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Volume 3 |
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Goals and History of Science Education |
The current "crisis" in science education has caused a flurry of activity at many levels. This brief article looks critically at the attempts by certain persons to redefine science education as the interface between science and society. We hope a continuing open dialogue on this issue will encourage the widest possible participation by those knowledgeable about and interested in public science education.
If the area of study called science education is a discipline, those practicing it should agree what it is. To develop an understanding of what science education is, the name needs to be analyzed and that analysis, we believe, consists of first describing science. Several of those descriptions follow:
(1) The object of all science is to coordinate our experiences and bring them into a logical system. (Albert Einstein in Booth, 1962)
(2) The task of science is both to extend the range of our experience and reduce it to order. (Niels Bohr in Booth, 1962)
(3) Science is built up with facts as a house is with stone, but a collection of facts is no more science that a heap of stones is a house. (Henri Poincaire in Kelly, 1941)
We believe that the foregoing descriptions of science were synthesized into a single, excellent definition by science historian Duane Roller (1970) when he said, "Science is the quest for knowledge not the knowledge itself."
We accept Roller's definition of science; science education, then, involves the process of educating student in how to quest---or search---for knowledge. That description, however, is not unique to the natural sciences until we specify that those searches for knowledge are made in the biological and physical worlds. Science education then becomes the discipline that bears the responsibility of leading students to learn how to search for knowledge in the biological and physical worlds. There is little doubt in our minds that once how to conduct a quest is learned, it will be used by students in other content areas if they are allowed. Of course, the process of science generates declarative knowledge, therefore, that declarative knowledge also falls under the rubric of science education. We, therefore, choose to define science education as the discipline devoted to discovering, developing, and evaluating improved methods and materials to teach science, i.e.., the quest for knowledge, as well as the knowledge generated by that quest.