Dewey’s “Science as Method” a Century Later

Abstract

Over a hundred years ago, John Dewey delivered his now-well-known address “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method” to those assembled at the Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which he lamented the nearly exclusive focus on content knowledge in early-20th-century school science classrooms. This article revisits Dewey’s talk and examines the development of science education in the United States in the years since that address. Dewey’s critique of science education in 1909 provides fertile ground for a renewed critique of science education practices today. It is argued that there is, specifically, a need to recover the rapidly fading civic aims of science teaching, which requires greater attention to the methods of science—the idea Dewey highlighted so strongly back then.

Keywords

civic engagement Dewey science literacy scientific method

On a snowy day in December just over a century ago, John Dewey stood before dignitaries and onlookers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The audience was assembled in the Walker Building on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, and Dewey, there as the outgoing vice president of the education section, had come to plead for a rethinking of what science education should aim to accomplish in shaping the understandings of students in schools across the country. Dewey’s address, subsequently published in the January 28, 1910, issue of Science under the title “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method,” focused on the continuing tendency of those teaching science to present the subject as, in his words, “an accumulation of ready-made material with which students are to be made familiar” and “not enough as a method of thinking” (Dewey, 1910b, p. 122). The unrelenting emphasis on the former, he argued, would leave society bereft of the intelligent direction science had the power to provide.

In today’s terms, the distinction more likely would be made between science as a body of content knowledge and science as a method of inquiry, and, as is evident to even the most casual observer, schools still fixate almost exclusively on conceptual content, rarely deviating from their single-minded goal of conveying as many physical, biological, and chemical facts as possible, typically aiming to increase standardized test scores. For this reason alone, one could do worse than heed Dewey’s early-20th-century words of caution. But there is more in his address than a simple rebuke to those who would pass over teaching about the methods of science in favor of leaving classroom practice resting comfortably on its bed of scientific facts. Implicit in Dewey’s words is a vision of what science education should accomplish in terms of bringing citizens into a productive relationship with the intellectual tools and social role of science in modern society. At the center of that vision lies an understanding of the means by which science generates reliable knowledge of the world. But while Dewey was clear about what the curricular focus of school science should be, he was less clear about why a focus on method could get us where we needed to be.

When we think of the prevailing social functions of science education in Western society in this new century, a number of things come to mind. There is the stated desire to train up the next generation of scientists and engineers, or at least skilled technicians of some sort, to drive innovation to bolster our side in the new, flat global economy.¹ This economic argument is perhaps the most prominent and is indeed rhetorically effective when it comes to focusing attention and resources on science teaching and learning. But there are others. One finds statements about developing familiarity with basic scientific concepts so that the public might make better everyday decisions, say, in deciding which appliance to buy or in selecting the best method to remove a stain from a blouse or jacket. Still other arguments for science include the need to cultivate general critical-thinking skills so that we might properly dismiss astrological predictions and resist the lure of e-mail spam promising some easy path to riches. There is also the desire to have students appreciate the great humanistic accomplishments of science and, not least among these, the aim of enabling citizens to participate intelligently in democratic deliberation over issues that engage complex scientific ideas or technologies (DeBoer, 2000; Feinstein, 2011).

It is taken largely as a matter of faith that science education, rightly conceived and implemented, can accomplish all these outcomes. Only a moment’s reflection is needed, however, to dispel that notion as wishful thinking. The experiences we create for students in schools must be tailored to specific learning outcomes if they are to be at all effective; science education is not an “all-purpose” endeavor. Dewey’s focus on method was clearly aligned with the goals that he envisioned a general education in science could accomplish, and these goals were concerned primarily with creating the circumstances necessary for widespread participation in the democratic processes and institutions of society for the greater goal of continually improving how we collectively live. His focus on method over content was matched specifically to these desired ends.

It could be argued that dredging up the ideas of John Dewey to help us think about science teaching and national science education policy, as I am about to do, is an unnecessary distraction from the real issues at hand. It would be better, perhaps, to grapple with our current troubles in science education using ideas and examples that are relevant to the problems of today rather than those drawn from a bygone era. In my defense, I hope to show that this particular talk of Dewey’s is, on the contrary, profoundly relevant to the ongoing efforts to improve science education here in the United States as well as worldwide. This is especially so as we begin to move forward with the Next Generation Science Standards, the latest effort to lay out what it is we believe the public should know and be able to do in the sciences.

There is much to be said for Dewey’s insistence on seeing education operating in the service of democracy and civic improvement. Indeed, this ideal is in dire need of resurrection as we think about the proper role of science education a century after Dewey’s address. Looking around, we find ourselves surrounded by phrases like productivity, technical capacity, and knowledge economy. The economic justification for science instruction seems to have eclipsed all others. While the prescription Dewey offered in 1910 is not a perfect fit for our present situation (given all we have learned over the intervening hundred years and the dramatic manner in which science and technology have permeated all levels of society), revisiting Dewey’s remarks back in the Walker Building provides a valuable opportunity to begin reconceptualizing the school science curriculum now and for the future. As he pointed out a century ago, the public needs a science education built upon an understanding of the methods by which we come to reliable knowledge if we are ever to harness the full power and promise science offers for the improvement of civic life. Although that sort of rhetoric has diminished of late, the need has not.

Dewey’s Address at the 1909 Boston Meeting

The perceived value of school science was, perhaps, foremost in the minds of those gathered to hear Dewey that winter afternoon. Only a few years earlier in 1904, educational psychologist and Clark University president G. Stanley Hall had publicized the rising drift of students away from science course work in the United States (most notably, physics). Dewey himself had participated in a symposium on this topic that was published in School Science and Mathematics earlier that year (Rudolph, 2005b). As the retiring vice president of the education section (Section L) of the AAAS, he had before him a captive audience of scientists and science educators looking for explanations of what had gone wrong; he took that opportunity to provide a diagnosis of the problem and offer a solution that he believed not only would begin to fill the seats in science classes once more but also would put science back on track to fulfill it promise of progressive social improvement.

Despite the promises made on behalf of science in the decades leading up to the 1900s, the grand idea of a society rationally guided by science was far from being realized as the new century unfolded. One had only to look at what was going on in the schools to see how far off the mark things were. Although subjects such as biology, chemistry, and physics were by then well represented in the curriculum, Dewey (1910b) noted disappointingly that “students have not flocked to the study of science in the numbers predicted,” nor has science, more significantly, “modified the spirit and purport of all education in a degree commensurate with the claims made for it” (p. 122). The blame for this, he insisted, could be pinned on a school science that was more concerned with the concepts and theories of the specialist than with the interests of the average person—the overemphasis on science content knowledge, in other words. The “facts of nature are multitudinous, inexhaustible, they begin nowhere and end nowhere,” he explained, which is why a content-focused science failed to provide “the best material for the education of those whose lives are centered in quite local situations and whose careers are irretrievably partial and specific” (p. 122). The remote facts of the specialist, by Dewey’s lights, held no real value for the concrete needs and experiences of the student.

The reason schools were left with a fact-based science education, Dewey explained, had to do with the way science was believed to contribute to public welfare. Herbert Spencer (1861) made the most prominent early case for the benefits of science in his classic essay “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?” There he tallied all the various activities of life (everything from self-preservation to filling leisure time) and claimed that all could be pursued more effectively by understanding the relevant operations of the natural world. It was the facts of nature, in this view, that were most useful to modern humankind. This utilitarian perspective held tremendous appeal to education advocates of the day and cemented the curricular focus on science as a body of information, as facts to be learned. But as scientific research accelerated toward the end of the 19th century, and specialists increasingly chased the esoteric and abstract, what might have been useful information in an earlier time (though even that was an open question) was replaced by an increasingly narrow mass of disciplinary knowledge. By the time of Dewey’s (1910b) address, there seemed to be no escaping the crush of increasing facts—“There is at once so much of science and so many sciences that educators oscillate, helpless, between arbitrary selection and teaching a little of everything” (p. 123).

What needed to be recognized was that science did not possess some universal value; rather, aspects of science had different value depending on the community to which one belonged. While complex conceptual frameworks were essential to the work of the specialist (indeed were the very tools utilized for research at the frontiers of science, designed as they were for those specialized ends), they were useless to the layperson. The mismatch, Dewey thought, should be obvious. But this, he pointed out, was where the argument for science education from a materialist perspective had left us. “To urge the prerogative of science,” he reflected, Spencer “raised the question what knowledge, what facts, are of most utility for life, and, answering the question by this criterion of the value of subject-matter, decided in favor of the sciences” (1910b, p. 125). “Having thus identified education with the amassing of information,” Dewey went on, it was hardly a surprise that “for the rest of his life [Spencer] taught that comparatively little is to be expected from education in the way of moral training and social reform” (p. 125), that is, for social and civic improvement.

The alternative Dewey offered to this misplaced emphasis on “subject matter” was to reenvision science education so that an understanding of the method of science was its proper outcome. This was the element of the scientific enterprise above all others that possessed the greatest value for the general public. “Surely if there is any knowledge which is of most worth,” he exclaimed echoing Spencer’s oft-cited title, “it is knowledge of the ways by which anything is entitled to be called knowledge instead of being mere opinion or guess-work or dogma” (1910b, p. 125). Teaching students about the process of knowledge production, however, was not easily accomplished by a simple change in curricular emphasis.

In the first decade of the 20th century, schools had, in fact, made a great show of engaging students in scientific practice through nature study and laboratory work (Kohlstedt, 2010; Olesko, 1995). Adopting these teaching approaches, however, was off the mark, Dewey insisted, when it came to developing real understanding of scientific thinking. In classrooms that embraced nature study, he explained, teachers did little more than move “with zealous bustle from leaves to flowers, from flowers to minerals, from minerals to stars, from stars to the raw materials of industry, thence back to leaves and stones” (1910b, p. 125). Work in the laboratory was similarly devoid of any true intellectual engagement. “One’s mental attitude is not necessarily changed just because he engages in certain physical manipulations,” Dewey noted acerbically (p. 125). “Many a student has acquired dexterity and skill in laboratory methods without it ever occurring to him that they have anything to do with constructing beliefs that are alone worthy of the title of knowledge” (p. 125). More work needed to be done to realize the potential that an understanding of scientific methods could offer the wider community.

Left here, one could argue that this look back on Dewey’s address offers few insights with which we are not already quite familiar. There is of course value in understanding the methods of science over and above the mere content of scientific subjects, and we would all agree that schools tend to adopt only surface features of inquiry-based science instruction, often overlooking the work needed to cultivate deeper understandings of scientific argumentation, the relationship of evidence to claims, the social negotiation of fact, or what have you (see, e.g., Donnelly, 1994; Duschl & Osborne, 2002; Ryder, 2002). But Dewey did not limit his comments to a simple advocacy of method over content. His remarks suggest that the understandings he believed science education should aim to develop were more complex, centering on an appreciation of scientific method both as it could be used by the individual and as a tool used by experts.

The more fundamental of these understandings—and the one most frequently identified with Dewey—was the ability of citizens to engage in sound empirical reasoning with respect to their everyday affairs. This was for Dewey one of the most important goals of education in all subjects: to teach what he referred to as the “scientific habit of mind” (1910b, p. 126). People needed the ability to make informed decisions about a variety of things from one day to the next. And those decisions were best made through thoughtful consideration of the various facts at hand and the consequences that would likely result from the range of actions entertained. Dewey detailed this intellectual process in his popular book How We Think (1910a), which he was finishing up in the months prior to his AAAS address (Rudolph, 2005a). Yet, despite the best intentions of science educators, this “habit of mind,” Dewey (1910b) lamented, had failed to take hold in the public consciousness. It was only to a “slight extent” that science teaching had “succeeded in protecting the so-called educated public against recrudescences of all sorts of corporate superstitions and silliness” (p. 126).

But there was more about science and its methods that science teaching should engender. If one looks carefully at the argument he makes in his talk, it is clear that he puts forward a case for another level of understanding as well: an understanding of the power and legitimacy of science as a means of knowledge production and its importance as an intellectual tool for social betterment. In other words, it was not enough that the average person could see through the fraudulent claims of commercial hucksters and make sound decisions based on a rational appraisal of his or her own individual circumstances. Equally important was the ability of the layperson to distinguish authoritative knowledge from mere assertions of authority made by others in matters that had broad social or civic significance, and that meant recognizing the underlying methodological foundation on which public claims were based. Understanding the “meaning of knowledge,” Dewey (1910b) explained, meant realizing “what is required in the way of thinking and of search for evidence before anything passes from the realm of opinion, guesswork and dogma into that of knowledge. . . . Unless this perception accrues,” he insisted, “we can hardly claim that an individual has been instructed in science” (pp. 125–126).

This level of understanding was not about citizens themselves appraising the validity of knowledge claims, of evaluating the reasoning or chains of inference laid out by experts in the field. Dewey (1910b) stated this explicitly: “I do not mean that our schools should be expected to send forth their students equipped as judges of truth and falsity in specialized scientific matters” (p. 126); only experts were competent to do that. His point rather was that citizens should be able to separate legitimate from illegitimate knowledge based on the methods used. “That the great majority of those who leave school,” he lectured, “should have some idea of the kind of evidence required to substantiate given types of belief does not seem unreasonable” (p. 126). Dewey naturally favored beliefs justified empirically over those derived from custom, charisma, or purported revelation—that is, science over all.

The ultimate purpose of schools, therefore, was to help the public understand where reliable knowledge was to be found and what it was about that knowledge that made it reliable. Education, properly conceived, would help people see that as society moved forward organizing its affairs by way of legislation, institution building, negotiating social contracts, and so on, that these activities would be best informed by scientific thinking. The public, Dewey believed, should trust and look to those with the appropriate expertise to be their guides. “Only the gradual replacing of a literary by a scientific education can assure to man the progressive amelioration of his lot” (1910b, p. 127), Dewey counseled his audience. With these remarks that afternoon, Dewey gave added voice to the sentiments of AAAS president T. C. Chamberlin, who in his opening address to the conference stated,

It is earnestly to be hoped that the discussions of this week will help to bring home to the consciousness of this community how large a share science should have in the interests of modern man and how much its spirit should enter into every phase of his activity.²

How Method Matters

Dewey’s, as well as Chamberlin’s, aspirations for the place of science in modern culture were undoubtedly ambitious—perhaps overly so. Yet science has indeed come to permeate our world in fundamental ways in the years since that Cambridge meeting. The state of scientific knowledge today far surpasses what is was a century ago; our corresponding technological sophistication has outstripped our capabilities at the turn of the previous century; we now employ technologies that were beyond the capacity to imagine then, including everything from medical imaging to nanoscale particle manipulation. These impressive accomplishments, moreover, have resulted in part from dramatic changes in the social and institutional arrangements that support scientific pursuit. Over the course of the 20th century, whole new government agencies have sprung forth in the United States devoted to fostering science and technical knowledge for purposes of national security (e.g., Department of Defense, Atomic Energy Commission) and medical well-being (e.g., National Institutes of Health) as well as to cultivate science for its own sake (e.g., National Science Foundation [NSF]). Federal expenditures on scientific research and development approached $150 billion in fiscal year 2011, to say nothing of support from state and local governments or institutional and other sources (AAAS, 2010). This commitment of resources alone should be sufficient evidence of the public recognition of the importance of science for national strength and ongoing social progress.

Yet, even with all these changes and seeming advances, as a society, we have yet to adequately accommodate science in our broader social and civic affairs (see, e.g., National Research Council [NRC], 2012b). We have embraced, without question, the material affordances science has served up, seizing upon the latest communication technologies and moving quickly to exploit cutting-edge medical breakthroughs (to cite two areas of dramatic progress), with nary a second thought in most cases. But in the civic arena, science has lost more than won in terms of public influence.³ In places where scientific knowledge has run up against established morals, customs, beliefs, and behaviors, or when it has been suggested that we look to communities of experts for guidance in making certain kinds of public policy decisions, debates over foundational issues of trust and authority have bubbled to the surface that have effectively blocked judicious action based on the best knowledge at hand.

What typically has been questioned in these instances—and what Dewey pointed to so clearly—are the methods by which science generates reliable knowledge.⁴ Public confusion over what scientific methods are or which methods are appropriate for a given problem has interfered with our ability to come to reasoned conclusions about a host of public issues. A few examples will serve to illustrate the nature and significance of these contests.

Postwar Research Funding

One of the more prominent debates concerning the place of science in society was over the funding of science following World War II. Though less broadly public than other debates, it was hardly less consequential for the ensuing relationship between the scientific research establishment and the federal government. As the war moved into its final days, it became apparent to high-level officials that the remarkable power science demonstrated during the conflict would need to be appropriately channeled to meet national interests in peacetime. The specifics of how that might be accomplished, though, were subject to a good deal of political wrangling and negotiation. On the one side were congressional representatives who pushed for a funding plan that would be responsive to the country’s more immediate practical needs. Opposing this approach were leaders of the scientific establishment who worried about heavy-handed government control over the direction of basic scientific work. After considerable back and forth, the views of the scientific elite won out, giving shape to the institutional arrangements that governed the NSF, an agency established in 1950 and run by scientists for the advancement of science (Kevles, 1977; Kleinman, 1995).

Much of the fight over the appropriate level of control over funding stemmed from conflicting views over what was essentially a question of methodological “domain specificity” as well as the relationship between science and technology. Those calling for more direction of government-funded research viewed science primarily as an intellectual technique, one that could be independently applied to any type of problem—material, social, or economic. Leading scientists of the time, in contrast, argued that the optimum conditions for scientific progress required unencumbered support. Fundamental understanding of the natural world, they argued, emerged from the ability to pursue problems of “scientific” interest, that is, without concern for practical problems or real-world applications. The knowledge generated would result inevitably in tools for solving practical problems. But targeting research on those problems in advance, scientists insisted, would only stifle creativity and impede progress. The methods of science, in this view, were bound up with the elements of the specific domain of scientific expertise, internal to the community of researchers. That is, there was no “general” method that could simply be directed to whatever problem needed solving by those outside of that community. The best course of action—and the model that became institutionalized in the operations of the NSF—was to provide generous support for basic research and then await the useful technical spin-offs that would come some time down the road (Hollinger, 1990; Kevles, 1977).

Perhaps there is no better evidence that perceptions of scientific method lay near the heart of this political struggle than the comments made by Vannevar Bush at the Westinghouse Centennial Forum on “Science and Life in the World” in 1946. Bush, an MIT scientist and administrator, was the dean of wartime science, having directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war (his plan for postwar research policy was the one on which the NSF was ultimately based). At the forum, he highlighted the contributions science had made in solving a number of industrial and logistical problems of national importance during the war but quickly qualified his remarks. “Do not mistake me . . . as joining the chorus which . . . sings an ill-considered and often cloying paean of praise to something summarily referred to as ‘the scientific method.’” He went on, “I am certainly not one of those who speak of the scientific method as a firm and clearly defined concept . . . applicable to any trouble and immediately productive of a complete cure” (Bush, 1946, p. 54). Such a view of the scientific process would naturally invite external direction along lines Bush made every effort to avoid.

Similar debates over method extended as well to the political struggle during the late 1940s over whether to explicitly include the social sciences under the charter of the NSF. Those advocating their inclusion insisted that the social sciences and natural sciences were essentially identical when it came to their methodological reliance on empirical evidence and the numerical treatment of data; the only meaningful difference lay in the phenomena being studied. Concern over the public misperception of method during this period was widespread and led Harvard president James Conant, a compatriot of Bush among the scientific elite, to initiate a thorough reconceptualization of general education in science at Harvard in the years after the war, a reconceptualization that sought to repair what he saw as an inaccurate view of the methods of science (Conant preferred to talk about the “tactics and strategies” of science rather than its “method”) in order to ensure favorable institutional arrangements for the growing scientific research community in the United States (see Conant, 1947; Hershberg, 1993).⁵

Evolution

The episode sketched above represents a fairly limited debate over method that took place largely behind the scenes, tucked away in the halls of academia and congressional offices and hearing rooms. The controversies that have flared up repeatedly over the teaching of evolution in schools have been more public. Since the introduction of Darwin’s ideas of descent with modification in the second half of the 19th century, the topic of evolution has been included to varying degrees in college and high school biology curricula, and throughout this time, questions about the validity of the methods used to derive evolutionary claims have been voiced. A number of scientists themselves expressed skepticism at the outset over Darwin’s assertion that species were mutable. College and university faculty members in the United States who dispensed such ideas to their students in the late 1800s and early 1900s often felt the displeasure of their more conservative constituents, being formally reprimanded or discharged entirely from their pedagogical posts (Roberts, 2005). The most celebrated of the evolution controversies in the lower schools, of course, centered on the Dayton, Tennessee, trial of John Scopes in 1925. It was a battle over who had the authority to determine the content of school curriculum, a battle that was repeated with the rise of creation science in the 1980s and its close cousin, intelligent design, in 2005 (Humes, 2007; A. Shapiro, 2013).

The trouble evolution had gaining acceptance among the public as well as segments of the scientific community in the 1870s (trouble it continues to have to this day) is that it deals with phenomena that cannot be seen occurring in real time. Unlike the electrolytic decomposition of water into the elemental gases hydrogen and oxygen (which can—with a spark—be reunited instantly to form water), the evolution of species takes place on a time scale beyond our observational capacity (microevolutionary changes notwithstanding). Evidence for this process has been assembled from assorted physical, chemical, and biological traces of events that have already happened (sometimes tens of thousands of years in the past). Here we are talking about things such as fossil imprints, the biogeographical distributions of organisms, and patterns of biochemical and molecular arrangements across species. Such evidence is necessarily indirect; the existence of macroevolutionary change must be inferred from what is left after the change has occurred, and therefore, the scientific work involved in building these claims must be descriptive and comparative rather than experimental in the traditional sense.⁶

Nearly everything about evolutionary biology thus runs into trouble when viewed from a methodologically constrained, physical science perspective that sees proper scientific knowledge as something that can be established only through real-time demonstration. This view was not uncommon in Darwin’s day. Responding to Darwin’s work in 1860, one paleontologist demanded visual confirmation of the truth of evolution. “I must see for myself a known case of an important organ beginning to form or a modification of some value in essential characters,” he stated, before he would accept the idea of evolutionary change (Pictet, cited in Hull, 1973, p. 145). Objections like these rooted in differing notions of scientific method and epistemology have continued over the years and into the present, particularly as modern culture has become increasingly secularized. Some groups opposed to the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools have urged the public to dismiss any claims about processes that are “beyond the scope of human observation and verification” (G.C. Ministries, 1997). More recently, a conservative member of the Kansas state board of education objected to evolution in the school curriculum on the grounds that it did not conform to what he believed were the universal principles of science, which covered only things that were “observable, measurable, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable” (quoted in Humes, 2007, p. 151). Efforts to develop criteria to demarcate science from nonscience—on both sides of the debate—have repeatedly foundered on the diversity of methodological practices.

Educational Research Policy

A final example, closer to the heart of educational researchers, rounds out my illustrations. Pushing the nationwide trend toward increased levels of school accountability, the federal government enacted the No Child Left Behind Act in January 2002. In an attempt to move education into the realm of evidence-based practice, this legislation included language that explicitly defined what was to count as “scientifically based research.” In addition to being “systematic,” “rigorous,” and “peer-reviewed,” the claims made in studies of teaching and learning would ideally be “evaluated using experimental or quasi-experimental designs,” with subjects randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. This legislation was followed up with the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) in the fall of the same year, which established the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) as the primary research agency of the U.S. Department of Education and included similar language about what should count as “scientifically based” work. By the end of 2002, research methods favoring the use of randomized control trials had been established in multiple policy frameworks as the “gold standard” in education research (Eisenhart & Towne, 2003). For Bush administration policymakers, effective research was simply identical to these clinical experimental methods. Nothing else carried any weight.⁷

While some lauded the spirit of the new legislation, the establishment of these federal guidelines prompted a flood of objections from scholars in the education community. Some assailed the administration for embracing a thin caricature of science that was blind to the complexities of actual practice. Others pointed out that experimental approaches were suitable only for relatively simple phenomena that exhibited regularities across multiple settings—which was far different from what was true for children in classrooms. In other words, the new research standards failed to recognize that different phenomena often required fundamentally different methods of research and analysis (as we saw was the case with evolution; see Rudolph, 2014). Still others claimed that the legislated preference for experimental methods was part of an ideologically grounded attack that effectively sidelined more critical and socially conscious investigations that raised issues at odds with the administration’s social and political point of view (see, e.g., Berliner, 2002; Erickson & Gutierrez, 2002; Howe, 2004). During the drafting of ESRA, concerned education researchers enlisted a National Research Council panel to weigh in on what should characterize scientific approaches to educational problems. The resulting report, Scientific Research in Education (Shavelson & Towne, 2002), offered a more flexible and broader account of science than that put forward by the Bush administration. In the end, nearly everyone expressed dismay that the federal government would attempt to impose an external methodological standard on an existing community of researchers.

The reaction to the unilateral methodological imposition was so fierce precisely because so much was at stake at the public policy level. The new evidence-based research guidelines required IES to target its funding resources on more narrowly defined random-assignment studies. For fiscal year 2012, those funds amounted to nearly $190 million—the majority of which went to only a fraction of researchers doing work in the larger field of teaching and learning.⁸ Those who had previously counted on federal support for their work now had to get along without or shift the nature of their work to garner public funds. More significant was the fact that these new federal research standards were used in conjunction with the What Works Clearinghouse to screen curricular interventions and instructional approaches sanctioning only those that had been demonstrated to increase student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. Clearly the adoption of this methodological standard not only changed the funding landscape of the education research community but also had the added impact of transforming the everyday experiences of millions of children in schools across the country in ways that may or may not prove to be beneficial in the long run.

The three cases sketched above reveal the ways in which understandings of scientific method exercise influence over significant aspects of public policy and, ultimately, the way we organize our lives in diverse social spaces from local schools to the halls of Congress. More important from an educational perspective is the fact that stakeholders in these debates actively sought to manipulate perceptions of science and its method in ways that would move policy decisions in one direction or another. The most common strategy entailed a narrowing of methodological conceptions by one group in order to gain cultural, political, or economic advantage over another. This practice, referred to as “boundary work” by the historical sociologist Thomas Gieryn (1999), is commonly found at the intersections of science and society.

In the negotiations over postwar research funding, elite members of the research establishment worked deliberately to rein in the public view of scientific method as free-floating and universally applicable and replace it with a conception grounded in the disciplinary community of researchers, a move that helped them consolidate their control over the funding process and maximize their professional autonomy. In the struggles over evolution in schools, creationist equal-time proponents contrasted the methods of evolutionary biologists with those of experimentalists in ways that cast doubt on the scientific status of knowledge arrived at using nonexperimental methods. And in the case of standards of research in education, legislative language deliberately screened out a huge number of studies that fell outside an externally imposed methodological standard. In each case, the ability of one group to impose its political position on the broader community or, at a minimum, to undermine the cultural authority of another group possessing legitimate epistemic authority (in the case of evolution) was enabled by public confusion about or misunderstanding of the variety of intellectual practices that constitute science. What these examples illustrate are the real social consequences that result from the inability of the lay public to fully appreciate the range of methods by which science arrives at reliable knowledge.

Anyone who thinks that method-related public policy issues arise infrequently and therefore are not worth concerted educational attention need only consider the additional topics of the carcinogenic effects of cigarette smoking, the clinical-trials model for HIV research, the claims of the heritability of intelligence, or human-induced climate change—one of the most pressing issues of our day (Brandt, 2007; Carson, 2007; Edwards, 2010; Epstein, 1996). Each of these (and countless more that could be brought forward) is an example of real-world situations in which public policy decisions have hinged on questions of scientific method and where various interest groups (some from within the scientific community and some from outside) have gone to great lengths to exploit public misunderstanding of legitimate knowledge-generating practices for their own advantage. The case of climate change, of all these, offers the most compelling case for attending to lay understanding of the diverse and complex methods research communities use to do their work. The extent to which expert knowledge on this topic has been deliberately undermined for short-term political and economic gain has been truly staggering (see Michaels, 2008; Mooney, 2006; Oreskes & Conway, 2010).

The ongoing public policy struggles and broader cultural conflicts over the role of scientific expertise in social and political decision making have left us today with a distrustful and dysfunctional relationship between institutional science and the general public. We do not know who to look to for help, because we are not sure whose knowledge to trust. The reckless manipulation of perceptions about which methods are or are not scientific—and who as a consequence possesses legitimate expertise in these realms—not only has compromised our ability to make enlightened policy decisions in the here and now but has shaken as well the foundation of our democratic social order, which crucially depends on the deliberate exercise of intelligence among its citizens in all societal domains to function effectively.⁹

From Then to Now

The historical episodes sketched above make it clear enough that Dewey’s warnings gained little traction among scientists and educators so many years ago. Although some real progress has been made in science education, we have not yet transformed our core approach to science teaching in ways that would lead to greater utilization of scientific expertise in the management of our social and civic affairs. Superficial measures of progress are not hard to find. In the years since the Cambridge meeting, enrollments in high school science courses, which hovered in the 4% to 15% range in the early 1900s (depending on the subject), have increased to the point now where nearly every graduate in the United States is required to have at least two credits (often three) of science course work. In 2009, over 95% of graduating seniors had completed biology and 70% had finished chemistry.⁹ Since World War II, nary a decade has passed without seeing significant national pressure for more and better science teaching. Few things have become as central to national education policy as student achievement in science and mathematics. But, in spite of these encouraging signs, the failure to shift our attention from the continued emphasis on scientific content to the methods of science is equally clear.

The record of high-profile policy initiatives aimed at improving science education—whether originating in Congress or coming from quasigovernmental or private organizations—has been focused without exception on the scientific manpower pipeline or, in more the more current phrasing, “workforce training.” From 1950 through the early 1960s, the NSF, acting within its charter to “improve science education,” devoted most of its resources to summer programs to improve teacher content knowledge along with fellowships to support scientists in training. A smaller fraction (less than 10% of its education budget) went to curricular reform, but even that targeted disciplinary competence rather than broad public understanding (despite the best intentions of the curriculum developers; Rudolph, 2002). The paradigm for direct congressional action was, of course, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Drafted in the late 1950s following the Soviet launch of Sputnik, this legislation aimed to increase the flow of manpower to science and technology fields. It provided funds for laboratory modernization, graduate fellowships, and career counseling, among other things. With the policy goal being worldwide technological superiority in the interests of national security, this focus on elite scientific training was perhaps not surprising (England, 1982; Krieghbaum & Rawson, 1969).¹⁰

After a lull in the 1970s, a second wave of attention to science education swept through the country following the 1983 release of the Commission on Educational Excellence’s report A Nation at Risk. That report, which called for greater attention to academic subject matter to compete with the Japanese economic juggernaut, set off a new round of reform initiatives and marked the start of the educational standards era in the United States. The AAAS released its vision of what the scientifically literate public should know in Science for All Americans in 1989 (Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1989), and following in short order were the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993) and the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996), drafted under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences.¹¹

The urgency and pace of reform, as we see all around us, has picked up noticeably since the turn of the most recent century with a renewed emphasis on scientific and technical workforce issues. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat reignited concerns over global competition in science and technology in 2005, which perhaps predictably led to another National Academy of Sciences report two years later, Rising Above the Gathering Storm (NRC, 2007a). This report coincided with the passage of the America Competes Act that same year, a modern-day equivalent of NDEA. Yet another call for more attention to science and mathematics education was made by the Carnegie Institute for Advanced Study Commission policy statement, The Opportunity Equation (Commission on Mathematics and Science Education, 2009). This flurry of reports and government action has reprised the crisis sensibility of the 1980s, but this time with India and China taking Japan’s place as the global economic threat to American prosperity. Among the new initiatives are funds for the training of more science teachers, programs for improving science content knowledge among existing teachers, a push for more Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate programs, more career education in science and technology fields, and the development of nationwide standards. Scientific capacity and technological innovation has clearly taken hold as the predominant motivation for national investment in science education (Berman, 2011).

The common threads uniting all the policy initiatives since the early 1980s have been the twin concerns with educational quality and accountability; the operational manifestation of these concerns has been student performance on standardized tests (Fuhrman, 2003; Ravitch, 1995, 2011). Mediocre student scores on a series of international science and math assessments in the 1980s, highlighted in the Nation at Risk report, led to a government push for more far-reaching accountability systems (Medrich & Griffith, 1992). In the late 1980s, the White House and the National Governor’s Association approved the Goals 2000 initiative, which called for, among other things, U.S. students to be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement. The National Science Board (NSB) soon began tracking the low state of public understanding of science using a fact-based metric in its biannual National Science Indicators reports (NSB, 1985). Moving down this accountability pathway, we have arrived at the current version of No Child Left Behind, a federally designed system with student test performance at its core (Vinovskis, 2009).

At the high school level, the prevailing accountability emphasis has combined with the growing emphasis on education as a private good to push greater adoption of AP course work in the sciences (P. Sadler, 2010; see also Labaree, 1997). Wealthier school districts increasingly measure themselves by how many AP courses they offer, and parents and high school students have rushed to add these courses to their transcripts in order to burnish their résumés for college admissions. From 2002 to 2012, the number of public school students taking AP exams more than doubled to nearly 1 million, with nearly half of those taking tests in math and science (College Board, 2013). These tests, reflecting as they do disciplinary preparation and advancement, notably focus heavily on content mastery and knowledge of the disciplinary field rather than broader knowledge of how science works. The increased attention to standardized test performance at all levels has, by its very nature, pushed science teaching toward fact-based learning outcomes, which does little to prepare the public to engage in the important science-related civic issues and policy debates that demand our attention (Polikoff, Porter, & Smithson, 2011; Webb, 1999; see also Southerland, Smith, Sowell, & Kittleson, 2007). If there is any civic vision here at all, it is a narrowly economic and individualistic one (see Labaree, 2012).

If one were hoping to locate in all this the kind of science education Dewey was calling for, one might look to the various national standards documents. These grand policy papers are where talk of a deep understanding of the methods and nature of science for the common good live and breathe. Process and method learning outcomes have long been bound up with the language of democracy and civic purpose in these spaces (see, e.g., Jewett, 2012). Such rhetoric has proven to be a powerful way to rally support for a broad-based, public commitment to science teaching at all levels of schooling. Under Conant’s direction, the 1945 Harvard Red Book, General Education in a Free Society, for example, contained an extensive discussion of the need to focus science education on how science is actually done (Committee on the Objectives of General Education in a Free Society, 1945). Forty-four years later, the landmark standards publication Science for All Americans articulated in its opening chapter a rather sophisticated view of nature of scientific work and the larger scientific enterprise. These threads were subsequently woven through the more detailed Benchmarks for Science Literacy, and the influential National Science Education Standards similarly showered attention on a range of methodological, epistemological, and social-context learning outcomes. The most recent effort to prescribe what every citizen should know about science—the Next Generation Science Standards (which emerged from recommendations in earlier NRC reports; e.g., NRC, 1999; 2007b)—does the same, casting these ideas in the language of scientific practices. Many of these ideas have had parallel expressions in the science curriculum policy initiatives in the United Kingdom, such as Beyond 2000: Science Education for the Future and the Twenty First Century Science project focus on how science works (Millar & Osborne, 1998). Unfortunately, they rarely find their way from the pages on which they are printed into the classrooms where they might make a difference in student understanding.

The problem is not with these particular aspirational visions of what citizens should know about science and how it functions. Rather it is the inability of our systems of schooling to translate these ideas into workable school experiences that result in meaningful student learning (see Fensham, 2009; Labaree, 2012). Whether due to the lack of teacher expertise, the demands and fragmentation of day-to-day school experience, the emphasis on measures of accountability, or the overriding pressure for workforce outcomes, science classrooms by and large simply have not been hospitable environments for teaching that ventures beyond the traditional emphasis on mastering science content knowledge. In the few instances where a focus on teaching about the nature of science and its methods has broken through the bulwark of traditional practice, the results have been unimpressive. Some efforts have been made to convey knowledge about what science is to students explicitly with the result being the transformation of what might have been a rich understanding of scientific work into a list of statements to be learned alongside the usual technical content (Lederman, Abd-El-Khalick, & Schwartz, 2002; McComas & Olson, 2002).¹² Immersion experiences have gained a stronger foothold, especially in higher-education settings. In these, students actually participate in the work of a research lab. But other than providing a kind of job shadowing (along with skill in the manipulation of various pieces of laboratory apparatus), these programs have demonstrated little effectiveness in developing any real understanding of how science works within and across fields and how that knowledge might relate to civic goals (see, e.g., T. Sadler, Burgin, McKinney, & Ponjuan, 2010). A hundred years’ worth of effort has done nothing to diminish the truth of Dewey’s (1910b) observation that “a student may acquire laboratory methods as so much isolated and final stuff, just as he may so acquire material from a text-book” (p. 125).

After 100-plus years of effort to develop (or at least rhetoric calling for) an approach to science education that can help citizens understand how the practices of science generate reliable knowledge about the world, recognize where legitimate sources of authority are to be found, and appreciate the contributions scientific expertise can make to public policy decisions, we are no better off than we were in 1910. If anything, we have regressed in this respect. According to a study in 2010, just 18% of Americans understand what it means to study something scientifically (NSB, 2012). And when confronted with science-related social issues, people overwhelmingly let ethics, morals, ideology—nearly anything other than science—guide their actions (Nielsen, 2012; T. Sadler & Donnelly, 2006). In fact, some evidence suggests that the public is becoming increasingly indifferent to scientific authority or, even more troubling, that certain groups have taken positions of outright hostility to it (Collins & Evans, 2007; Gauchat, 2012; Shapin, 2008).

Conclusion

Repeated ceremonial invocations of civic purpose in research reports or policy documents do little to change the plain fact that the kind of science education that takes place in classrooms day in and day out across the United States (if not in most advanced Western nations) reflects the root societal value we believe science has. “Form follows function,” as the biological dictum goes. Just as Dewey lamented the Spencerian emphasis on the utilitarian value of scientific information—the facts of science—at the beginning of the 20th century, society at the beginning of this 21st century has similarly cast the value of science in utilitarian terms, this time of a narrow vocational sort—either for the preparation of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals to fuel the national economic engine or, more generally, as the next step toward college preparation and personal economic success. Both have resulted no less surely in forms of teaching and learning aimed at mastery of content knowledge isolated from wider social concerns and some deeper understanding of where and how that knowledge was made.¹³

A look back at the address Dewey gave in the winter of 1909 offers us two primary insights into the problem before us today. First, it reminds us of the importance of focusing on the methods of science in the school curriculum. And by methods, I mean neither the facile, five-step method widely heralded in classrooms (from grade school to college) across the country nor the generalized “nature of science” or “nature of scientific inquiry” advocated in various quarters of the research and policy communities. The focus of science education, if we hope to fulfill the civic aspirations we routinely voice, should be on helping students see how science generates knowledge in all its diversity. As sociologists, philosophers, and historians of science have shown us over the past 50 years, science is not any one single kind of intellectual and social practice but, rather, pluralistic and multifaceted and necessarily so, given the wide range of phenomena we continually seek to understand, explain, and live with (Cartwright, 1999; Galison & Stump, 1996; Longino, 2002). The move toward seeing science as a “practice” advocated by the Next Generation Science Standards is a step in the right direction. But that step will be for naught if it is intended only to better enable the “mastery” of any particular practice, to train what Feinstein (2011) refers to as “marginal insiders,” or to give individuals the false hope of being able to evaluate scientific knowledge claims on their own (Norris, 1995a, 1995b). Future citizens need to recognize instead the diversity of practices that are counted as scientific and know where legitimate knowledge is to be found when dealing with a given phenomenon or domain.¹⁴ They need to know where to look (or whom to look to, more specifically) for knowledge of the consequences of a particular action (or inaction). The public policy implications can be significant, as I have attempted to show, if the public (or more specifically, those making public policy decisions) only selectively avails itself of the best available knowledge as a result of some misunderstanding (deliberately cultivated or not) about which methods count as scientific and which do not.¹⁵

The second insight that consideration of Dewey’s talk affords us relates to the question of what science has to offer and to whom. In 1909—in fact from the 1800s through the 1940s—the purpose of public education was largely civic in nature. That is, schooling was intended to make better citizens through the dissemination of basic literacy and numeracy skills as well as by building moral character and forging a democratic whole from the many diverse American subgroups (Hollinger, 1984; Selig, 2008; Tyack & Hansot, 1982). There were practical benefits to be sure (Spencer’s utilitarian argument for science instruction, for example), but those largely accrued to the individual and were general in nature. Science education during this era, and for Dewey in particular, was viewed as a fundamental element of “general education” because of what it could contribute to civic goals through the intellectual and moral development of the individual citizen— things like mental discipline, practical knowledge, appreciation of the natural world, and effective thinking strategies (see Westbrook, 1991). All of these things were (and continue to be in many cases) seen as valuable and widely applicable across a range of contexts within and, more importantly, outside of science. These are skills or learning outcomes, in other words, that are fungible.

After World War II, however, science education in the United States (as well as in other developed countries) was fundamentally transformed. Given the instrumental power that science and technology provided during the war, key elements of the scientific enterprise were eagerly folded into the country’s national security infrastructure and, not long after, into grander designs on global economic competitiveness and expansion (Leslie, 1993; Porter, 2009; Wolfe, 2013). By the late 1970s, as historian Elizabeth Berman (2011) observes, science was seen as something that “could be used to solve the nation’s growing economic problems” (p. 39; italics in original). During this period, the mission of science education was extended beyond the individual to support the scientific research community and the various forms of technical expertise embodied within it. The problem with this new “dual” mission is that the learning goals for each, although complementary in many ways, are fundamentally different. A science education for individual moral and intellectual growth—the goals we have always sought for developing citizens—looks (and should look) different from a science education for technical competency and disciplinary expertise. Technical expertise, as Shapin (2008) notes, is by its very nature not fungible. It exists within the institution and community of practice in which it was developed; it has little general utility out in the world. Over the past 60 years or so, we have convinced ourselves that it was an inconsequential matter to turn science education to serve national security and economic interests, that, despite what we might add or change, good science teaching would always be able to fulfill its core civic mission. But the civic learning outcomes, we must recognize, do not simply come along for free in this expanded educational scheme.

More to the point, the turn to technical, workforce education that occurred after the mid-20th century is at odds with the population of students precollege institutions are designed to serve. Few would argue that the primary goal of instruction at this level is the development of the general knowledge and skills citizens need to function effectively in a modern democratic society. This is the reason why public schools were established; they were to serve as the “pillars of the republic” in the words of the eminent historian Carl Kaestle (1983). Yet with the incessant funneling of students into the STEM pipeline, one might be led to believe that the purpose of school science instruction is only to provide the technical capacity to pursue careers in industry or research institutions. A simple examination of the student population in the United States, however, shows that only about 8% of the general high school population ends up with a STEM degree of one sort or another. But even if it were as high as 10%, it is fair to ask what sort of science education we are providing to the other 90% of our future citizens.¹⁶ Dewey’s plea all those years ago—not just to teach science as “method” but, as he so elegantly insisted, to teach students “the ways by which anything is entitled to be called knowledge” (Dewey, 1910b, p. 125)—should rekindle within us a desire to consider more thoughtfully the purposes for which we seek to educate the public about science. Recovering the civic goals of science education is long overdue—at least a century or so by my count.

Footnotes

Notes

John L. Rudolph is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, 225 N. Mills St., Madison, WI 53706, and faculty affiliate in the departments of History of Science and Educational Policy Studies; e-mail: jlrudolp@wisc.edu. His work focuses on the history of science education in the United States and the portrayal of scientific epistemology and practice in schools.

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