidentally would make the best actual scientists in the event.

How big of a risk are you talking about? What about gifted programs that are meant to identify such kids in the first place? At what age you are convinced that it starts to make a difference in how they respond to a different educational model from the one they use through elementary school? Will teaching to a critical thinking model harm kids who CAN'T think? What about special education programs for them?

I don't think you could adequately instruct elementary school students; if their grasp of science matches that elementary school history students obtain by rote memorization, they're not going to know much to speak of.

To make the rote memorization model useful as a way of teaching students enough about science to avoid obvious scientific errors, you would have to extend application of the model into the teen years. At which point you run into adolescent rebellion against the program and really are getting into the critical development stage for "growing young minds" of the sort that grow up to study the sciences.

Though I may be overgeneralizing from my own experiences. I learned quite a bit about critical thinking (mostly from very provocative books) well before I learned anything that I-of-today would consider useful knowledge about science. I suspect that memorizing more science factoids would have done nothing but distract me from honing my critical thinking skills.

But that is an anecdote, at best a datum, not data.

Saying that you might suppress a kid from thinking who already demonstrates aptitude at thinking merely by making their elementary science education model one of textbook memorization, sounds reasonable at first blush but demands some kind of confirmation, no?

It's mostly a question of how far the "learn by cramming and memorizing" model applies. If it's stopped after a few years no great harm is done, but if you keep doing it until the kids turn seventeen you'll have done real harm.

Look at all the students in freshman physics courses whose attitude is "whatever, just show me the equations I need to memorize." Those kids will never learn the material in a useful way, at least not until they get the "just show me what I need to memorize" nonsense knocked out. Seriously, it's like pulling teeth to get them to think about a problem rather than pick one of their memorized techniques and factoids and trying to hammer the thing into submission with it.

Today, most of the people who do that are the ones who aren't very interested in science anyway. Encouraging those who are interested to think that way is liable to be counterproductive, from my point of view, because it favors interest in "what do I need to store in my head to master this?" over "what do I need to understand to master this?"

-You know damn well that people are going to forget or half-remember the shit they rote memorized in high school. To the point where hammering them with "trust anyone in a lab coat" is a useless lesson, because they can't tell real lab coats from fraudulent ones.

I'm not precisely advocating turning scientists into priests. I'm suggesting, perhaps poorly, that if you say, "study the evidence with these skills and see where it leads" to an unprepared neophyte, they could end up anywhere. But if you lead them by the hand to the conclusion and demonstrate the mechanisms that other people have done all the real hard work for, you may impress upon them the idea that scientists produce reliable results.

Yes, but we already do this. The key is that the critical thinking skills really are part of the process. Basic science courses already present lots of results; if you could teach kids to be less clueless about physics by showing them more physics factoids, we'd have already done it. But the mental process underlying science is at best only taught during science fairs. Having been a science fair judge, I can tell you that a lot of students just aren't getting it; at the low end there is painfully little comprehension of just what it means to develop and test a hypothesis, and almost none of the fact that "hypothesis" does not mean the same thing as "random half-assed guess." Which is one of the most important steps of the process in real science...

quote="Lagmonster"]Schools may not be good at separating good students from bad ones and changing their educational model accordingly. Teachers may be pricks. Changing the science curriculum to be more demanding doesn't necessarily solve either of those problems. The foundations of science, to me, are the shoulders of the giants we stand on. There will be time at the advanced level to learn WHY f=ma, but at the beginning it's most important simply to learn that it does, how to understand the kind of math needed to use the equation, and how to take measurements so as to have accurate data going in and coming out.[/quote]We already do this.

As an aside, while I allow for the relevance of critical thinking in a science education, whenever I hear "must teach more skepticism!" from a skeptic, I sometimes worry that they aren't concerned with teaching kids science, but with teaching kids to defend themselves against pseudoscience and other dishonesty. It's an admirable goal, but not under the guise of a science education.

I disagree. Historically, the first step in mastering science was learning how to learn science: much of what we had to wait until the 1600s and 1700s to discover, we could have known centuries earlier if the institutional mindset had been there.

Something similar holds true in an individual's education. I'd much rather try to teach facts about science to an adult who's already learned critical thinking than try to teach critical thinking to an adult who knows a million science facts but doesn't know how to tell when they apply. Because then you get people who think all kinds of bizarre stuff, like the idea that "quantum physics means we can't be certain of things" implies "therefore, we don't really know anything." It's an absurdity, and it's only made possible because people learned the factoid before they learned how to think about the factoid.

[Packbat]

I wouldn't be so sure, Kanastrous - pseudoscience does try to look like science, and without specific instruction in critical thinking, one could be fooled by that appearance.

But I want to get back to Lagmonster's point, which is a valid one - one should not be overly confident that one can teach a great deal of science in a high school context, and one has a great volume of memorized science fact that is required from a secondary school education. Any proposal of "must teach x in science class" has to be formed in recognition of this pragmatic reality.

[Kanastrous]

Well, for example I would imagine that once you have taught someone some good basic examples of how to gather experimental evidence - say, Galileo's inclined-plane acceleration experiments, or what's-his-name's sealing-up-the-raw-meat to see if it spontaneously generated flies - you've equipped them to evaluate whether or not a given pseudoscientific claim was founded upon proper controlled experimentation (assuming that it's the sort of claim amenable to investigation via experiment)...

...sure, there's more to it than just experimental technique but the same idea would apply - teach by examples of good and effective practice.

[Lagmonster]

I wish we had Red to chime in on this, honestly, because none of us have either experience in education or evidence that shows success of one educational model over another.

Look at all the students in freshman physics courses whose attitude is "whatever, just show me the equations I need to memorize." Those kids will never learn the material in a useful way, at least not until they get the "just show me what I need to memorize" nonsense knocked out. Seriously, it's like pulling teeth to get them to think about a problem rather than pick one of their memorized techniques and factoids and trying to hammer the thing into submission with it.

Fair game; Uncle James taught Physics at Guelph U, and he's said more than once that kids that come in with bad habits leave with a failing grade. The question is, could more kids pick up the material before they get to their freshman year?

Encouraging those who are interested to think that way is liable to be counterproductive, from my point of view, because it favors interest in "what do I need to store in my head to master this?" over "what do I need to understand to master this?"

But you're arguing for the minority; a science curricula can't be tailored only for these top kids, because that would only serve to alienate more kids from science.

But the mental process underlying science is at best only taught during science fairs. Having been a science fair judge, I can tell you that a lot of students just aren't getting it; at the low end there is painfully little comprehension of just what it means to develop and test a hypothesis, and almost none of the fact that "hypothesis" does not mean the same thing as "random half-assed guess." Which is one of the most important steps of the process in real science...

And I'll give you that right off, though we're drifting away from adding skepticism programs to high school science classes. A child taking even elementary science should understand the terms on which science is conducted and, I'll go you one better and say that even more important than that is to practice being able to take accurate measurements. I don't get the feeling that many people day-to-day understand how to take proper account of their observations.

Something similar holds true in an individual's education. I'd much rather try to teach facts about science to an adult who's already learned critical thinking than try to teach critical thinking to an adult who knows a million science facts but doesn't know how to tell when they apply. Because then you get people who think all kinds of bizarre stuff, like the idea that "quantum physics means we can't be certain of things" implies "therefore, we don't really know anything." It's an absurdity, and it's only made possible because people learned the factoid before they learned how to think about the factoid.

Which takes us back to Twain's statement about how a little knowledge can cause lead people to a big fuckup. The problem with your example is that some subjects are too complex for the average person, even one equipped with good thinking skills, to comprehend in anything other than sound bites. The best we can say for them is that they're insulated against pseudoscience as long as their prejudices don't win out and they have the inclination to test the claims of those who claim to be authorities.

Of course, this is where we disagree that the average adult would bother sifting through their oversimplified factoids via their critical thinking skills even if they had them. Perhaps they would be equipped to think better if we trained them, but some subjects are so complex or deemed 'unnecessary' to the average person that said person remains much happier with what they think they know. Sounds like a job for science journalism.