The move from respecting science to scientism, i.e., the idealization of science and scientific method, is simple: We go from acknowledging the sciences as fruitful human activities to oversimplifying the ways they work, and accepting a fuzzy belief that Science and Scientific Method, will give us a direct pathway to the true making of the world, all included. The idealization of science is partly the reason why we feel we need to impose the so-called scientific terminologies and methodologies to all aspects of our lives, education too. Under this rationale, educational policies today prioritize science, not only in curriculum design, but also as a method for educational practice. One might expect that, under the scientistic rationale, science education would thrive. Contrariwise, I will argue that scientism disallows science education to give an accurate image of the sciences. More importantly, I suggest that scientism prevents one of science education’s most crucial goals: help students think. Many of my arguments will borrow the findings and insights of science education research. In the last part of this paper, I will turn to some of the most influential science education research proposals and comment on their limits. If I am right, and science education today does not satisfy our most important reasons for teaching science, perhaps we should change not just our teaching strategies, but also our scientistic rationale. But that may be a difficult task.
Isolating scientific pursuits from the rest of human activity belittles scientists creativity and imagination too (Lederman and Lederman 2014). Scientists come up with new questions, new methods and techniques, new equipment, and new interpretations. They sure need knowledge and sound reasoning for all that, but reasoning does not exclude imagination or even sentiment (Solomon 1988; Damasio 1994). Under the scientistic rationale then, students fail to see that scientific theories and laws are human products and as such they are subject to change. Scientific knowledge is tentative. This does not mean that it is not reliable. It just means that it may evolve or it may be modified or even sometimes abandoned (Quine et al. 2013). New evidence may come to light or new interpretations may be put forward. The history of science is full of change and we still hope for more new theories, or even sciences to come up (Haack 2007).
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Idealizing science then, promotes a false conception of what sciences and scientists do (Haack 2007; Kitcher 2012). Many studies over the past decades have shown that indeed science educators and students share such misconceptions (e.g., AAAS 1994; Chen 2006; Lederman et al. 2002; Lederman 2006; Liang et al. 2009; Lederman and Lederman 2014). The findings should not come as a surprise; after all, misconceptions like these are in line with our overall scientistic ideology.
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At the rock-bottom of all these misconceptions that ground scientism, one finds the integration of data with theory. Scientific knowledge is seen as the result of data plus a good calculus. Whenever teaching science as merely describing facts, we miss all the creativity, all the social factors: the entire struggle of data-theory coordination. And then, one important thinking skill that students should get from science courses is neglected. Students fail to understand that scientific knowledge is not something you see in the world. It may be based on data, but it also needs interpretations in the light of theories that allow making sense out of the data. Scientists are expected to choose what to count as evidence; their choice has to do with what they already know and expect, and then again, what they find out might cause them to change their beliefs and theories or even their choice of data. And certainly all kinds of factors may interfere with this coordination process, from community
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If students miss this coordination process, they miss an important skill that science education should promote. Scientism deprives them of it.
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