Does science education need the history of science?

ISIS

Volumn 99, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 322-330

  Gooday, Graeme ^a   Lynch, John M ^b   Wilson, Kenneth G ^c   Barsky, Constance K ^d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

^b ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d Redesign   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; EDUCATION; HISTORY; HUMAN; SCIENCE; UNIVERSITY;

HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; HUMANS; SCIENCE; UNIVERSITIES;

EID: 47749142806     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/588690     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Naomi Oreskes's contribution to this Focus section (coauthored with Zuoyue Wang) illustrates that this is not beyond the realm of possibility.
2. Given the limits of current K-12 education in practice, Wilson and Barsky propose that a pilot curriculum, and teacher preparation project be established to test such ideas, with follow-ups perhaps ten and then twenty years later. Teacher preparation is likely to be a critical issue: at present, they believe, few education reform projects-especially those in mathematics and science - supply enough preparation, and technical assistance, and with sufficient quality, for teachers' historical work with precollege students to have much hope of success. Kenneth G. Wilson and Constance K. Barsky, "Applied Research and Development: Support for Continuing Improvement in Education," Daedalus, 1998, 727:233-258;
3. and Barsky, Wilson, and B. Daviss, "A Model Development Concept (MDC) for Education: A Framework for Change," Proceedings of the Redesign in Science Education Conference (RISE), Columbus, Ohio, 20-21 Oct. 2000.
4. Stephen Brush, "Should the History of Science Be Rated X? The Way That Scientists Behave (According to Historians) Might Not Be a 'Good Model' for Such Students," Science, 1974, 185:1164-1172.
5. These remarks on Brush's lack of specificity derive from. Graeme Gooday, "U-Rated Not X-Rated: Reassessing How Science Students Could Benefit from Learning History of Science," 2005, http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/view.html/ prsdocuments/68.
6. Brush, "Should the History of Science Be Rated X?" p. 1165. However,
7. see Brush's comments on how Kuhn was interpreted as offering an antiscience message in his discussions of L. Eisenbud's speech "Science for Antiscientists," presented at the American Physical Society meeting, Washington, D.C., 26 Apr. 1972:
8. ibid., p. 1172 n 58. For further discussion of Brush, see Eugene Garfield, "Current Comments: Identifying Paradigms in Science," Current Contents, 1974, 17:5-6.
9. For a more recent response see Jane Maienschein, "Why Study History for Science?" Biology and Philosophy, 2000, 15:339-348;
10. and Richard Duschl, "Using and Abusing: Relating History of Science to Learning and Teaching Science," 2000, http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/ data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1a/c1/90.pdf.
11. Brash, "Should the History of Science Be Rated X?" pp. 1170-1171.
12. For the concerns that prompted the "Science Wars" see Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994).
13. Reacting to Fuller's intervention see Steve Mirsky, "Teach the Science," Scientific American, Feb. 2006, pp. 36-38. Fuller has received considerable criticism from fellow scholars in science and technology studies; see below for further discussion of this point.
14. This was the case with one author of this piece (Graeme Gooday). It would be interesting to know from Isis readers what proportion of them moved into history of science for just this reason.
15. What follows summarizes Gooday, "U-Rated Not X-Rated" (cit. n. 3). That piece draws on the U.K. Quality Assurance Agency Benchmark statements for Higher Education curricula that aim to spell out the key skills, knowledge, and understanding for all major Higher Education disciplines. For Honors degrees see http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/honours/. For an attempt to develop a comparable benchmark statement for history of science, technology, and medicine see http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/view.html/prsdocuments/ 114.
16. Unfortunately, we must accept that it is probably unethical to engage in controlled tests on. science students, allowing only some to take history of science courses!
17. The magnum opus on American antievolutionism remains Ronald Numbers's The Creationists, which has recently been reissued in an expanded version (Harvard Univ. Press, 2006). It is worth noting that Numbers has become politically active in counteracting creationism; see http://www.bpnews.net/ bpnews.asp?ID=22610.
18. The decisions in question are Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), McLean v. Arkansas (1981), and Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). Complete trial archives for Kitzmiller v. Dover are available online at http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?page_id=5.
19. Hugh Miller, "The Physical Science Chair," Witness, 17 Sept. 1845, p. 396.
20. For more on the reaction of his fellow sociologists to Fuller's attempt to argue for an "equal opportunities program" for intelligent design see the various essays in Social Studies of Science, 2006, 56(6):819-868.
21. For more on creationist misuse of history see John M. Lynch, "Pithecophobes of the World, Unite! Revisionist History and Creationist Rhetoric," 1998, http://darwin.bc.asu.edu/pub/pithecophobes.pdf.
22. For discussion of the claim regarding the qualifications of scriptural geologists see Terry Mortenson, The Great Turning Point (Green Forest, Ark.: Master Books, 2004).
23. For a more nuanced view see the introduction in Lynch, ed., Creationism and Scriptural Geology, 1 vols., Vol. 1 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002).
24. Stephen C. Meyer, Scott Minnich, Jonathan Moneymaker, Paul A. Nelson, and Ralph Seelke, Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and against Neo-Darwinism (London/Melbourne: Hill House, 2007).
25. K. M. Pickett, J. W. Wenzel, and S. W. Rissing, "Iconoclasts of Evolution," American Biology Teacher, 2005, 67:275-282,
26. on p. 282. For a subsequent examination of Haeckel's drawings and their history see Nick Hopwood, "Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel's Embryological Illustrations," Isis, 2006, 97:260-301.
27. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
28. For an alternative view see Robert J. Richards, "The Moral Grammar of Narratives in History of Biology-The Case of Haeckel and Nazi Biology," in Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, ed. Michael Ruse and David Hull (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 249 - 451, on p. 451. It should be pointed out that Richards also takes on the historical analyses of Daniel Gasman and Stephen Jay Gould regarding Haeckel.
29. For reviews of Weikart's book see Sander Gliboff, in H-Net Reviews, 2004, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=37981105462766;
30. Paul Lawrence Farber, in Journal of the History of Biology, 2005, 58:390-391;
31. and Nils Roll-Hansen, in Isis, 2005, 96:669-671.
32. Hopwood, "Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud" (cit. n. 16), p. 301.
33. For details of these twenty-year goals see Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004). The document is available online at http://darwin.bc.asu.edu/pub/wedge.pdf.