The Nature of Science: From Test Tubes to Youtube (Sacred BOVINES‪)‬

Climategate. Erroneous links between the measles vaccine and autism. Revised mammogram recommendations. Suspect communication with coma patients. Such cases in the news in the last year are striking because biological knowledge will not help the typical citizen interpret the key issues. One needs to understand instead the nature of science (NOS): Whose expertise can be trusted, especially when experts seem to disagree? What public presentations of scientific findings are credible? How do scientists manage data? How do they communicate with each other? What conditions warrant a change in scientific consensus? How do value judgments relate to verifiable information? How might scientists make "honest" mistakes, and how does one detect them? These cases exemplify vividly the educational goal of scientific literacy--here, to use knowledge about how science works to inform real-life decisions, both personal and public. Knowledge of NOS may be as important as--if not more important than--knowledge of content. Approaches to NOS in education harken back to the 1960s, at least (Lederman et al., 1998). By the mid-1990s, amidst various reforms, the characterization of NOS seemed to reduce to a tidy list of 8 to 10 simple concepts (AAAS Project 2061, 1993; McComas, 1996; McComas & Olson, 1998; National Science Teachers Association, 2000; Osborne et al., 2003). For example: science is tentative; scientists are creative; observations are theory-laden; science is affected by its social and cultural milieu (Lederman et al., 2002). The list has become a largely uncontested consensus. Another sacred bovine, perhaps? Here, I review how such tenets inform the cases above, as touchstones. That leads to a simpler, more coherent way to characterize NOS--one that is also more practical in terms of teaching and evaluating student understanding (for fuller discussion, see Allchin, 2010).