Book and Media Review pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Review of Teaching the Nature of Science: Perspectives and Resources Carmen J. Giunta* Department of Chemistry, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York 13214, United States The book’s focus is on teaching NOS to develop thinking citizens; it is not primarily about training future scientists on the nature of their prospective profession (although they are not exempt from the need for good NOS instruction). Teaching NOS has a prominent place in science education standards. Furthermore, understanding how science works and critically assessing the validity of scientific claims have clear relevance for informed decision-making at the personal and collective (political) levels. How to react to the 2009 recommendation by a U.S. government task force on the appropriate age to begin mammogram screening and how to judge policy proposals on climate change are matters of general interest and impact. So the book’s audience can be considered to be high school science teachers, students and faculty in science education programs, and science faculty who teach general education courses to nonscience majors. Because the science of most widespread public interest tends to be relatively unsettled and still developing sciencescience in the makingit is the nature of that kind of science that is most relevant to teach. Understanding how scientific claims become established, how they proceed (or fail to proceed) from science in the making to textbook science, is the heart of the process or practice of science. Few science educators, I think, would disagree with the goal of developing in students an understanding about how science and scientists generate scientific knowledge. Disagreements may begin, however, over the author’s conception of NOS and his prescription of how best to teach it. Effective and engaging teaching of NOS, he asserts, comes from the study of cases in their particulars. Furthermore, history of science is a rich source of material for NOS lessons by providing detailed insight into how some aspects of today’s textbook science came to be established. History of science can document key data, proposed interpretations, social context, role of chance, and many other factors involved in the eventual transformation of striking observations or tentative explanations into established scientific knowledge. It is not difficult, however, to imagine objections to historical case studies on the grounds that they are time-consuming (taking away from teaching content, perhaps) and outside the expertise of most science teachers. There are many good reasons for using history as a source of NOS lessons, and Allchin makes an excellent argument for it. History provides, well, historical perspective on scientific developments that have become established. It sheds light on the processes and contingencies that resulted ultimately in their establishment rather than the heat that sometimes surrounds contentious current science in the making. Even though the goal is to enable students to make informed judgments about
Teaching the Nature of Science: Perspectives and Resources, by Douglas Allchin. SHiPS Education Press: Saint Paul, MN, 2013. xii + 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-9892524-0-9 (paperback). $40.00.
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hat ought science educators to teach about the nature of science (henceforth NOS, as abbreviated throughout this book)? And how ought NOS to be taught? These are the primary questions Douglas Allchin poses and answers in Teaching the Nature of Science. Allchin’s answers reflect considerable expertise in NOS and in pedagogy over a broad range of scientific disciplines. His passionate interest in developing understanding of NOS in the general public via the educational system is obvious throughout the book. The answers he proposes are thoughtful and persuasiveand not without controversy.
Cover image provided by SHiPS Education Press and reproduced with permission.
The book is structured in two major portions entitled Perspectives, and Resources, respectively. Perspectives serves as an introduction both to salient features of NOS and to Allchin’s recommendations on how to teach it, and it comprises the first 160 pages. It introduces readers to traditional notions of NOS (such as falsifiability) as well as more recent notions informed by history and sociology of science, and to some extent philosophy. Allchin does not assume that readers have a significant background in these fields, and he also provides an ample bibliography to supplement his exposition. At the same time as he introduces these perspectives on NOS, he makes the argument for teaching it by means of detailed, historically based case studies. Resourcescase studies, references to more cases, and advice on how to construct casescomprise the next 100 pages. Notes, an extensive bibliography and an index complete the volume. © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
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elicit real understanding and engagement among students. They also require considerable commitment from the teacher in preparation and in time both in and out of class even to use these caseslet alone to develop similar ones. The author undoubtedly asks a lot of science teachers in proposing to teach NOS through detailed and authentic case studies informed by solid history. In the end, the book’s vision of NOS is a rich one and meticulously well informed; Teaching the Nature of Science would serve both future scientists and thoughtful citizens well. It is difficult for me to imagine how to provide a comparable education in NOS by any means less arduous than the path Allchin describes. Inclusion of at least some of the perspectives and resources described in this book would enhance any course that treats NOS.
just those contentious issues of contemporary science in the making, teachers can avoid taking sides in present-day disputes by teaching about episodes from the past. Historical perspective can also be important in revealing biases that were not apparent to participants at the time, immersed as they were in their own cultural assumptions. Just as not everything that is asserted under the name of science is reliable science, not everything asserted under the name of history is reliable history. Allchin repeatedly warns against scientific hagiography, the romantic depiction of a lone scientist heroically persisting in the pursuit of the truth in spite of the shortsightedness of contemporaries in the field. He also criticizes the oversimplification of history to shoehorn past events into an idealized version of scientific process or into a narrative to support ideological preconceptions. Some readers may raise objections to Allchin’s vision of NOS itself. That vision is incredibly well grounded in history, philosophy, and sociology of science, including both recent and older scholarship. The author advises including multiple perspectives on NOS rather than presenting a monolithic vision. Respect for multiple perspectives, however, is not the same as uncritical acceptance of them, and Allchin warns of limitations in the perspectives of scientists and sociologists. He is critical of many traditional formulations of NOS, particularly those that describe idealized conceptions of how science should be conducted. Falsifiability, for example, he quite rightly notes is a much-cited aspect of how science ought to work, one that real scientists often fail to follow. He considers deductive logic to be overemphasized by some as the primary or even exclusive source of scientific knowledge. It is difficult to disagree with many of Allchin’s criticisms; however, some of his targets struck me as “straw men”. For instance, in his chapter on teaching “lawless science”, the author rightly criticizes the teaching of scientific laws such as Boyle’s law as if they were universally valid. Teaching the limitations to laws, he notes, is as important as teaching the laws themselves, and it is crucial to avoid giving the impression that deviations from law-like behavior come about because nature is somehow in the wrong. Yet over the course of that chapter, I wondered whether responsible science teachers really do teach scientific laws as infallible. Does the teaching of scientific laws really imply that all natural phenomena follow simple regularities? Readers of this Journal will be pleased to see chemical topics well represented throughout the book. Boyle’s law is treated in some detail as a prime example of a scientific law whose limitations ought to be treated at least as explicitly as its regularity. Joseph Priestley appears in several contextsas a researcher not very reliant on theory, as a person whose science is sometimes portrayed as flowing out of his Enlightenment views on politics and religion, and as an adherent to the phlogiston theory of combustion. Indeed, one of the cases in the Resources section “rekindles” the phlogiston theory of combustion as an example of a model that has predictive power in a limited sphere of application. Another of the Resources is a role-playing exercise based on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, although the emphasis in the exercise is more biological than chemical. The author’s advice on how to teach NOS is quite ambitious. But he devotes about 40% of the body of the book to examples of NOS cases of the sort he describes: classroom-tested cases (including teaching notes), references to still more cases, and advice on how to construct and select cases. The examples he provides are well designed activities that have the potential to
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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