Tuesday, July 17, 2018

SCIENCE AS A VERB

Growing up, I was taught science as a NOUN—as a body of established knowledge.  I memorized the bones of the body, learned that water molecules consist of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, that gravity is one of four basic forces of nature, and on and on.  Essentially, we were taught science much like we were taught history (unfortunately)—as sets of rules and facts to be memorized.  I think my experience was not very different from that of most of my cohorts.

What we should have learned, but generally were not, was science as a VERB.  We should have been taught science as a process and a methodology by which we learn about the nature of reality, a methodology that includes observation, the formulation of a hypothesis based on that observation, the design of an experiment to test that hypothesis, and the conduct of that experiment to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.  We should have been taught that every finding is to be held conditionally, not unconditionally, and must be capable of falsifiability.

Several decades ago I had a brief (three-year) career as an instructor in psychology at the college level.  Because I was low man on the pecking order of seniority and experience, I was generally blessed with the classes that no one else in the department wanted to teach.  Over that time period I taught a number of different classes, from introductory psychology to a course on the history of psychology.  

It was probably inescapable that the introductory class would be taught primarily as a body of knowledge.  That was the expectation of the department, and virtually all textbooks were written as if the field of psychology was simply a set of known facts and principles—psychology as a noun.

But the classes I taught that I recall most fondly were a couple of upper level classes, experimental psychology and social psychology.  In general, I’m happy with how I handled those classes.  For experimental psychology, I focused on the nature of the scientific method and on experimental design and the special problems with design that research in psychology can present.  I had each of the students devise and conduct an experiment and asked each to critique his or her design and results.

Social psychology can be taught as a body of knowledge class, and maybe that is what many of the students were looking for when they signed up for the class.  (Or maybe they were just looking to fulfill the credit requirements for a major or minor in psychology.)  But that was not my focus.  A lot of textbooks at the time attempted to summarize the state of knowledge in the field and presented that summary as a body of knowledge.  I chose instead a text that consisted simply of recent experiments in the area.  These included original professional journal articles along with critiques of the designs that the experiments had employed.  In effect, I was trying to teach psychology as a verb, as a methodology for extending our understanding of the world in the context of psychology.  It was fun for me, and I felt good about what I taught.  I’m sure some of the students were disappointed, but others, I believe, gained insight into how the scientific process works.

Bottom line:  I’m not arguing that science has to be taught exclusively as a process or methodology.  We need to have an understanding of the body of knowledge that we have achieved through the application of the scientific process.  But we also need to introduce students, not just at the college level but beginning at the elementary grade level, to the process by which we have developed that body of knowledge.  We need to teach our children to think like scientists, to ask why, how do we know, how can we find out.  We need to teach them to view science not just as a noun but as a verb.

© 2018 John M. Phillips

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