Science and the Educated American - American Academy of Arts

277 Pages·2011·2.59 MB·English

Science and the
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AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES E AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES
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Science and the
Educated American:
A Core Component
of Liberal Education
Please direct inquiries to:
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
136 Irving Street
Cambridge, MA 02138-1996
Telephone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.amacad.org
Science and the
Educated American:
A Core Component
of Liberal Education
Edited by Jerrold Meinwald and John G. Hildebrand
© 2010 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
“Physics for Future Presidents” © 2010 by Richard A. Muller
All rights reserved.
Cover image © iStockphoto.com/runeer
ISBN#: 0-87724-088-4
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is grateful to the Simons Foundation
for supporting the publication and dissemination of this volume and the Academy’s
ongoing work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.
The statements made and views expressed in this publication are solely the respon-
sibility of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Simons Foundation or
the Officers and Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Contents
vii Acknowledgments
viii Preface
1 Introduction
Jerrold Meinwald and John G. Hildebrand
Part I: The Case for Studying Science
9 Chapter 1
Science in the Liberal Arts Curriculum
Don M. Randel
23 Chapter 2
Science as a Liberal Art
Frank H.T. Rhodes
Part II: What Should Students Be Learning?
41 Chapter 3
Science in the Liberal Arts and Sciences
Eugene H. Levy
57 Chapter 4
Scientific Literacy: A Modest Proposal
James Trefil and Robert M. Hazen
70 Chapter 5
Science Education in the Age of Science
Chris Impey
Part III: How to Present Science?
112 Chapter 6
Physics for Future Presidents
Richard A. Muller
130 Chapter 7
Learning Astronomy through Writing
Martha P. Haynes
151 Chapter 8
Teaching Science for Understanding: Focusing on
Who, What, and Why
Sally G. Hoskins
180 Chapter 9
Molecules of Life: A General Education Approach
to the Science of Living Systems
Brian N. Tse, Jon Clardy, and David R. Liu
218 Chapter 10
Science for All in a Core Curriculum: Frontiers of Science
at Columbia University
Darcy B. Kelley
Part IV: How Can We Judge Success?
228 Chapter 11
Assessing Scientific Reasoning in a Liberal Learning Curriculum
Diane Ebert-May, Elena Bray Speth, and Jennifer L. Momsen
241 Chapter 12
The Conceptualization and Measurement of Civic Scientific
Literacy for the Twenty-First Century
Jon D. Miller
256 Contributors
Acknowledgments
The American Academy’s project on Science in the Liberal Arts Curriculum pays
special attention to the challenges of and opportunities for teaching science in
a general education context, considering how best to engage those students not
majoring in the physical or natural sciences. It also argues that scientific literacy
developed during a student’s undergraduate years plays a critical role in the
quality of our national debate and, in turn, the health of our democracy.
In August 2007, the Academy convened academic leaders from thirty-
four colleges and universities to discuss science curricula for non-science majors.
The forum facilitated the exchange of ideas across institutions, focusing on
innovative teaching methods and common barriers. The participants also
completed a survey of their institutions’ existing science requirements for non-
scientists, the options available for fulfilling those requirements, and the
assessments used to determine success in meeting science-education objectives.
This volume grew out of the Academy conference and survey. (A list of par-
ticipants and schools represented in the survey responses is included at the
end of this volume.)
The essays contain descriptions of specific courses, concrete strategies for
curricular reform, and spirited defenses of the value of science to the liberal arts
curriculum. We hope that administrators and faculty members will find this
publication useful in updating their institutions’ curricula. We are confident
that the many new ideas and thoughtful recommendations in this volume will
have a positive influence on post-secondary science education in America.
The Academy thanks especially Jerrold Meinwald and John G. Hildebrand
for their guidance of the project and for serving as editors of this publication.
We are thankful to the Simons Foundation for supporting the publication and
dissemination of this important volume and the Academy’s ongoing work in
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. We also acknowl-
edge the partial support provided by the Podell Emeriti Awards for Research
and Scholarship, awarded through the Cornell Association of Professors Emeriti.
We are grateful to Katie Donnelly and Kim Durniak, the program officers who
worked closely with Jerry and John on the conference and publication, respec-
tively. Thank you also to the program assistants and publication staff for help-
ing to produce this publication. Most of all, we express our gratitude to the
contributors for bringing their knowledge and creative ideas together in an
effort to inform curriculum debate at higher-education institutions.
Leslie Cohen Berlowitz
President and William T. Golden Chair
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
Preface
An idea for a new approach to science teaching unexpectedly grew out of my
experience at several small faculty dinner parties. More than once, I found my-
self responding to “and what do you do?” by explaining that my research, at
the interface between chemistry and biology, was largely focused on exploring
how various organisms (mostly insects and other arthropods) use chemistry to
defend themselves and to communicate with the outside world.
A simple example I might cite was our discovery that a handsome local
millipede (Apheloria corrugata) defends itself by secreting a mixture of deadly
hydrogen cyanide and benzaldehyde when disturbed. In a short time, this topic
might be followed by a somewhat lengthier explanation of how a female Florida
Queen butterfly relies on a chemical signal provided by a courting male in se-
lecting a mate. Her choice of a partner, it turns out, is based on the male’s abil-
ity to provide chemical protection for her eggs (rendering them unpalatable
to egg predators such as lady bugs). The male obtains this protective chemical
from toxic plants (Crotalaria spp.) and incorporates it into a spermataphore,
which is transferred to the female during mating. In courtship, the male “in-
forms” the female of his defender status by applying a courtship pheromone,
which he produces from the toxin itself, to her antennae. If a male lacks the
toxin, he cannot synthesize the courtship pheromone, and the female will most
likely evade his advances. Most listeners are intrigued by this example of chem-
ical communication in nature.
What struck me about these interchanges was that I was actually explaining
the first recognized example of Darwin’s sexual selection based on a chemical
signal to a thoroughly engaged audience whose primary interests were in sub-
jects as diverse as music, economics, or ancient history. Without the benefit of
a blackboard, slides, or props of any sort, my fellow diners became truly inter-
ested in this narration, and they came away with a new understanding of some
previously unsuspected roles of chemistry in nature.
That a group of humanists and social scientists expressed interest in chem-
istry during casual conversation over a glass of wine provided a clue as to how
we might teach chemistry and biology to a large body of undergraduate students
whose own primary interests are not necessarily in science. These considerations
led me to develop an unconventional chemistry course at Cornell University,
with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as the Henry and
Camille Dreyfus Foundation and the National Science Foundation. I called the
course “The Language of Chemistry,” a phrase used by Arthur Kornberg in his
1989 autobiography, For the Love of Enzymes. Designed as a lecture course with
viii SCIENCE AND THE EDUCATED AMERICAN
a built-in writing requirement—with no prerequisites or laboratory component
—it could nevertheless be used to fulfill part of the science requirement for
students in the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences. “The Language of Chem-
istry” made no attempt to survey the entire field. Instead, it demonstrated, via
carefully selected case studies, exactly how chemists have studied a variety of
biological phenomena and have ultimately attained a deep understanding of
these phenomena at the molecular level. Students came to appreciate why mo-
lecular structures are important and learned how those structures can be de-
termined. As part of the course, they also studied an area of chemistry/biology
on their own and wrote an essay explaining this body of science to a lay reader.1
During a subsequent sabbatical leave, which I spent as a Visiting Scholar
at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I explored further the general
question of what sort of scientific education our country’s college undergrad-
uates actually receive. In August 2007, a workshop was held at the House of
the Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A group of roughly forty partici-
pants, comprising physical and biological scientists as well as college and uni-
versity administrators, met to discuss the importance to our society of incorpo-
rating a substantial science component in the “liberal arts” curriculum, and to
learn about some highly original approaches to science teaching that several of
our faculty participants, from a variety of institutions of higher learning, were
pursuing. At an early stage in preparing for this exercise, I had asked my good
friend John G. Hildebrand (Regents Professor of Neurobiology with joint
appointments in Chemistry and Biochemistry, Entomology, and Molecular
and Cellular Biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson) to join me in
organizing the workshop. Following the workshop, we solicited and edited
the essays collected in this volume, some of which describe and expand on
material presented at the meeting, and some of which were written by non-
participants whose expertise we sought to broaden the scope of the volume.
Our hope is that these essays will stimulate and perhaps even inspire col-
leagues involved in undergraduate education to devise courses and curricula
that are particularly suited to developing science literacy in all their students.
We look forward to a widespread reexamination and reevaluation of the contents
as well as the methods of presentation employed in science courses designed to
1. For a detailed account of the course, which also incorporated a significant writing component, see
Stacey Lowery Bretz and Jerrold Meinwald, “The Language of Chemistry: Using Case Studies to
Teach on a ‘Need-to-Know’ Basis,” Journal of College Science Teaching31 (4) (2002): 220–224.
PREFACE ix