Lloyd G. Humphreys
Notional Science Foundation Washington, D. C. 20550
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Education in icience for Nonscientists
A s we look a t today's undergraduate and graduate students, and many of their teachers, it is obvious that many of them have negative attitudes toward science. I n many cases this rejection of science also accompanies the rejection of the intellect generally and the concomitant embrace of the emotions as the basis for problem solving and action. Fortunately only a small proportion have gone so far down this road that they may be beyond reach. My discussion is oriented toward the much larger group who are troubled and confused by the problems that confront us, who are scientifically ill informed, and who might be helped by some degree of reorientation concerning the ways in which science is taught in our schools. To return for a bit to those anti-intellectuals who prefer to respond with their gut rather than with their head, an evolutionary point of view puts the problem in perspective. Homo sapiens shares with his fellow primates the full gamut of emotions. As a group the primates show intense, varied, and easily triggered emotional responses. There is nothing particularly human about responding to a problem emotionally. Homo sapiens does d i e r from the other primates, however, in his abilities to use abstract symbols and to solve problems that are complex and highly abstract. The problem is to get more people responding in a human way rather than revert to, and exalt, the primate way. At this point I am tempted to add a couple of comments on the contemporary scene. It has not infrequently been reported that rioters, particularly the young student rioters, have thrown human excrement a t the police. For any one with experience around primate colonies, it is hard to conceive of anything more primate-like than this behavior. I also note that there is a movement in my discipline, termed humanistic psychology, which glorifies the emotions, rejects scientiiic analysis of problems, and abhors all effort to quantify psychological concepts and relationships. This movement has clearly been misnamed; perhaps atavistic psychology would be more apt. It represents the way in which a chimpanzee would go about trying to solve the problems of his fellow chimps, but it is not distinctly human any more than the digestive and elimine tive processes are distinctly human. The security blanket has a function, but it does not help solve many problems. Whether the attitudes of students are generally antiintellectual or more narrowly anti-scientific, i t is true This paper was read in substantially its present form at the meetof the Division of Chemical Education. Seotember. 1970. -1t renments the ~ersonaloniniom of the authorind do&
not necessarily besr the endorsement of the Nations1 Science Foundation.
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that enrollments in science are dropping during a time period when increasing numbers of students are entering our colleges. There have been absolute decreases in the numbers of first year graduate students in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering in the last couple of years. Enrollment in undergraduate courses is down, or at best not growing. Furthermore there is a concerted attack on requirements for degrees, and in particular the general education area, or distribution requirements. As the latter movement grows, further decreases will follow. All this is taking place a t a time when an educated citizenry is needed as never before. Financial support of research is also on the decline and is a problem of major importance in its own right. The causes for this decline are in part different, but there may also he some overlap. Members of the executive and legislative branches of our government were students themselves not too many years ago, and I suspect that many of them were not well satisfied with their education in science. What is wrong with the education of nonscientists in science? Eight introductory semester hours in any physical science or mathematics is not a realistic way of providing the background in physical science necessary for educated citizenship. The fault is not primarily the lack of interchangeability of introductory courses, although it is true that these courses are not interchangeable. Mathematics is not a science, and most mathematicians do not think like scientists, but the solution is not to require of every student physics, as a colleague half-jokingly suggested, or (with due regard for my audience) even chemistry. It is probably not much of an overstatement that most introductory courses in science are organized and taught as if the entire class consisted of futurePhD's in the discipline. This approach was not as much a t fault fifty years ago as today, but educational patterns have changed. In 1920 less than 30% of our population of high school age graduated from high school. This group, by and large, was in the highest 30% of our population in intelligence. From this group about half and largely the upper half in intelligence, entered college. Today approximately 80y0 of our population of high school age graduates from high school and about half of this group goes on to college. Again these groups tend to be from the upper part of the distribution of intelligence, but the size of the area under the curve is substantially more than twice what it was half a century ago. High school students in 1920 were generally more superior intellectually relative to their peers than students who enter college today, while those who entered college in 1920 were about a t the level of graduate students today. Treating each stu-
dent as if he were a future PhD, or a t least a BA in the discipline, involved no serious intellectual error in the earlier day. Even if today's students are better prepared and have a higher level of intellectual competence than the earlier group, the intellectual demands of science have become proportionately higher. A second major problem is that even among students of high ability who are able intellectually to master the fare we place before them, there seems to be less docility than in a previous era. The motivation to work and study just because authorities state that the subject matter is important appears to have decreased. It is also probable, in my opinion, that motivation is reduced today by the fact that personal gain from study is less obvious to the student. I suspect that widespread affluence is part of the background for this development. Another part is the increasing commonness of the baccalaureate degree. Note aho it is the gain that is less obvious, not that students are any more or less motivated by external incentives than wtls true in the past. This observation is one that I wish to expand on a little. People in the educational enterprise a t all levels tend to think moralistically about the motivation of their students rather than psychologically. The argument goes like this. Students ought to he interested in learning for its own sake. When we put good sound science before them, and they don't learn, there is something wrong with the students rather t,han with our curriculum or our teaching methods. Yet when an investigator tries to be more psychologicltl and mauipulate the mot,ivation of his students, and even when he demonstrates the effectiveness of his curriculum and his methods in ways that would ordinarily carry great weight, he is frequently assailed because he obtained achievement by bribing his students to learn. We bribe business and union men to produce goods for us, we bribe physicians, nurses, and hospitals to cure our diseases, we bribe lawyers to protect our legal rights, and we bribe scientists with salary, rank, and other symbols of distinction to increase basic knowledge. But when first graders reach a level of speed and comprehension in reading substantially above that of control groups through the systematic use of external rewards, the procedures are rejected on moralistic grounds. We expect grade school kids to be more altruistic and more far-sighted in their academic motivation than adults in the world of work. There is no fundamental difference between first graders and college students, or between primary teachers and college teachers, with respect to the principles of academic learning. Students must be exposed to science if they are to learn science; students must be motivated as well as exposed to content if they are to learn; furthermore, students must be exposed to the kind of science we want them to understand and use, if they are to use it. The first principle requires no further comment, but
the second and third need interpretation. With respect to motivation, there is no good psychological basis for any single, narrow approach to human motiv. t'lon. There is no reason to believe that there is an innate interest in academic learning that, in recalcitrant cases, has been killed by poor schools. There is no reason to settle on any one methodology, whether it be democratic discovery or authoritarian drill, as the key to student motivatiou. It does not matter particularly whether motivation be intrinsic to the task or extrinsic to the task. A pragmatic, empirical approach, however, is essential. If our students are unmotivated, it is our job to provide the motivation. The third principle that curriculum content reflects the aims of instruction is exceedingly important. The problem is that use of learning in new situations, or the transfer of acquired content to new problem areas, is almost always more restricted than our hopes or expectations.' We need to look a t the kind of problems involving science that a citizen is likely to face and work backwards from there to curriculum content. Abstract physical principles obtained from present courses may furnish all of the guidelines needed for social problem solution, but without practice in applying physical principles to such problems the typical student does not usually make the transfer. There may be interaction between the second and third principles. A problem-solving curriculum may well induce motivation in otherwise unmotivated students. Student rhetoric should not be accepted in toto, but the demand for relevance is important. On the other hand, student stipulation of what is and is not relevant may be quite arbitrary-in, for example, the highly vocal opposition to ROTC programs-and may be disregarded. I am not going to try to describe in any detail the content of a general education course in physical science that would meet my requirements. Subject matter specialists are much more competent to do this than I. There are many useful recommendations in the report of the recent Snowmass Conference. I can make a few suggestions. It should be possible to teach good science organized around environmental problems. The energy problem involves geology, physics, and chemistry. Water and air pollution offer similar opportunities. A second possible organization could involve present technologies and their scientific bases and origins. How many of today's students, do you suppose, have made blanket condemnations of science while their solid state hi-fi's were playing in the background? The chemistry of detergents and alternatives to their use, or their chemical modification, constitutes another technology of the sort I have in mind. Superimposed on either of the above kinds of organization might be more attention to the personalities of scientists. People are more interested in people than in ideas per se. There is drama in the life of Robert Oppenheimer as well as Galileo. There is one important risk involved in the sort of 'There are many disoussions of the problem of transfer in the curriculum development program I have outlined: psychological litereture. An older article applying the princinamely, it might not work. But educational experiples of transfer to general education by the present author still represents a valid summary of the problem (see HUMPHREYS, mentation, by and large, can not be carried on in tfhe laboratory. I t requires students and a curriculum and L. G., Transfer of training in general education, Journal of Gencareful evaluation. We can find ont only by trying. e m l E d w a t i a , 5,210-16 (1951)).
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There is also an unimportant risk: namely, colleagues will claim that science has been watered down and degraded, standards have been lowered, and teachers of such courses may be looked on askance. These are risks that must be run and care used to minimize them. Relevant does not necessarily imply sloppy or inaccurate or superficial. For example, the addition of laboratory experiences should be encouraged even though relevant ones might be quite diflicult to develop and manage. But the logical justification for this approach may be the best answer. I n today's world it is cer-
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tainly bet,ter to go beyond teaching a lot of science to a few students and try to teach some science to the much larger number who are either untouched or turned off by existing courses. My conclusion is brief and to the point. It is modeled on the old TV Western "Have Gun, Will Travel." The National Science Foundation, including its educational component, is looking forward to a fairly lean budget period, but for innovative, high quality curriculum projects our motto is "Have Funds, Will Support."
