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John L. Rudolph, "Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should)" (Oxford UP, 2023)
00:36:54
An interview with John L. Rudolph
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Dr. John Rudolph
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Marshall Poe
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Mortezahajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. And today I'm honored to be speaking to Dr. John Rudolph. Dr. John Rudolph is a distinguished professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and he'll be talking to us about a great book he published with Oxford University Press called why We Teach Science and why we should, which is a very, very timely topic because currently I guess there's this debate to push more students to study science and define humanities. We'll talk to John and see how effective this strategy is. But John, welcome to New Books Network. Can you please introduce yourself first before starting the conversation and tell us a little bit about your background and your field of study?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Sure, yeah. Happy to. So as you mentioned, my name is John Rudolph. I'm a faculty member, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and I've been here for the past 24 years or so. I started off as a high school science teacher. Actually I taught biology and physics and chemistry at a number of high schools around Wisconsin. And then I went back to grad school in the history of science and transitioned over to a PhD program in curriculum and instruction. And so now and then I've got a job as the faculty member and so currently in the Department of Curriculum Instruction at Wisconsin, along with the Department of Educational Policy Studies.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And can you tell us how this book came about? Why did you decide to write a book about why we teach science and why we should teach science?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Yeah, that's a great question. So my field of research is primarily the history of science education, sort of joining my interest in the history of science and science education as it's currently practiced. And I, in my department, I'm, I teach courses for pre service science teachers. So we have a program that trains people to be middle and high school science teachers and get certified in the state of Wisconsin. And and so it was just interesting that, that a lot of students would come in, people with it's a master's program, so they come in with an undergraduate degree in the sciences in some science already and they're excited about science and they want to teach science and they dive all in on teaching students all the facts and concepts and theories and how to solve problems and everything, but they never really think about, well, what's the purpose of science education? And my previous book that came out in 2019 was strictly a history of science education in the United States. And toward the end of that book, my editor was asking me, well, this is great, we've got this wonderful history, but what should we be doing in science classrooms? And my work with pre service science teachers and sort of that question had always sort of been with me. And so I had been working on in my course the various ways to think about the purposes of science education with students. And then it manifested in this book, which is drawn from those experiences working with science teachers and getting them to try to think about why do we teach Science. And how should that impact what we do in classrooms?
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Morteza Hajizadeh
When I was a student myself, when I was doing my PhD, I had another colleague who was doing his PhD in a different field. He was more drawn towards scientific approach, towards literature. And I was just doing, bringing regular stuff in literature. And we sometimes had this debate, what's the use of humanities? And he would put this question, at least with science it's practical, you can see the outcome. But why should we teach Shakespeare, for example? And you do speak about how science has been taught for utilitarian purposes, historically speaking, and you come up with three purposes for teaching science, which is personal utility, national security and economic growth. Can you talk about this, how it has been taught historically for utilitarian purposes?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Yes, absolutely. That was, I mean, one of the first reasons science education appeared as a subject in schools was because it was believed to be useful, useful knowledge. And in fact, in the mid-1800s in the United States, science was referred to as, as what they called an information subject. That it was other subjects like mathematics and classical languages were taught because they had the ability to discipline the mind. Sort of this, this old faculty psychology, psychology, theory of learning that, that you exercise the mind. But the science had its value from just the knowledge about how things worked in the world. And so that's where the utilitarian focus came from. And these ideas, the facts, enabled people to get things done. And over the course of the past century plus it's applied across different sort of foci like personal utility, like you pointed out, personal utility, national security, economic growth and prosperity. And so the, the three, just as I talk about in the book, the personal utility is, is pretty simple. It's sort of things that, like knowing how to get a stain out of a pair of pants or understanding enough human biology to avoid disease and stay healthy. And in fact, from the 1920s through the 1940s, there was a huge focus in science education on sort of the science of the home and community and things like how to adjust a furnace damper or how to keep foods from spoiling, basic sanitation and hygiene. So that was all sort of these things that are very useful to the individual. With World War II and the Cold War, the focus shifted pretty dramatically to thinking about the utility of science for national security. And here the focus was clearly on much more advanced science, cutting edge research that had produced things like radar and solid fuel rockets and the atomic bomb. And it was science not for the average student, but an emphasis on science that would recruit and train new research scientists who could contribute to the Development of military technology and things like that during this, this time in history. The more powerful argument today is about economic growth, economic prosperity. And this is all the things we hear about, talk of the STEM pipeline and all that focus on the production of scientists and engineers who drive industrial innovation that can be turned to corporate profit and whatnot. And this emerged primarily in the late 1970s during the economic recessions of the time. And people argued that science was the way out of that, that science was the key to innovation. But it was also interesting how it manifests itself in different historical periods. That argument, sort of the economic industrial argument, was also very prominent in the middle 1800s when the country was expanding west, with an emphasis on knowledge related to agriculture, minerals and mining, rail transportation, telegraph systems and things like that. And so that's the argument that probably gets the most traction currently and maybe historically too.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And do you think this way of teaching science in school by focusing on mastery of a discipline or the content of the book, is it a useful way? Is it an approach to actually help students or citizens use science for general educational training purposes?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the. There are a number of these myths of science education. I, I begin to, to see it that way, that there's this, this belief that if we just teach students the facts, the theories, the concepts, they're able to solve the problems, balance the equations, calculate the coefficients of friction, that some. That's useful to students in their daily lives, but it's really not. It really, the research shows that that's not how students or people generally use information. Number one, all the things we teach in our science classes, very little of it is retained. There are studies that show most people, most even science majors, by the time they end their four years of college science education, they don't remember 40 to 60% of the science content they learned. And so with, with the everyday citizen, that's got to be even less. And the way people typically solve problems isn't by trying to recall something they remember from their high school science class, like, how do you get a stain out of a pair of pants? They're not going to think back, oh, I remember something about organic solvents. Let me try to find something in my house that'll dissolve this oil stain or something. You know, most likely the way people work is they're going to Google it, they're going to look up some tips on YouTube, they're going to ask a friend or a relative or their mom, somebody who does a lot of laundry, that that's the way people solve their everyday problems. As, as for in the other argument, one of the other myths is this notion that the. Doing science develops these scientific reasoning skills that are useful in dealing. Right. The. The critical thinking.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Critical thinking, yeah.
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Dr. John Rudolph
Yeah. And, and, and the research shows, going through the research in cognitive psychology and whatnot, it turns out it's very, it's extremely difficult to teach. The, the, the ability to manipulate variables in ways that, that allow someone to answer a scientific question are pretty complex and not easily done by students in middle school and high school. I mean you can walk them through lab experiences where they're step by step asked to do this, but in the end they don't really know what they did. And the cognitive psychologists that I've referenced in the book, there's one excerpt from a study that just came out in 2020 where they say this is work Andrew Stolman's done. He says it doesn't appear, there doesn't appear to be a natural developmental path toward higher levels of scientific reasoning and there are no obvious instructional strategies to help students learn the skills involved. And so after decades and decades of work trying to think about teaching students scientific reasoning skills, there's very little solid evidence that that can be done in any reasonably efficient way.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And I guess there's also this debate between those who study humanities and science as well because they normally say critical thinking is something that comes from humanities, which is sort of a reductive argument because it could come, it depends on the way you teach and it could come from any subject. But. Yeah, but that's a different story. And do you, do you think that this, this the way the, the focus is, of course, we prepare students for a scientific oriented career to become scientists or IT technicians, engineers. Do you, do, do you think that the schools are actually doing this? Apart from, you know, issues of critical thinking that you just mentioned? But do you think actually students, schools or the way we approach teaching science is helping people to prepare future, let's say scientists or engineers?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Yeah, I mean there are actually there's some debate about whether the, the current emphasis in science education, which is typically on sort of students learning content knowledge and, and maybe engaging in scientific process, the process of science or scientific practices through hands on laboratory work. The way that ends up showing up in schools is in a very sort of mechanical, rote way, sort of the book step by step laboratory and then simply just memorizing the various facts like the phases of cell division or. The way to balance a chemical equation or something like that. So it's done very algorithmically, a lot of learning by rote and the. And so there's questions so you can get students through all that. They can learn, that they can do that they don't remember much of it when they're done, but they can take a test and they can score well on it. Carl Wyman, the Nobel Laureate in physics from originally University of Colorado, he wrote a piece not too long ago that said that he gets these students who come into his lab as graduate students who've done extremely well on their tests and have been straight A students in the sciences and they struggle when they're asked to then engage in technical scientific reasoning, research, real laboratory work. The question of whether that approach works to train scientists, I think is an open question and there's really serious questions about that. The other point is that very few students end up in science related careers to begin with. If you take a typical beginning freshman high school class, so 9th grade class of students in the American educational system and say that's 100% of your population by the end of high school or actually by some dropout, but by the end, by their late 20s, about half of them end up with degrees like a two year degree, associate's degree or a four year bachelor's degree. Of those degrees that are earned, only about 20, 27% are in a science related field. And this is a broad definition of science related field. So not just physics, biology, chemistry, geology, but also engineering, agricultural sciences, health related fields. So nursing, dental hygiene, respiratory therapy, like any of these broad notions of science or science related careers. And so when you take that 50% who get degrees and only 27% end up in a science related career, the total from that initial 100% student population is about 13% that end up at that point with a science related degree. And at that point only about half of them end up in a career. We overproduce STEM graduates in this country by about 40 to 100%. And so of all those students who start out, you end up with 7% who end up in a science related career field, which is incredible when you think about it. So why do we spend all this time if our argument is that we need we teach in this way that's very content focused and very technical for STEM careers. While we're only teaching for this 7% of the population. The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365Copilot this episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate.
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- [18:52]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply and I'm just thinking off the top of my head. Most of this push I guess comes from politicians who feel that schools are only there to prepare the future workforce. And I I live in Australia and about I guess was two years ago two years ago one year into Covid so the government started the new it was in higher education of course subsidy scheme. So they subsidized the STEM fields more than humanities hoping to push more students into science in universities. I just thought the whole scheme was ridiculous because you know you can't encourage somebody to study science simply because it's a little bit cheaper than studying humanities, especially after they have graduated from universities. Even if it's free. If for example, even if there is a free course engineering bachelor degree, I wouldn't be able to take that because I don't have the aptitude and the attitude. And then two years after that there was some statistics coming out that that scheme hadn't really changed the number of students in hadn't significantly changed the number of students in STEM fields. And whenever I guess economy gets harsh, economic situation gets hard, there's more push whether in high schools or universities for students to study science hoping that they will get a job to boost the economy. Which is one of the reasons you mentioned at the outset of the book economic growth and you talk in the book about focusing on teaching science for citizens or non science bound student. What do you mean by that?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Well, I mean so the the fact that that 93% of the of the students aren't going to end up in science careers, science related careers means that we we definitely should be focusing on non technical training goals. I mean and what goal is left? I mean the, the citizenship goal is sort of the science that that the everyday person needs to understand to to get along in the world to to, to for society to manage the problems and challenges that we're Faced with, I mean, there's a huge number of these things, from the global pandemic to climate change to gene editing and water usage. There's all kinds of science related social issues that the everyday citizen needs to participate in and make decisions about and think about. And so the technical knowledge that you might learn in the science class isn't useful in those situations.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And the other question you sort of talked about, you touched upon the idea of psychology, cognitive psychology, earlier. So let's talk about how there are different fields such as cognitive psychology, science education, science communication, to see if science education enables the students to solve everyday problems and also be better citizens. Can you discuss this idea? How do we prepare students to be better citizens to fulfill their civic duties through the teaching of science? Maybe not only humanities.
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Dr. John Rudolph
Yeah, I mean, I think that the challenge is that we were. No one gives a lot of thought to that as a goal. I mean, you ask people who, when they advocate for science education and policy documents that are written where they say, oh, we need to prepare people for the STEM workforce, then they'll also say, and science is really important in democratic decision making and therefore need people to understand science. But it's from their perspective, it's a one size fits all. As long as people know the science content, then they can get a job, even though very few people go into those jobs. And then they'll have science content knowledge to be able to answer questions about climate change, global warming, pandemics, vaccines, whatnot. But that's not how the work from cognitive psychology and science communication shows that that's not how people interact with science. That's not how people use science to make decisions. People typically fall back on making decisions based on their emotions or intuitive shortcuts, heuristics. They don't step back and say, oh, what's the rational answer to this question? What science content now do I need to know? They talk to friends, they talk to colleagues, they rely on their social networks. And we see this all the time. There's work done by this Dan Cahan at Yale where he looked at how sort of the difference between people who are left leaning and right leaning, how levels of scientific literacy affect the way they make decisions or see problems, answers to questions in the everyday world. And when they're very fact based people with high levels of scientific content knowledge, whether you're on the left or the right, they get the same answers. That's wonderful. When there's any kind of a political element injected into the question that's asked, like, are humans responsible for Global warming, then there's a huge polarization where people on the left answer the question correctly, or at least the way the scientific community would say should be answered. And people on the right will use the scientific knowledge they have, so they have high content knowledge. But then they use that content knowledge to dismiss the arguments of the other people. So they cling to their ideological perspective. This is known as motivated reasoning. And they use that science content knowledge not to arrive at what would be a correct answer, but to further their own political position or the position of their group that they're identified with. And so it just shows you that this, and we all go back to this notion of science, good science education is just learning the science content and that'll do everything, that, that'll prepare citizens and the workforce and all that. And that's just. The research shows that that's not the case. I'm not hearing you right at the moment.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Oh, sorry, I forgot to unmute my microphone. Yeah, I was just saying that it was a very interesting point you just raised because there has been a lot of weaponization of science, ideological war, sacrificing, let's say, the idea of truth simply to further one's political. Political ideas. And let's talk a little bit about history, because you mentioned that you wrote a book about the history of teaching science. When was science first introduced in schools in the United States as a subject back then? Yeah.
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Dr. John Rudolph
Right, right. It's almost always been in the, in the first high schools and private academies in the U.S. the, the earliest high schools were started around 1820s, right about that time. And the subject then typically showed up. And the thing that I think it's important to realize is that high schools then were much closer to small liberal arts colleges rather than. When we think of high schools now, we think of these mass institutions that everybody goes to and that, you know, and the goal is 100% graduation. You know, there's a very small percentage of the population that actually went to high school in the early 1800s. And the subjects that showed up as science were things like natural philosophy, which is the early version of physics, chemistry. Geography was very popular. And then they didn't. Biology wasn't invented yet. That didn't happen until the early 1900s. And so you had students studying botany and zoology. And so there was a range of these various subjects. And actually, interestingly, there's this great book by Kim Talley called the Science Education of American Girls. At that time, since girls weren't expected to go on to college, they didn't study the classical languages and mathematics. And so they were left with these subjects that were thought to be useful back to the utilitarian argument. And so girls actually were the predominant audience for these, these science subjects in the 1800s. The, the chemistry, geography, botany, zoology courses.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And you, you, you do mention that it's the way science is taught. It's not very helpful. So when we need a radical change, what radical changes are required to teaching science to students and how can we bring them about?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Yeah, that's a great question. The, the, the way I approach it in the book, I mean, it's hard to have. So in the book I make an argument that we need to look at the evidence. Like how do we, how do we know what we should do? What's the evidence that the things we assume we're doing are actually working? And I have plenty of evidence and studies that I draw from that show that what we are currently doing isn't working the way we think it is. And so my recommendations are really just recommendations and need to be tested, I guess in practice, but based on what the research shows and where the book comes from, a philosophical perspective is that this content focus isn't getting us what we want. And that the question, the real issue with the current strife and difficulties with science related social issues around the world, I think is the problem of misinformation, the problem of the dismissal and disregard of expertise, all the attacks on Fauci during the pandemic and everything like that. And that maybe we need to lay a foundation of helping the public understand where scientific knowledge comes from, not just what the scientific knowledge is, but how do scientists know something? How do they know what they know? Sort of an epistemological question. And to walk students through like the creation of how did we discover the structure of DNA? How did Watson and Crick arrive at that? What evidence did they draw from? Who did they depend on? Who was in their scientific networks? What was Rosalind Franklin's role and was she given proper credit for the X ray crystallography data that she worked with? I mean, so, so helping people understand that we can know things and it's hard to know things, and that when we do come to know something that, that it has a, a legitimacy, it has a durability that, that can't just be waved away with, you know, a wave of the hand. And, and so that's one thing I think is really important. And that the creation of knowledge isn't just an individual scientist, you know, a lone solitary figure in a laboratory who just discovers something, but that it's a community that has checks and balances, that there's peer review, that, that there's a development of, of knowledge that the scientific community comes to a consensus about. And it's not just one person's idea that you can then just say, well, that's just that person's thinking, you know, that there's hundreds of people when it comes to human induced climate change, for example, the IPCC report is a consensus document of hundreds, thousands of scientists. And so it shouldn't be easily dismissed. And then the public needs to understand that.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
I think, yeah, I was, I think it was last week I was talking to somebody else about a book that she wrote about teaching, including more women into science, removing gender barriers to encourage more women to study science. And she mentioned exactly the same thing, that there's this idea that there's this lonely genius working in a lab, producing works of science. And then we talked a little bit about the rise of how to tackle the, let's say, how to rebuild faith and trust in science. And that's a question that I'd like to pose as well because you just touched upon some of the anti science or let's say conspiracy theories and we saw a lot of that during COVID So generally, how do you think we should tackle, tackle or let's say rebuild the. I don't think rebuild is the right way because I guess there is still a lot of faith in scientific community. But unfortunately you do see disturbing trends. So how, how do you think we should tackle that to tackle the rise of, let's say, anti science movements?
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Dr. John Rudolph
I mean, I think that the key is to. There's a sort of a tendency or a desire among some science educators. A lot of teachers will say, well, you just need to listen to me because I'm the authority and that this is what the right knowledge is and what you're saying is wrong. And now I'm going to teach you what's right. And so that just comes off as authoritarian and dogmatic. And so I do think that science needs to be opened up like that. We need to look, like I said, at how it's done. Where does that knowledge come from? The epistemological questions and the fact that it's done by communities of individuals, that it's done in different ways. This is a really important point, I think. So there's the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Reskis and Eric Conway. Right. And the key things that they talk about as being that the, that these merchants of doubt were able to sow confusion among the public were climate change, the cancer causing effects of smoking. There's one other one, I forgot what it was. But anyway, all of the examples that they use are things that the public, the, the our sciences, epidemiology, climate change, climatology, they're that differ from sort of the stereotypical view of experimental science. These are, these are non experimental sciences. And so we teach, when we do teach the process of science in schools, we, we often say, oh, we'll do a test. You make a hypothesis and then you test it in the laboratory and then you simply confirm whether it's true or not. But in all of these other instances, in a lot of subjects or research topics like evolutionary biology and cosmology, there's no experiment that's done. It's all indirect evidence. You come to that knowledge through very different non experimental means. And helping the public understand that science has done a variety of different ways depending on the question that's being asked, the phenomena that's being explored, that there's a plurality of practices that all are scientific, but that they're not going to all conform to this very simple experimental approach to science that we, that, that, you know, so that someone who's against evolution can say, well, show me an instance, show me clear evidence that we evolve from apes that can solve the argument once and for all. Well, that's not how evolutionary biology works. Macroevolutionary speciation, it's all indirect evidence. Fossil record, biogeography, molecular biology. Helping students see in those other subjects how knowledge is arrived at is really important, I think.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And before we end this conversation, is there any other projects that you're currently working on?
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Dr. John Rudolph
Well, actually I just finished a paper on the, the origins of the concept of scientific literacy which will be out in the fall, which, which is interesting because scientific literacy always gets thrown around. Is this, this idea that, that, that'll solve the problem. We just need people who are scientifically literate and if they're scientifically literate then they'll be good citizens and they'll, and they'll be ready to support science and they won't question expertise and all this. But the problem is that it's meant different. Scientific literacy has been this sort of slogan or catchphrase that has been bandied about in the media since World War II. 1945 is when it was coined and, and it, it just means anything and everything. And so in the end it doesn't become, it's not a very useful idea. Everyone's on board because it's it seems to make sense. Of course we want people to be scientifically literate. Literacy is a good thing. Right. And it builds these ideas of the ability to read and write, basic skills. And so there's a spot in the book where I argue that we need to just stop talking about scientific literacy and just what is it we want people to understand about science and for what purpose? Right. The teach science question. Right.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Professor John Rudolph, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on New Books Network with us.
- [36:49]
Dr. John Rudolph
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