Students, Science, and Creativity

What do students think science is all about? It's an important question, because we would like to see an increasing number of students think about science as a possible career. And, even if they don't pursue further studies in science, we would like to see them leaving high school with at a solid foundation of scientific literacy , including a general idea of how science works.

The desire for general science literacy has a practical dimension. Take the rapidly changing scientific understanding about the rate of global warming, where the scientific consensus of a decade ago is in a state on ongoing revision as scientists discover that polar ice is disappearing much more quickly than anticipated. Someone who thinks that science is all about certainty might look at these changing understandings and decide that no one really knows what is going on -- and tune the whole issue out. A scientifically literate person would, instead, recognize that so much change is indicative of new information and new thinking and is a reason to take the research, and the problem, seriously.

We Decided to Ask Them

This fall we worked with high school teachers in a number of schools and asked them to have students fill out a short survey that asked about things such as whether scientists observing the same phenomenon will reach the same conclusions, whether scientific theories change, whether science reflects social and cultural norms, whether scientists are creative, and about the methodology of science. The survey we used is one developed by Ling Liang and other educational researchers. Known as "SUSSI," it is a survey that has been used in a wide variety of settings.

We are still analyzing the results of these surveys. So far, we have data from about 140 students in 5 different schools. Most of the students are either freshmen or sophomores. In all cases these surveys were completed BEFORE the students had the chance to engage in their own scientific investigations in our "Acadia Learning" program, where we transport scientific research at Acadia out to schools.

How the Students Answered

Across the board, the students had difficulty with this survey; all the classes demonstrated some real confusion about what how scientific knowledge emerges, grows, and changes. For example, students tended to agree with the idea that "Scientists’ observations of the same event will be the same because observations are facts." The great majority of students (85%) agreed that "Scientific theories exist in the natural world and are uncovered through scientific investigations," with most of them agreeing very strongly. In other words, students think that science is kind of like an Easter egg hunt: the scientific facts are out there to be uncovered, and the scientists job is find them. Scientists are a little like the guys walking up and down a beach with metal detectors -- they are trying to find things.

We got a different angle on this view of science and scientists from the questions about science and creativity. About 3/4 of the students agreed with the statement that "Scientists do not use their imagination and creativity because these conflict with their logical reasoning," and, similarly, felt that there was no room for imagination or creativity in collecting data.

The idea that science is all fact, logic, and process and has no room for imagination or creativity is less surprising when we look at what students believe about the scientific process. The idea that there is such a thing as THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD (the capitalization reflects student beliefs) and that science is all about using it is very much on students' minds. More than 70% of the respondents agree with the statements that "Scientists follow the same step-by-step scientific method" and that "When scientists use the scientific method correctly, their results are true and accurate."

Putting the Answers Together

The interesting thing about these answers is that they are consistent with each other. The problem is not that students are without beliefs or views about science; the problem is that their beliefs are wrong. They understand scientific knowledge to be a set of facts waiting to be discovered, and they see the work of scientists as the orderly, logical application of something called "the scientific method" in order to uncover those facts. Good science is about doing the right things, in the right order, to get the right answers.

This understanding is not just wrong, it is dangerously wrong. Consider again the rapidly changing evolution of scientific understanding of global warming. Viewing this from the perspective that the students have, there is some set of facts about global warming that we need to discover. The fact that scientists are changing their minds can only mean that they have not yet found the right facts (or, perhaps, that some people are bending the facts to suit their politics). The reasonable thing for a layperson to do, in such a situation, would be to ignore the controversy and discussion and wait until the facts are clear.

What the students are missing--and missing nearly totally--is the realization that scientific knowledge is constructed. Building on what we already know, scientists work to fit new observations into our previous understanding. When they fit, the observations confirm the understanding. When they don't, scientists use their training, imagination, and creativity to modify our understanding. Quoting from Ling Liang, et al., as they talk about the idea of "tentativeness" in their description of the SUSSI survey:

Scientific knowledge is both tentative and durable. Having confidence in scientific knowledge is reasonable while realizing that such knowledge may be abandoned or modified in light of new evidence or reconceptualization of prior evidence and knowledge. The history of science reveals both evolutionary and revolutionary changes. (p. 30)

Pedagogy

A couple of years ago I was working with a group of high school students with Sarah Nelson, a geochemist at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research who does a lot of work at Acadia. We were guiding the students through some field research in which they divided into groups to devise experiments about mercury in soils. The experiments reflected hypotheses that the students developed. When we got the results back from the lab, the data were consistent with none of the hypotheses. In fact, the data pointed in a direction contrary to all expectations.

For us adults, this development was suddenly very interesting in ways that went well beyond our educational objectives with the students. The surprising results meant that there was something that we didn't understand -- we had happened onto something new. That was a good thing. Suddenly we had something to think about. (In fact, we are still working on confirming and understanding those results.)

But for the students the whole effort was a failure. Their hypotheses were wrong, the experiments did not work out as expected, and they had gotten the wrong answer.

The difference between the students' response, on the one hand, and Sarah's and my response, on the other, was striking and thought-provoking. This experience has informed much of the work that Sarah and I have done together with students since that session. We recognized that so much of what goes on in school is about getting the right answer. This is true even in science "experiments" in school, which usually, if the students follow all instructions, result in the "right" outcome. Given that, why would students think that encountering a result that none of us fully understood, and that contradicted all predictions, was a good thing?

The data that we are collecting this year about student understanding of science shows that this focus on "right answers" is not just an artifact of multiple choice tests and other activities in school, but also reflects what students believe about science. In their view, science is not supposed to be surprising, and when it is surprising that means that someone has messed up. Students have somehow gotten the idea that science, done right, uncovers truth and that it does so by using an approach akin to the instructions for assembling a shelving unit from Home Depot: "First, unpack the carton and sort out the different sized screws and bolts ..." An unexpected result is not a chance to revisit assumptions and use one's imagination to think about what else might be going on -- it is, instead, evidence that you made a mistake and got off on the wrong track.

Our experience a couple years ago with students focusing on getting "the right answer" has shaped all the work that Sarah and I have done subsequently in connecting teachers and students to research at Acadia National Park. It is why we engage teachers and students in new inquiries, where none of us knows just what we will find. Now we have even more reason to do so. The focus on "right answers" is not just a reflection of the nature of schools. It also grows out of a fundamental misunderstanding of what scientific knowledge is, and how we develop it. It is the kind of misunderstanding that leads to bad decisions. We need to try to correct it.