Science (and math) education

Several years ago, I stumbled on an article that talked about a research showing that the problem of young American students in science and math lies in their lack of conceptual understanding of the things that they are supposed to be learning in such subjects. Probably, according to the study, this has to do with the American students' tendency to focus on computation rather than on gaining conceptual understanding.The same study states that Japanese students are not wanting in conceptual understanding in science and math. There are good reasons to believe that our own students here in the Philippines are comparable to their American counterparts. Evidence for this is our students' dismal performance in the TIMSS. We could, however, say that while our students could do the numbers game, they could not articulate the central concepts in the problems that they are asked to solve. I think, the study finally suggests that students shall improve greatly with their performance in the TIMSS if only they have a firm grasp of the key concepts that figure in the problems that they are asked to solve. Here, of course, they need the assistance of well-trained teachers. I believe that some fine examples of excellent teaching of scientific concepts could be found in William Laurence's old article titled A Primer of Atomic Energy, T. Ryan Gregory's Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions, and Stephen Hawking's books, A Brief History of Time and Black Holes and Baby Universes, and youtube lectures.

Obviously, the teaching of critical thinking is a vital component of science (and math) education. If not for the kind of critical and rebellious intellectual thinking of Copernicus and Galileo, humans are probably still in a state where nearly all of them agree that the center of the universe is the planet earth. The death blow on the geocentric world picture was a great and truly inspiring story, but it's sad that despite the culture of intellectual rebelliousness that the Renaissance scientists and Einstein have introduced, many students, as well as school teachers, continue to hold obviously questionable beliefs in science. For instance, I have encountered students both at the undergraduate and graduate levels who are outraged by the observation that even those scientific formulations that have achieved the status of law could not be considered as absolute truths. They are permanent truths just in tone, but they are not in fact. I must confess now that I learned the same falsehood--that statements of natural laws are Absolutely True--when I was in elementary school, and it's only in college that I was able to question and reverse what I thought was true. Of course, the falsity of such dogmatic thought about scientific laws is likewise nothing permanent. In fact we could not tell whether there is a frozen truth out there. No one could really tell for sure what the absolute case is, if any, about the material universe.

That scientific experiments are done to disconfirm--not to confirm--a previous finding because we can't be so certain about any scientific claim should not come as something outrageous. Instead, it should have a humbling effect on the student of science and, at the same time, it should get him/her to realize that, despite the welter of discoveries and findings in that area of study, it is not true that some of such knowledge are calcified truths or will remain true forever. This means that every student, if only he/she has the proper equipment to test his/her or other people's thoughts and know better, stands a chance to contribute something new to the current pool of scientific knowledge. More could be learned about this matter from Karl Popper.

Whether science education should include the teaching of the practical value (instrumentality) of science is another story, a huge one, I believe. What exactly is the meaning of the expression "science"? We do know that scientific knowledge need not have a practical value in order to gain the status of being a real scientific information. I don't see any sufficient reason thus to suppose that science education should place equal premium on the practical value of science if only we'll be faithful to the meaning of science, which, again, does not include the idea of "technology". This is not, of course, to say that the science teacher should not mention anything that belongs to the realm of technology whenever he/she is teaching science. But then again, in science, the scientist (not the technologist) is there, basically, to know/describe, predict, and explain. The scientist is not required to do technology in order to become a legitimate scientist, much less the teacher of science should teach technology or the utility of science in order to count as a real teacher of science.

Take the case of Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz whose works on magnetism and electricity were not aimed at anything practical. Maxwell and Hertz were not concerned with the utilitarian importance of their studies, yet no one would say that their works are not completely scientific because their contributions had previously no perceived practical value. Just like any "useless" scientific theory, Maxwell's and Hertz's works on electromagnetism were a genuine contribution to the fund of scientific knowledge during their time, regardless of the benefits the future generation might/would reap from it. Now we know that such previously useless electromagnetic theory turned out to be just a sleeper as it was later used by Marconi to developed the radiotelegraph system which further gave rise to a series of innovations.

The point here is that educationists need not worry about the practical worth of science because the concept does not require that it should be practical. Science does not ask the question, What should we do with this knowledge? We can leave that problem to the technologists and politicians. Science wants to answer theoretical questions. Of course, it seems best to treat the matter this way: A scientific knowledge may start as having no practical value, but that is not to say that that should be reason enough to turn our back on the part of science education that has no utilitarian value within the range of the present moment and the not-so-distant future. Take again the Law of Inertia. It was a useless knowledge for several centuries until humans started hurling artificial satellites in space. I think more could be learned on the theoretical-applied issue on the function of science from Professor Peter Dear's article titled Joking about science.