Mass Extinctions and Environmental Science Literacy

Elizabeth Kolbert published an excellent article in the May 25, 2009 issue of The New Yorker titled "The Sixth Extinction?" Acadia Partners is in the environmental science literacy business, and so I think a lot about what should be included in the set of basic things students should know to be scientifically literate. How about mass extinctions?

Since the beginning of life on Earth there have been five really big ones -- "mega-extinctions -- die offs in which more than half of the species on Earth disappeared. According to many sources, including the very useful and detailed 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Biodiversity Synthesis by the World Resources Institute, species have been disappearing at a rate that is between 100 and 1,000 times the normal rate over the past few hundred years. The rate of die-off has been particularly fast over the past 50 years. It appears that we are in the midst of the sixth mega-extinction. But if you ask people about the current great mass extinction, most will be bewildered; some will think you are crazy.

I surveyed several leading high school environmental science and biology texts for discussions of mass extinctions. Most of them do explain that extinction is part of evolution and that really big extinctions open ecosystem niches that can be occupied by new species. A couple of the books explain that the last great mass extinction, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, was followed by the rapid emergence of mammals. (One could make a good argument that humans have the fifth mega-extinction to thank for their current dominant role on the planet.) The environmental science texts discuss the current loss of biodiversity. One of the books that I looked at actually included the idea that we could be in a sixth major mass extinction. In all cases the discussion covered just a few pages in a text that is 600 to over 1,000 pages long.

There are good reasons for this light coverage of the current mass extinction and for the general lack of awareness about it: it is a difficult subject. Kolbert's New Yorker article is a good place to start in thinking about what makes it so difficult.

Extinction and Humans

We know that extinction happens when humans begin to populate an area. This is not just a recent phenomenon. Kolbert traces the relationship between human settlement and extinction back 50,000 years, to the time when the first humans were arriving in Australia.

At that time, Australia was home to a fantastic assortment of enormous animals; these included a wombatlike creature the size of a hippo, a land tortoise nearly as big as a VW Beetle, and the giant short-faced kangaroo, which grew to be ten feet tall. Then all of the continent's largest animals disappeared. Every species of marsupial weighing more than two hundred pounds--there were nineteen of them--vanished, as did three species of giant reptiles and a flightless bird with stumpy legs known as Genyornis newtoni.

This pattern of sudden die-off coincident with the arrival of the first people in an area was repeated in New Zealand, South America, North America, the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere. Hunting appears to be the cause in some cases, but cannot explain everything. For example, 90% of Hawaii's bird species disappeared when people first came to the islands. A clue emerges from some work on the Australian extinction.

A few years ago, researchers analyzed hundreds of bits of emu and Genyornis newtoni eggshell, some dating from long before the first people arrived in Australia and some from after. They found that around forty-five thousand years ago, rather abruptly, emus went from eating all sorts of plants to relying mainly on shrubs. The researchers hypothesized that Australia's early settlers periodically set the countryside on fire--perhaps to flush out prey--a practice that would have reduced the variety of plant life. Those animals which, like emus, could cope with the changed landscape survived, while those which, like Genyronis, could not died out.

Unintended Change

Setting fires over large swaths of countryside is clearly a dramatic--and intentional--impact on the ecosystem. So, from an educational standpoint, the story of Genyornis newtoni might be a useful example of how ecosystems work and of the potential impact of large ecosystem changes--an example of the kind of thing that modern day humans shouldn't do.

The problem with the much more recent die offs is that the human impacts, though just as devastating, can be subtler and unintentional. Kolbert traveled to Panama to trace the story of the recent sudden die-off of frogs and other amphibians. She portrays the speed with which these massive changes to ecosystems can take place.

In the late nineteen-eighties, a herpetologist named Marty Crump went to Costa Rica to study golden toads; she was forced to change her project because, from one year to the next, the toad essentially vanished. ... Probably simultaneously, in central Costa Rica the populations of twenty species of frogs and toads suddenly crashed. In Ecuador, the jambato toad, a familiar visitor to back-yard gardens, disappeared in a matter of years. And in northeastern Australia biologists noticed that more than a dozen amphibian species, including the southern day frog, one of the more common in the region, were experiencing drastic declines.

Kolbert follows the story of these die-offs, going on jungle frog collecting expeditions in the dark of the night and talking with a variety of scientists. Habitat destruction and chemical pollution are undoubtedly important factors, but the principal cause appears to be a chytrid fungus. Chytrid fungi are everywhere. In most cases they play a role in the decomposition and recycling of dead plants and animals. But in this case, a pair of pathologists working on dead frogs from the National Zoo discovered a previously unknown chytrid, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (or Bd for short), that breaks down keratin in living amphibians.

Bd is not new; subsequent research found it in frog specimens collected in the 1930s. In particular, it seems common in the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. The difference is that the African clawed frog and Bd seem to coexist happily. The problems emerge only when other species of frogs who have never before encountered Bd become infected with the fungus.

The next question, of course, was how did Bd move from South Africa to the Americas? This was an easier question to answer. Again, quoting Kolbert's article:

In the early nineteen-thirties, a British zoologist named Lancelot Hogben discovered that female Xenopus laevis, when injected with certain types of human hormones, laid eggs. His discovery became the basis for a new kind of pregnancy test and, starting in the late nineteen-thirties, thousands of African clawed frogs were exported out of Cape Town. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, it was not uncommon for obstetricians to keep tanks full of the frogs in their offices.

Discarding unwanted frogs (African clawed frogs have now been introduced to North and South American and Europe) or even just discarding aquarium water would spread the fungus. It appears that the massive frog die off is an unintended consequence of work by doctors a half century ago.

What is it About Humans?

Kolbert's story is a good example of why extinctions are associated with the presence of humans: by our nature, we change ecosystems.

A couple of weeks ago I was previewing the new Ken Burns documentary on National Parks. In the opening few minutes there is footage of grizzly bears standing in a waterfall and catching salmon as the fish leap up over the falls. The bears just catch them in their mouths in mid-leap. Spectacular. No doubt about it: they have eye-mouth coordination that goes way beyond anything I could do. But that does not mean that I can't catch salmon; I would just build a trap.

Humans aren't the biggest, fastest, most physically powerful animals. We survive and and excel as a species by making things and changing things. We set fire to the forest. We turn forests and grasslands into fields in which we cultivate crops. We domesticate animals and move them around into different environments.

There is nothing wrong with this. It's not, at its roots, a moral issue: it's what we do to survive. It's our species' great innovation. But it does have the effect of changing the structure of ecosystems more quickly than the rate at which other species can adapt to change. So they die.

Evolution and Rates of Change

Understanding that life evolves is one of the most basic elements of science literacy. It is a significant learning objective for high school biology classes. One of the key components of that understanding--and a challenge in communicating it to students--has to do with rates of change.

One of Darwin's great contributions to our understanding of the world was the notion that great, significant changes in the structure of life could result from the aggregation of many small changes given enough time. His work built directly on the work of Charles Lyell, the founder of modern geology, who made the same observation about changes in the physical structure of the earth. Before Lyell came along, it was generally believed that change came in the form of catastrophic events, such as Noah's flood. Lyell was an advocate for a new paradigm, known as "uniformitarianism," which asserted that the world around us is shaped by slow moving forces that are continual and ongoing.

The idea the enormous changes could result from small effects was a difficult concept in the 19th century, and it is still a difficult thing for students to grasp today. How could water running over rock create the Grand Canyon? How could random mutation and natural selection result in humans? However, I think it is fair to say that most students today do accept these explanations, even if they don't have an intuitive feel for the scales of time and change involved. Over the past century and a half, scientists and educators have successfully established uniformitarianism as the way to understand big changes over time. I suppose we could say that it is another part of science literacy.

Perhaps that is part of why understanding and accepting the notion of mass extinctions is so difficult. They don't happen slowly; they violate the core assumptions of the uniformitarian paradigm. As Kolbert points out, Darwin certainly believed in extinction, but also believed that it only happened slowly. It is only over the last twenty-five years or so that there has been growing acceptance in the scientific community that Darwin was partially wrong: Yes, great changes can happen slowly over long periods of time, but they can also happen quickly.

That notion--that great change can happen quickly as well as slowly--is another candidate idea for inclusion in basic science literacy. That seems particularly true in an era such as the one we are entering. Without that idea, students have no way of getting their hands around the idea that we are in the midst of a sixth great extinction.

Environmental Science Literacy - and Why This One's Difficult

At this point, this is another one of those articles that I need to turn over to the reader. What follows is a quick summary of where we are at.

• Humans are now causing massive extinctions. We know from studies such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that humans have increased the rate of extinction by about 1,000 times over background rates typical of the Earth's history.
  
  
• Understanding extinction is fundamental to understanding evolution. Evolution is a basic component of science literacy and a core part of high school science education. The fact that die-offs happen quickly as well as slowly is basic information that people need in order to understand the makeup of the world around them.
  
  
• The fact that humans cause extinctions appears to be a fundamental fact of life. Our species' great innovation is the ability to create large scale changes to the environment around us--changes that require language, the ability to plan, and other capabilities that are hallmarks of the species. Large scale, rapid environmental change inevitably kills off some species that depended on the old structure of the ecosystem.

Back in October, 2006 I took a different look at this same problem. (This blog entry notes, by the way, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at an all time high at the time of the writing. Talk about rapid change ...) The article is a review of Mitch Thomashow's book, Bringing the Biosphere Home. The question raised in Mitch's book and in my article is how do we teach people, particularly young people, about global environmental change? The current great extinction is a prime example of such change.

In that article I listed a number of skills and understandings that need to be in place to support comprehension of the concept of rapid mass extinction. Students need some first-hand experience with biodiversity: They need to be able to identify different species themselves, so that they can see the diversity. They need to spend time outdoors so that they have a personal way of valuing richness and diversity. They need practice in working with different time scales and spatial scales. (This kind of practice needs to be the subject of the kinds of "exemplary problems" that support internalization of a scientific paradigm.)

The learning progressions required to support understanding of mass extinction take time and substantial effort. But I think that the biggest barrier to accepting the notion of anthropogenic mass extinction is less conceptual than it is emotional. Thomashow captured the problem with a quotation from a book by Scott Russell Sanders titled Hunting for Hope. The quotation is from Sanders' son:

You make me feel the planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it. There’s no room for hope. Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot of living still to do. I have to believe there’s a way we can get out of this mess. Otherwise what’s the point? Why study, why work — why do anything at all if it’s going to hell?

How do we respond to such questions? Clearly, there does need to be a focus on hope. But hope for what? That everything will stay the same? That we can avoid mass die-offs? That would be false hope. That the human species can find a way through the current extinction and find a way to live in a changed, but still resilient world? That seems like necessary hope. (See the article "Beyond Naturalness" for more thinking about changed systems and resilience.)

I also wonder whether it might help to move away from some of the moral opprobrium associated with concepts such as mass extinction. It seems that we send the message that extinction is a tragedy and that humans' role in creating biodiversity loss is wrong and should be stopped. That's not possible.

What if, instead, we delivered a message more like, "Yes, humans do cause other species to die off. That's a fact. It happens anytime you introduce big changes in a complex ecosystem. Get over it. What we need to focus on is how to manage and conserve systems so that they are as resilient as they can be. Failure to do that could kill us. Managing ourselves to sustain resilient systems may be the biggest challenge to confront the species. It is an exciting time to be alive." Or something like that -- how would students respond to that message?

Those of you who are teachers -- middle school, high school, or college -- do you introduce students to the concept of mass extinctions? If so, do you make students aware that we are in the midst of another big one? How do you approach that? What problems and insights have you encountered?

Those of you who are students, scientists, resource managers, or simply people concerned about the environment -- what do you think about the idea of making it easier to discuss mass extinction by reducing the emphasis on morality ("Thou shalt not ..."), recognizing that extinction has been and probably will continue to be a consequence of human activity, and focusing on the question of how to manage and minimize extinction? Is this a way to put discussion of extinction and resilience (the countermeasure) back on the table? Or is it starting down a slippery slope?

Let's discuss this.

Paradigms, Puzzles, and Citizen Science in Schools

A month or so ago I finally got around to reading Thomas Kuhn's classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I say "finally" because the book was first published in 1962, while I was still in junior high school. The book was--and still is-- widely read and referenced. As an indicator of the book's impact, consider that the term "paradigm shift" came into common usage through this book.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (I am going to call it TSSR) is engaging--the best book I have read in quite a while--though not an easy read. Kuhn refers to it as an "essay." The term is apt, because TSSR is a closely reasoned argument for what was, in 1962, a new view of science.

It's worth spending a moment to summarize the old view and the new one that Kuhn sets forth in TSSR because, despite TSSR, the old view is still alive and well in science education. The contrast of views also raises interesting questions about what we should be doing in science education and about how citizen science might fit into that program.

The Old View

Kuhn was a science historian, which is why a key question in TSSR is how we should understand scientific progress. Kuhn describes the traditional, pre-TSSR view of scientific progress as follows: (All quotations are from the paperback, third edition of TSSR. I also note that Kuhn only refers to all scientists as men ... sigh ... that was then.)

If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not, have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation. Scientific development becomes the piecemeal process by which these items have been added, singly and in combinations, to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge. (p. 1)

The key image here is the constantly growing stockpile of knowledge. In this traditional view, the story of science is one of incremental accumulation in which, as each decade and century passes, we are a little closer to complete understanding.

The work of science education, given this view, would be to introduce students to the knowledge in that pile. Kuhn's use of the word "constellation" acknowledges that the stockpile is structured. The word "edifice" is sometimes used to describe this view of science: it is a large, complex building constructed brick by brick since the time of Aristotle. Science education should then be about introducing students to the structure and content at the foundation level.

This view of science matches pretty closely with what students tell us when we survey them about the nature of science. It is a pile of facts about the world acquired through a process called the scientific method.

Kuhn's View: Paradigms

TSSR argues that this picture of science is not supported by historical fact. Kuhn makes this argument by looking at examples. The transition from the Ptolemaic, earth centered view of the universe to the Copernican view did not add another brick to the edifice of science; instead it completely rearranged the bricks. Similarly, the movement from a phlogiston theory of combustion to Lavoisier's oxygen theory was a complete turn around in thinking about what happens when something burns. Or, to take another example, the quantum view of light as electromagnetic radiation completely displaced wave theory and a belief that there must be something called "ether" to support the propagation of light waves.

Kuhn recognizes that these upheavals, as important as they are, are the exception rather than the rule. He distinguishes between "normal science" and the much more unusual condition of science in a time of revolution. Normal science is where most of the day-to-day work of science gets done. It is where the steady, cumulative work happens.

So, you have normal science working away for hundreds of years, piling up observations, most of which fit with the theories in place at that time, but including a few that don't fit. When the things that don't fit are numerous or important enough, the normal scientific work enters a time of crisis, followed by a revolution. Then normal scientific work returns. The revolution in thinking about geology in the 1950s and 1960s, from a geosyncline theory of movement of the earth's crust to plate tectonics, is a recent example of such a revolution followed by a return to productive, normal science.

Kuhn asks whether the scientists working before such a revolution--say, on the phlogiston theory of combustion--were somehow any less "scientific" in their work. Take, for example, Joseph Priestley, one of the people credited with discovering oxygen. He went to his grave defending phlogiston theory, despite his discovery. Does that make him less a scientist? Was his application of "the scientific method" somehow less complete than Lavoisier's?

Of course not. The point is that there is more than "scientific method" that binds normal scientific work together in any discipline at any point in time. Kuhn calls the collection of values, beliefs, methods, shared examples, and shared problems a "paradigm." What separated Priestley and Lavoisier was immersion in two different paradigms.

The word "paradigm" has come into common use thanks to Kuhn--and now means different things to different people. In understanding Kuhn's use of "paradigm" it is helpful to start with his view that scientific work is primarily about "puzzle solving." Contrast this with "discovery." Think of the image of Sir Issac Newton sitting under a tree. An apple falls and Newton suddenly has an "Aha!" moment in which the law of universal gravitation pops into his head. That's discovery.

What actually happened is that Newton went to work on the problem of explaining what was already known from Kepler's observations about the motion of the planets. The law of gravitation was the resulting solution. That's puzzle solving.

"Discovery" implies surprise: you find something that you didn't know was there. Puzzle solving, on the other hand, implies that you know in advance what the solution will look like--the puzzle is in how to get from what you know to the desired solution. Puzzles also typically come with constraints. In a crossword puzzle, all the words need to share letters. In su doku every each number can only occur once in a row, column or square. In Rubik's cube you can't take the cube apart.

A paradigm gives scientists a picture of the solution--of what they need to figure out--and the constraints that must be satisfied in reaching that solution. Scientists working within a paradigm generally know where they are headed and know the accepted practices they will use to get there.

Thinking of science as puzzle solving is very different than thinking of it as discovery. It is an important difference when we think about science education.

Paradigms and Learning Progressions

Kuhn tells us that paradigms are essential to scientific progress. They provide a "map" for scientists to follow; normal scientific research is the exploration and elucidation of the detailed landscape charted by that map. Moreover, "paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making." (p. 109)

When scientists try to work without a map (which is how science MUST work before a paradigm is established and broadly accepted) their writings are like those of the blind men describing an elephant. They talk past each other, working from different assumptions about what is real and what is important. We see some of this when we watch students present their research. There is a lot of "It could be this, or it could be that" without a way to connect to each other's work).

The other thing that we see when students engage in research without a good map of the landscape is confusion and frustration. (See the parable "Joe and the Hundreds of Holes.")

Thinking about all of this in terms of science education, it seems that TSSR is giving us important insights into the learning progression required to support student inquiry: We must somehow introduce students to the paradigm that encompasses the research they will undertake. How do we do that? If it were really a physical map, we could just draw it. But a paradigm is a map in a broader, metaphorical sense. How do we help students see the problem space covered by the paradigm? What are they key elements? How do they connect?

Kuhn suggests that the answer lies in the direction of having students solve a common core of problems. He notes that "Scientists solve puzzles by modeling them on previous puzzle-solutions." These "puzzle-solutions" become what he calls "exemplary problems." The value of having students work problems, either with pencil and paper or in the context of structured (contrived?) research settings is not just that they get better at solving problems: Working the problems introduces students to the accepted paradigm. They learn what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and how to see the world:

After he has completed a certain number [of exemplary problems], which may vary widely from one individual to the next, he views the situations that confront him as a scientist in the same gestalt as other members of his specialists' group. For him they are no longer the same situations he had encountered when his training began. He has meanwhile assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing. (p. 189)

Citizen Science

My organization works with teachers to engage students in citizen science rooted in research in the National Parks. In the Northeastern United States, mercury pollution is impacting ecosystems. The students in the schools that we work with collect samples that we analyze for mercury content. Gathering information about mercury levels in target species in different ecological settings across the Northeast helps us construct a better picture of how mercury moves and where it settles. The idea is that as the students help scientists out by collecting samples, they learn earth science, biology, and chemistry. They also learn about their National Parks and--just as important--learn what scientists do and how they do it.

This kind of work--outdoors, working with issues that matter outside the classroom, engaged in research where no one (including the teacher) knows what the result will be--is a new experience for students and teachers. We see evidence of increased student engagement, but also see evidence that students need more preparation and background knowledge to get the most from the experience. (Again, see the parable "Joe and the Hundreds of Holes.")

Kuhn's focus on paradigms and on exemplary problems as a way to assimilate them--as a "time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing"--raises two important kinds of questions about the intersection of citizen science and science education:

1. Citizen Science as Exemplary Problem: If we think of citizen science as a means to science education, we will ask, "Is the citizen science work a good exemplary problem? What is it an example of? Where does it lead? How do students build on the experience with us to get better at working these problems?"
   
   
2. Exemplary Problems to Support the Citizen Science: Thinking instead of the citizen science as the goal--something that we want to build scaffolding in earlier grades to support--we will ask, "What kinds of exemplary problems should students work on in preparation for the citizen science experience? When should they do this, and how long will it take for them to acquire the "group-licensed way of seeing" that they need to engage productively in the citizen science?"
   

These two kinds of questions could be asked with regard to any activity in science education. Restated, they are "What future learning does this activity support?" and "What support needs to be in place before I do this activity?" But the questions come into particularly sharp focus for citizen science because students are engaged in real, useful research--not just schoolwork--and are doing it in collaboration with working scientists. Our program's value as an example of scientific work is why teachers sign on.

I don't have answers to these questions. Some of them have to do with what science educators and schools want to achieve. Others have to do with what works, what's possible, and what's necessary. All are questions that we need to explore over the next couple of years.

Hearing from others--both in response to these questions and in the form of additional questions--would be a good way to start on this work.

Joe and the Hundreds of Holes: Ruminations on Inquiry Learning

Twenty years or so ago, when a was in charge of design and engineering in a small software firm in Boulder, Colorado, I had an employee named Joe who was from New York City. He was so completely from New York that he had never learned to drive, even though he was in his early twenties. Boulder was not and still is not the kind of place where you can hail a cab. So, Joe had a bicycle.

Bikes have been popular in Boulder for a long time. The town has bike lanes everywhere. So, especially since software engineers tend to be young, Joe was one of a good number of people who rode a bike to work. They were pretty nice bikes, and people brought them inside where they would be safe. We had a lot of space in cubicles and aisles filled up with bikes.

To get the bikes out of the cubes and free up space I got together with my senior engineer--who was actually a semi-pro bike racer--and fabricated racks that would allow us to hang a good number of bikes on a wall back in an odd shaped corner of the office that didn't get much use. (The office was converted from the garage and service area of an Alfa Romeo dealership. High ceilings, industrial skylights, and lots of oddly shaped spaces.)

Joe was one of our most junior engineers and so was assigned the task of mounting the racks on the wall. I brought in an electric drill, bits, and screws and set Joe to work. I told him that the racks would hold a fair amount of weight, which meant that they needed to be screwed directly into the studs behind the wallboard, rather than just into the wallboard itself. I suggested that he use a small drill bit--1/8" or so in diameter--to drill test holes to make sure that he was drilling into a stud. Then I went back to my office.

Some time later--I am guessing that it was the better part of an hour--I looked out over my cubicle to the corner where Joe was working. I expected to see at least some of the racks up on the walls.

Nothing.

So, I went back to have a look. What I saw was Joe still drilling away on test holes to locate the studs. Joe was a software engineer, and so this was very neat and well-organized work. He had drawn a horizontal line about 3 feet off the floor and was methodically drilling 1/8" diameter holes along that line, spaced 3/4' apart, and marking the places where he had found a stud. The wall looked like a "fold and tear here" perforation on a statement from the power company. Without question, Joe was finding every stud in that wall.

Expectations and Focus

Joe was--and surely still is--a bright guy. Despite this, I had a nearly overwhelming impulse to say something including the word "stupid" when I saw him kneeling there drilling away. On the other hand--this whole investigation was so carefully laid out: the penciled line, the evenly spaced holes. It was beyond stupid.

What Joe was doing was a little bit like what some students fall into as they design their own experiments in our inquiry learning program. It is a citizen science program in which the students explore mercury levels in plants and animals in forests, ponds, and marshes around their schools. Their work can be carefully thought out, but also somehow misdirected -- heading off in surprising directions that are not likely to be fruitful.

I think that their problem, like Joe's, is that they are missing information about the bigger picture of the system that they are working with.

Joe was missing information in two important areas. The first was that he needed a working model of the structure of the system hidden by the wallboard--an expectation about the likely arrangement of the studs. He apparently did not know that studs are, for the most part, evenly spaced. If studs could be just anywhere it would make sense to drill lots of holes. But if you knew that the spacing is usually regular, you could predict where the next stud would likely be, given the location of the first two studs.

It would also have been helpful for Joe to know that there is usually more than a foot between studs. Even better, he could have come to the job with the information that, in many walls, studs are placed on 16 inch centers. (Or I could have told him that.) This knowledge about typical wall systems would have enabled him to formulate a hypotheses about the location of the next stud after finding just one. Testing the hypotheses would be a simple as measuring out 16 inches from the first successful hole to drill the next test hole. This is what I had expected Joe to do, since it was what I would have done. My mistake was in not telling Joe what I knew about walls that allowed me to formulate such a hypothesis.

The second general kind of information that Joe needed had to do with the larger objective of his inquiry. He needed to stay focused on his goal. Even without knowing anything about the way that walls are built, he did know that we were intending to hang a bike rack on the wall and that the two uprights would not be side-by-side, but would instead be spaced apart so that they could support bikes. Our objective was to hang up a bike rack, not to locate every stud. So, even without knowing anything about the usual spacing of studs, Joe could have avoided drilling holes in the wall right next to the first stud simply by focusing on the goal of the research.

Student Research

Both of these observations apply to some of the student work we have seen this year. Sometimes students are working without a good, rough model of what is probably "behind the wall." Other times they run into trouble because they lose sight of their research objective and get lost in the details, effectively drilling hundreds of little holes to no end.

Take, for example, the efforts of a number of students who looked at mercury in soil. In some of the projects, which were carefully executed and presented, the students focused on the idea that mercury comes down in the form of rain and so hypothesized that there would be less mercury in soil under trees than in the open. Sometimes their reasoning was that the trees sheltered the area around them and sometimes it had to do with the idea that the trees would remove mercury from the ground as they took up water from the soil. What these students were leaving out--evidently because it was not in their own models of the system--was the important effect of dry deposition, where trees act as big filters, picking up mercury attached to particulate pollution which is later washed off the leaves onto the ground below.

As another example, several student groups looked at the amount of mercury in individual fish, tabulating mercury and fish length, fish weight, and fish age without any strong reference to fish species, beyond recording it. In listening to these students talk about their work, it seemed that in some cases they did not really have the idea of food webs and bioaccumulation included in their mental models of what might be going on. Like Joe and the wall studs, it seemed that the students thought that mercury could end up anywhere, and their job was to find it in all these different places. In other cases their diffuse focus seemed to be more a matter of losing sight of the objective--or perhaps not having ever formulated a firm hypotheses to guide their investigation.

Two Very Different Approaches

For me, these examples raise the question of what we want these students to get out of this fieldwork that we are having them do. That question then leads to a second one, having to do with what preparation: What intellectual "scaffolding" do we need to put in place for them to reach the learning goals that we have in mind?

Going back to Joe's example, if I had been wanting to engage Joe in self-directed inquiry, maybe I was actually off to a good start. Seeing the line of hundreds of carefully spaced holes, I might have used this as a clue to his conception--his "mental model"--of how the studs were arranged behind the wallboard. I might then have guided his inquiry a bit at that point, suggesting that it would be interesting to see if there was any pattern in the arrangement of the studs. Given this prod--a "nudge' in direction of discovery--perhaps Joe would have then come up with the idea of measuring the distance between successful test holes, looking for regularities. Looking at the empirical data that he was so carefully gathering, he might have reached the insight that studs are often on 16" centers. Knowing Joe, he might have come up a very un-carpenter-like 40.6 cm centers, but that would have been OK too.

Or, I could have taken a very different approach--an option that leads to my question about scaffolding. I could have started out by giving Joe the key information that studs are often on 16" centers--perhaps drawing him a picture of what typical wall framing looks like. Before he started work, we could have talked through the sequence of steps. "So, you will begin by thumping gently on the wall with your fist or with a hammer, being careful not to mar the surface, listening for whether is sounds hollow. When you have a place that sounds solid, drill a test hole. If the hole does not hit a stud, then what do you do?"

"I drill another one."

"Where?"

"Ummm, on either side of the first one? Maybe 3/4 of an inch away?"

"Drilling on either side of the first hole is a good idea. Do you know how wide a wall stud is?"

"No."

"Wall studs are an inch and a half wide. Do you want to revise your estimate of how far the next test hole should be from the first one, assuming the first one is a miss?"

"Ummm, an inch and a half?

"Sounds good. Maybe just a little less. The idea is to make sure that you don't miss a stud by drilling on either side of it. Okay, now suppose that you find a stud. Where do you drill the next hole?"

"You said they were usually 16 inches from center to center."

"Right."

"So 16 inches."

"Good. Now, keep in mind that we are hanging up this bike rack, and we actually want more than 16 inches between the uprights. So, you might skip one test hole and measure out 32 inches and see if you find a stud."

Which Way Forward?

Which approach would have been better? We work with some teachers who take a "pure" view of inquiry and voice concerns about providing too much information through direct presentations--teacher to student--telling students what to do rather than letting students discover facts and relationships. These teachers would be uncomfortable with a conversation like the imaginary one that I just described, in which I walked Joe through the work plan. They would, instead, be inclined to let Joe figure the pattern out for himself. Their argument would be that by drawing a picture of wall framing and telling him about the typical arrangement of studs, I would be robbing Joe of the opportunity to see a pattern in his measurements and learn to make inferences from such a pattern.

Other teachers prefer the second approach, giving Joe an overview of the way the system works before sending him "into the field."

I suppose that making this choice might depend on the learning objectives that you are aiming at. If you are most interested in having students learn to look for patterns, then having Joe drill hundreds of holes might be the way to go. On the other hand, if you were wanting Joe to come away with an understanding of wall framing systems, it seems to me that the second approach would be the better choice. The reason for this is that even if a student drilled all the holes and saw the pattern (Hooray!), it would not necessarily follow that the student saw how that pattern is part of a more complicated system.

I should also add that if your goal is to hang up a bike rack, the second approach is way better.

The story of Joe and the hundreds of holes is kind of simple and goofy (real life is sometimes like that). But it also has a good bit of relevance to what we are seeing in our work with teachers and students. Here are a few thoughts and questions that emerge from the story for me:

• Key Paradigms: Even though I am beginning to have an allergic reaction to the term "scientific method," I will argue that, whatever a scientific method is, it is NOT (at least not very often) about drilling hundreds of holes and seeing whether there is a pattern. As Thomas Kuhn argued--nearly 50 years ago now--in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, normal scientific work builds on a paradigm that is already accepted by a community of scientists. The paradigm embodies theories about the makeup and working of the system under investigation. To the extent that science is work that builds on these paradigms, wouldn't it follow that a large part of science education should be about introducing important, broadly accepted paradigms? In my interaction with Joe, that would have meant drawing a picture of the way that walls are framed.
  
  
• Actual Scientific Practice: I worry about giving students the wrong idea about science. Science is not doing stuff to see what happens, or just looking at stuff to see what you find. This is another aspect of science's dependence on paradigms. A scientific paradigm not only encompasses theory, but also prescribes the accepted questions and methods for exploring and extending that theory. As Kuhn puts it on page 109 of my edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making. In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture." I am concerned that if we allow students to follow a path similar to Joe's--drilling hundreds of holes without a foundation in theory, methods, and standards--we are giving them a misconception of what actual scientific practice is all about.
  
  
• Proliferation of misconception and bad information: As I listened to students present their work to audiences of other students this year I winced as I heard some of them say things that were misinformed and, in some cases, just plain wrong. For example some students concluded that fish diet was not a factor in determining mercury burden. Another gave a small lecture to a group of students saying that mercury was due to local waste streams, setting aside the effects of air pollution. Much of this misinformation was, I suspect, related to students' overgeneralizing from their data or, in some cases, setting aside data completely and venturing into the realm of opinion. This is perhaps yet another reason to invest more time in providing students with a firm grounding in what we already know before sending them off to investigate.
  
  
• Student frustration: When I went back to see what Joe was doing, it was obvious that he was not happy with what was going on. He was confused and didn't know what he was doing or why he was doing it. Learning rarely happens in the context of such confusion and frustration.
  
  Listening to some of the students present their work I had the sense that they were in the same place that Joe was. Inquiry learning aims at that "Aha!" moment when students see, on their own, that the data come together into a pattern, but it can sometimes happen that someone can drill hundreds of holes--or collect and analyze samples of many macroinvertebrates and fish--and not see a pattern. Referring back once again to Thomas Kuhn, much of the value of a paradigm is that it actually provides the pattern. Most work in science starts from a well-understood pattern and seeks to fill out details or extend the pattern to new situations. Scientists don't like working without a clear understanding of context and purpose anymore than students do.
  
  
• Citizen science is like hanging a bike rack: One of the strongest "take-aways" from this year's work with teachers and students is that much of the value of using citizen science as part of science instruction arises from the service dimension of the work: the data are actually useful. This value arising from usefulness is not just value perceived by scientists, but is also--and most importantly from the standpoint of our educational goals--value perceived by students. The students are engaged in meaningful work.
  
  Putting up a bike rack was also meaningful work, but for Joe the meaning got lost in the frustration of drilling hundreds of holes. Joe knew that, whatever it was that I had in mind when I set him to the task of finding the wall studs, what he was doing probably wasn't it. So he was frustrated, and the frustration overtook the meaning.
  
  For some students this year, their experience was at least a little like Joe's. Meaningful work feels purposeful, rather than random and confusing.

Supporting scientific learning through inquiry and work in citizen science is complicated. Teachers using this approach are faced with finding a balance between direct instruction--transmitting information and instructions required to do the work and to support learning--and guiding a process where students are engaged in figuring things out for themselves.

The image of Joe kneeling there while he perforated wallboard is a reminder of what happens when we get this balance wrong. The system that Joe was "researching" was a simple one compared to, say, as pond or stream. It is easy to see that the balance I created between direct instruction and Joe-directed inquiry was SO wrong, resulting in no work getting done and little learning. I offer the story as a parable.

Beyond Naturalness?

Many of the sessions at this year’s George Wright Society conference (GWS) addressed the question of how to manage protected areas. Managing something presumes that you know the outcome you want to achieve. As Yogi Berra put it, "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."

Historically, the "target" for protected area management has been to keep the land in a natural state or to return it to a natural state. That sounds clear enough. To see how this works in practice, let’s look at the example of fire management.

Acadia is small and densely populated, so we don't let fires burn at Acadia. That means that, at Acadia, some parts of "natural state" won’t be operational. Oops.

An Example

Setting that aside, suppose your job is to manage a much larger forested area -- boreal forests in Alaska, for example -- where you can let fires burn in some areas, but where fire has been suppressed for years. You know that the forest is not in its natural state because you have historical records that show that there used to be frequent fires. But you also know that because these fires were frequent, they were smaller. So, one problem you will face is figuring out how to initiate a fire policy that doesn't end up being hugely destructive, going beyond the impact that fires would have had if they had been burning all along.

Things get yet more complicated when you add the consideration that climate is changing and altering the frequency and impact of fires. The effects of global warming are more pronounced near the poles; consequently your area in Alaska is experiencing noticeably warmer summers. Climate variability is also increasing, so that dry summers with high fire danger are now occurring several times a decade rather than just once or twice. All of this change raises the question of just what the "natural" fire regime should be? Can you use a historical record as a point of reference when the entire climate system has moved on to new, warmer, drier conditions that have not occurred in recorded history?

It gets worse. Does "natural" include human impacts? For many people the answer would be that a system is "natural" to the extent that it is free of human intervention. But in your Alaskan forest you know that over the past 6,000 years indigenous communities have incorporated fire as part of their subsistence culture, in some cases setting fires to open up areas to improve wildlife habitat, herd animals, and reduce fuel loads. How does this history change your understanding of "natural" and the target state of the system that you are managing?

(For more information about fire management in Alaska's boreal forest and a discussion of how the complexities associated with developing a solution, see the article by Chapin, et al. in BioScience titled "Increasing Wildfire in Alaska’s Boreal Forest: Pathways to Potential Solutions of a Wicked Problem." Access to this article requires a subscription to BioScience. The same authors have also written a freely available article on the more general problem of boreal forest sustainability titled "Policy strategies to address sustainability of Alaskan boreal forests in response to a directionally changing climate.")

Alternatives to "Naturalness"

The problem with "naturalness," as this short example illustrates, is that it isn't clear just what "natural" is. It’s not a scientifically precise concept, it does not have a well-defined point of reference, it is hard to quantify, and--to the extent that it is a historical notion--it is not easy to see how it adapts to changing conditions. Consequently, a number of scientists speaking at GWS suggested alternatives. For example, Stephen Woodley, Chief Scientist in the Ecological Integrity Branch of Parks Canada, suggested "ecological integrity," a replacement for "naturalness." The term has been given an official, legal definition in Canada, along with status as the goal of conservation.

Other speakers suggested setting a management goal of retaining (or improving) biodiversity. Biodiversity has the advantage of being more quantifiable than "naturalness." It also has the advantage of providing a quantified snapshot of a system at a point in time--much like a balance sheet does for a corporation.

The analogy between a biodiversity inventory and a balance sheet is instructive. When we look at a balance sheet we do get useful information about the health of a company at one point in time, but are also missing much of the picture. To understand more about the health of a company, we look at a sequence of balance sheets--comparing, say, the current balance sheet with one from a year earlier. Comparing balance sheets gives us a way to see how the situation has changed and some sense of the direction of change. To get an even more complete picture, we would look at a statement of cash flows so that we could understand the inputs and outflows behind the changes. There is value in looking at flows as well as at sequences of states.

In her presentation at GWS Dr. Erika Zavaleta suggested that instead of biodiversity or naturalness, we might manage living systems with the aim of improving and preserving resilience. The value of this suggestion is that it is a measure of a system’s responses to external inputs and stresses over time--it leads to consideration of flows.

Back to Nature

Jon Jarvis, Regional Director for the Pacific West Region of the NPS , acknowledged the value of putting management on a more scientific footing, but also expressed serious discomfort with wholesale movement away from naturalness as the guiding principle, if not the measurable goal, of managing protected areas. His expressed concern was that naturalness has been, over time, a useful working concept and yardstick for the more general, non-scientific public that cares about parks and conservation.

It was the next day, during a presentation on the interactions between indigenous peoples and conserved lands, that I made the connection that Director Jarvis was pointing to. Conservation is not just science; it is stewardship. Stewardship builds on facts, but also builds on spirituality. Such spirituality grows out of a connection to nature. Managing lands to retain and restore naturalness builds on that connection.

Science Education and Science Literacy

There is no conflict to resolve here; the question is not whether we should work to preserve lands in a natural state or whether we should measure our success in terms of biodiversity, resilience, ecological integrity, or something else. When we focus on the bigger picture, it is clear that we need to do all of these things. Perhaps the real question is one of knowing how to select the appropriate frame for the task at hand.

The question of how naturalness, biodiversity, resilience and other concepts fit together to support stewardship and good management is relevant to middle and secondary school science instruction. The relevance is not in the details -- after all, the scientists at GWS have been working at high levels of professional attainment for decades. Pre-college science education cannot expect to reflect the nuance of these discussions, at least not initially. Instead we should focus on what the discussions tell us about science literacy.

The discussions at GWS present a complicated picture of what science does and of how we use it. A scientifically literate person (what we are trying to create through science education) would be comfortable with the idea that "naturalness," "ecological integrity," "biodiversity," and "resilience" are all constructs--things that we invented--rather than scientific facts of some kind. (See "Students, Science, and Creativity" for what we are learning about students’ understanding of science as something we construct.) Some of these constructs are more quantifiable than others, and so are useful for portraying the state of a system or for describing the flows as a system changes state. The different constructs are useful for different things and, when used together, complement each other and provide a more complete picture. The scientifically literate person would understand that this is a discussion about UTILITY, rather than about TRUTH.

Our scientifically literate person -- emerging from our educational system -- would also be comfortable with the idea that the state of a system -- the measurements we might make about species diversity, growth rate, mortality, rates of change, and so on -- must be understood in the context of the system’s environment. Using our Alaskan boreal forest scenario as an example, there is no "right" fire regime for all times. Instead, the system must be responsive to changing climate conditions, forest populations, and so on.

This is the kind of scientific literacy that we need to support a democracy faced with resource decisions in a rapidly changing biosphere. It is the right objective for us to be focused on in science education.

Keeping It Personal

"I’m excited about studying environmental issues because my generation is going to be the last to have a chance to do anything to avoid a catastrophe.” That’s how things look to a Unity college student meeting with college trustees last Friday.

It really is an exciting time to be working on environmental issues. As I write this I am at a George Wright Society conference in Portland, Oregon, which brings together a thousand or so people from the National Park Service, the US Geological Survey, and many universities. The conference theme is “Rethinking Protected Areas in a Changing World.” As advertised by this title, the presentations focus on change--change in the environment and change in the way that we need to think about and work with the environment.

Change can be frightening because we don’t know how it will work out. Periods of rapid change appear very different when you are in the middle of them than they do when you are looking back at them. At the start of this conference, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan gave us a sneak preview of their upcoming 12 hour, 6 part PBS series titled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” Duncan pointed out that when Lewis and Clark were in the middle of their exploration of this continent, they didn’t know how the trip would work out. They didn’t even know that they would be coming back alive.

Working with environmental concerns at the start of the 21st century, as the species is just at the outset of a journey in which it will discover how it responds to rapid climate change, it is understandable that we might feel a bit like Lewis and Clark did on some of their more difficult days. We should also, along with paying attention to the risks, keep focused on the adventure and the chance to learn and do new things. This is not just any time in the history of our species -- this is a uniquely exciting time.

The “National Park Idea," stripped to its essence, is an optimistic one. Our parks connect people to nature. They remind us that we are part of something bigger. As Dayton Duncan said, the connection to National Parks is not theoretical; it is personal. As with the parks, so with humans in nature generally – the Unity student has it right: the engagement with a rapidly changing climate over the next decades isn’t theoretical; it’s personal.

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.

Scientific Literacy

One of the pleasures of my job is that I get to hear teachers tell stories. One of my favorites is about the student who, realizing that his biology course was going to involve some chemistry, asked "Are we going to have to memorize the periodic table AGAIN?" My favorite part of the question is the word "again." Just how long did that "learning" last the first time around?

Acadia's Schoodic Education and Research Center -- SERC, for short -- is one of about 20 "Research Learning Centers" (RLCs) distributed across the 380-some operating units within the National Park Service. All the RLCs share a common mission. Here it is:

The Mission of National Park Service Research Learning Centers is to increase the effectiveness and communication of research and science results in the national parks through facilitating the use of parks for scientific inquiry, supporting science-informed decision making, communicating the relevance of and providing access to knowledge gained through scientific research, and promoting science literacy and resource stewardship.

So, just what is "science literacy?" And ... is it something that children learn in school?

There is a really wonderful, readable, even entertaining book with the title Science Matters, written by Robert M. Hazen and James Trefil. The subtitle is "Achieving Scientific Literacy" -- they take up the question of what scientific literacy right at the start of the book, in the preface:

For us, scientific literacy constitutes the knowledge you need to understand public issues. It is a mix of facts, vocabulary, concepts, history, and philosophy. It is not the specialized stuff of the experts, but the more general, less precise knowledge used in political discourse. If you can understand the news of the day as it relates to science, if you can take articles with headlines about genetic engineering and the ozone hole and put them in a meaningful context--in short, if you can treat news about science in the same way that you treat everything else that comes over your horizon, then as far as we are concerned you are scientifically literate. (p. xii)

It should be pretty easy to figure out why the National Park Service cares about scientific literacy. When the National Park Service was created by Congress in 1916, the agency was charged with protecting and managing the parks in order "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." So, if the NPS expects people to come to intelligent decisions about, say, the use of coal to meet our country's power needs, it would of course be important for people to have some understanding of how stack emissions from plants in the Midwest can affect the water chemistry and level of mercury up here in Acadia. Maybe even more important, the NPS would need people to have some understanding of how hard -- impossible, really -- it is to reverse some kinds of changes in complex, ecological system like Acadia or Yellowstone. Scientific literacy isn't about understanding all the details of the chemistry or ecology -- but it does require having a general understanding of how living systems work.

It seems like a pretty simple argument: If you want people to support something like restrictions on stack emissions or a reduction in carbon emissions, you need to be sure they have enough general understanding that they can see, for themselves, why these restrictions are important.

But, as Hazen and Trefil explain, actually ensuring that people get that kind of information is not so easy ...

...This argument, as simple as it seems, runs counter to powerful institutional forces in the scientific community. To function as a citizen, you need to know a little bit about a lot of different sciences--a little biology, a little geology, a little physics, and so on. But universities (and, by extension, primary and secondary schools) are set up to teach one science at a time. Thus a fundamental mismatch exists between the kinds of knowledge educational institutions are equipped to impart and the kind of knowledge the citizen needs. (p. xvii)

The simplicity of the this observation--and the familiarity of the educational system that Hazen and Trefil describe--can make it easy to underestimate the serious implications of what they are saying. Institutional change is hard -- not because of lack of will or commitment, but simply because it is hard enough to try, day after day, to make a system work. Taking it apart and finding a way to approach the whole thing differently can be overwhelming.

I believe that institutions like that National Park Service can be critically important to enabling the changes in science education necessary to support science literacy. Part of the reason is that the NPS mission embraces education, but also reaches beyond it -- driven by the need to conserve parks "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." It is the pursuit of that broader mission that makes it easier to see why science literacy is so critically important and to invest in it.

At Acadia Partners, when we work with teachers and students to help them begin thinking productively about the biology, the geology, the chemistry, and the ecology involved in understanding how mercury moves in a watershed and how it affects life, we are working to help teachers and students develop scientific literacy and put it to use. The goal is not to understand all of these matters in detail -- that would be impossible in a semester or two in college, let alone high school. Instead, we try to help teachers enable students to understand enough of the key mechanisms and concepts to see how the parts of the system fit together. It is a first step toward science literacy.