Most of us certainly ‘know’ more about the natural world than Newton knew in his lifetime. But does that make us better scientists than he was? 

What do instructors, universities, and the larger scientific community intend to achieve through their introductory courses in STEM? What do undergraduate students see as the point of their learning in these courses? 

At first glance, it seems the purpose of these courses is to introduce students to the wide array of topics within their chosen discipline. For example, a student who takes chemistry courses is expected to learn some foundational concepts such as the composition of atoms and molecules, the differences between elements and compounds, and how and why chemical reactions occur. 

Rethinking STEM education

This notion of introducing the subject matter has largely informed instructional practices for over a hundred years: The instructor who knows the subject delivers a series of lectures hoping to transmit that knowledge to students who are new to the discipline. However, over the past few decades, there have been numerous calls to expand the scope of STEM learning beyond ‘knowing science’. For example, a framework for K-12 education by the National Research Council (NRC) advocates for three-dimensional learning for sciences.¹ This approach not only covers the disciplinary core ideas of the subject matter but also emphasizes science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts.

Although this framework was conceptualized for K-12 education, many researchers find it relevant and useful for undergraduate science education.² Despite these calls for changes, in most science learning environments, knowing the subject matter takes the front seat while the other dimensions take the back seat.  Additionally, the initiatives aimed at reforming higher education focus on areas such as instructor preparation, making higher education equitable, and structural changes to course design and assessments, rather than on the magnitude of content that needs to be covered in introductory STEM course.^3,4 This content heavy model has led to decreased student success in STEM, especially for students from marginalized backgrounds.⁴ 

To put this in perspective, consider how transportation and communication has changed over the past hundred years. We have moved from writing physical letters that could take weeks to arrive to instantly messaging anyone across the globe. Horse buggies, steam engines and slow speed cars have been replaced by new age cars, high speed trains and affordable air travel. But how does a typical undergraduate science classroom look in the present days compared to how it looked at the beginning of the twentieth century? 

Challenges and opportunities in modern STEM courses

To address some of the issues raised above, we need to ask ourselves, “Why should students take introductory STEM courses?” This question can have multiple answers such as ‘we need more STEM graduates for our workforce’, ‘knowledge of science is useful in daily life’, ‘STEM courses help students make informed personal and political choices by building critical thinking skills’, etc. While all these answers hold merit, it's important to focus on the students who enroll in these courses, many of whom do not intend to major in that field. They often take these courses because it is prerequisite course for what they intend to do. For example, most students who take chemistry do so because it is a prerequisite course for other specializations such as pharmacy, dentistry, medicine, etc. 

So, what do we want our students to retain from these courses? Drawing on literature, I argue that knowledge and practices from introductory STEM courses should, in addition to helping students learn about a given discipline, help people solve personally meaningful problems in their lives, directly affect their material and social circumstances, and inform their most significant and practical political decisions.⁵ This is the 'enduring understanding' intro STEM courses could create, illustrated by the figure below.⁷ 

A subset of students who graduate high school intend to join college. The door on the outer circle is the entry door for introductory STEM courses. As mentioned above, a small fraction of those who take a particular STEM course end up specializing in that field by entering the inner door (community of practice). They form a small community who use the specific skills and knowledge of the subject they have learnt on a daily basis. But, the vast majority of students move into other fields. It is my assertion that the focus of their learning should be more about “enduring understanding” (such as making informed decisions about vaccines or reading a nutrition label meaningfully) and less about domain specific skills and knowledge (such as mechanism of a particular reaction or how to calculate escape velocity on a specific planet). 

Achieving enduring understanding

How do we achieve enduring understanding? Well, what enduring understanding already exists in society regarding science? What comes to our minds when we think of science in general? Is it a subject with a wealth of knowledge about the way the world works? Is it a subject which has a profound influence on technology and modern society? Does pursuing science usually increase the odds of getting a well-paid job? All these things may be true, but how often do we think of science as a discipline of practice rather than a discipline whose main purpose is to amass knowledge? I feel quite often the role of scientists as practitioners gets downplayed. I am of the opinion that altering the view of science from a discipline of knowledge to a discipline of practice can help us achieve ‘enduring understanding’. 

To understand what constitutes a discipline of practice, let us look at the example of medicine, where the phrase ‘practicing doctor’ (but we hardly say ‘practicing scientist’) gets used a lot. The word ‘practice’ can either mean “to perform often, customarily, or habitually” or “to be professionally engaged in” and doctors use the latter term.⁶ So, if doctors (and lawyers too who say ‘practicing law’) are professionally engaged in their work, what are scientists up to? How do they amass the knowledge about the workings of the natural world? The answer lies in the ‘practices’ scientists engage themselves in routinely. It is these practices that enable them to uncover the mysterious workings of nature. Some of these practices identified by the NRC are:

1. Asking Questions
2. Developing and Using Models
3. Planning and Carrying Out Investigations
4. Analyzing and Interpreting Data
5. Using Mathematics and Computational Thinking
6. Constructing Explanations
7. Engaging in Argument from Evidence
8. Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information

To fit the last piece in this puzzle, we must ask ourselves what is more effective in achieving ‘enduring understanding’? Is developing knowledge of science more effective in honing qualities such as critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills or becoming a practitioner of science? The relation between practices and disciplinary knowledge can be summarized as - “when scientists engage in scientific practices, they produce scientific knowledge”. In other words, practices are the process by which knowledge is generated. Though the practices and disciplinary knowledge are intertwined and cannot be isolated, we can shift the emphasis on knowledge in introductory courses. 

A practice-oriented approach to STEM education

Circling back to our original question - what do we want our students to retain from the STEM courses they have taken? To reiterate, knowledge and practices from introductory STEM courses should help people solve personally meaningful problems in their lives, directly affect their material and social circumstances, and inform their most significant and practical political decisions.  Looking at the above-mentioned eight science practices, it is not a stretch to think that practices are more aligned towards achieving the intended objective of introductory STEM courses. If we want our students to solve meaningful problems, the specifics of a reaction from chemistry or an equation from physics might be of less help in comparison to skills such as asking questions, carrying out investigation or analyzing data. This is one of the main reasons NRC has added ‘science and engineering practices’ as a new dimension to science learning. However, most introductory STEM courses are inundated with disciplinary knowledge with lesser focus on the dimension of practice. Shifting this focus by relaxing some of the content can give the much-needed space for science practices, thereby paving the path towards empowering our students with much needed skills to make informed decisions about aspects which has influence on personal lives and the larger society. Having said that, there is no easy answer to questions related to the content that needs to be relaxed or the extent to which it needs to be relaxed. I believe the answers to these questions are discipline specific and need careful deliberations by instructors, discipline-based education researchers etc.

In conclusion, we may know more than what Newton knew in his lifetime considering the inventions and discoveries that are made in the last 300 years. But we can all agree that does not necessarily qualify us to be better scientists. What distinguishes most of us from Newton is not the amount of knowledge we have but the way we think and interact with the world around us. If the former makes us better informed, the latter makes us better thinkers and problem solvers!

References:

1.  A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas; National Academies Press, 2012.
2. Cooper, M. M.; Caballero, M. D.; Ebert-May, D.; Fata-Hartley, C. L.; Jardeleza, S. E.; Krajcik, J. S.; Laverty, J. T.; Matz, R. L.; Posey, L. A.; Underwood, S. M. Challenge Faculty to Transform STEM Learning. Science 2015, 350 (6258), 281–282. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab0933.
3. Hammond, J. W.; Brownell, S. E.; Byrd, W. C.; Cheng, S. J.; McKay, T. A.; Tarchinski, N. A. Infrastructuring to Scale Multi-Institutional Equity and Inclusion Innovations. Change Mag. High. Learn. 2022.
4. Dewsbury, B. M.; Swanson, H. J.; Moseman-Valtierra, S.; Caulkins, J. Inclusive and Active Pedagogies Reduce Academic Outcome Gaps and Improve Long-Term Performance. PLOS ONE 2022, 17 (6), e0268620. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268620.
5. Feinstein, N. Salvaging Science Literacy. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.20414.
6. Fogarty, C. T.; Mauksch, L. B. “That’s Why They Call It Practice.” Fam. Syst. Health 2014, 32 (4), 365–366. https://doi.org/10.1037/fsh0000093.
7. Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Pearson.