Karen Hopkin, Keith Roberts, and Bruce Alberts are scientists who coauthor, with four others, the Norton textbook Essential Cell Biology, which is now in its Sixth Edition.
In 2019, a novel coronavirus made its way into the human population, creating a catastrophe that reverberated across the planet. Five years later, we continue to grapple with the loss of life, economic upheaval, and educational disruption it caused. The political and social ramifications will affect society for decades, maybe generations, to come.
A Wake-Up Call
For scientists, the pandemic served as a distressing wake-up call. The tragic experience revealed that millions of people have little faith in science—or in scientists. Far from valuing scientific expertise, many think that scientific judgements are simply whatever scientists happen to believe—and that the scientific consensus on issues that range from vaccine safety to climate change are just an opinion, no better than any opinion people might encounter through social media. As a result, scientific conclusions in conflict with individuals’ views can be safely ignored.
What gave rise to this seemingly sudden decline in scientific trust? In retrospect, the public’s misapprehension about the value and meaning of science and scientific consensus clearly reflects a failure of science education.
Scientists experience firsthand how science creates reliable knowledge through a broad community process with many checks and balances. They know why a scientific consensus must be open to change based on new evidence and ideas—and that scientific understandings improve gradually over time, with refinements that bring them ever closer to the truth.
But in our eagerness to expose students to all the amazing things that science has discovered about the natural world, scientists (and even authors of science textbooks) often overlook the most critical task for scientific education: teaching students how the remarkable human endeavor that we call science creates knowledge.
A New Textbook Chapter and Essay
Dismayed and concerned by what we observed during the pandemic, we, the seven authors of Essential Cell Biology, wrote a new, 13-page chapter for our Sixth Edition in January 2023. Norton posted our chapter, “Why Trust Science?,” on its site, making the material freely available as a resource to help catalyze what we viewed as an urgently needed change in science education. The chapter can be downloaded from the Essential Cell Biology digital resources page at https://digital.wwnorton.com/ecb6. For instructors assigning the book in their course, we also created an activity in the accompanying Smartwork assessment platform, consisting of seven multiple-choice questions (each with answer-specific feedback) to help students refine their understanding of how scientific knowledge is produced, validated, and communicated.
This freely available resource addresses students directly, to talk through how misinformation has spread, and it dives into the process of science to help them better understand where knowledge comes from and the nature of experimenting. It can be assigned as a standalone reading assignment to further classroom discussion.
Soon after our chapter was made public, The World Academy of Science (TWAS) in Trieste reached out to ask whether we could produce a version that would be more broadly relevant to other areas of science. In response, three of us—Karen Hopkin, Keith Roberts, and Bruce Alberts—created a version of “Why Trust Science?” based on the history of infectious disease and continental drift, rather than cell biology. A new website now hosts this revised essay: https://whytrustscience.org.uk. The associated assessment questions that appear in the Smartwork course are also provided at this site in PDF format.
Adding Teaching Tools
We soon recognized that our isolated essay and assessment questions would benefit from the inclusion of the types of active learning exercises that have been shown to be critical for promoting understanding in the classroom. Therefore, we have also curated a set of free “Teaching Tools,” outstanding materials that had previously been produced by others to support the explicit teaching of how the scientific community produces reliable knowledge.
These tools—which come from sources like the National Center for Science Education and the Strategic Education Research Partnership, as well as individual educators and researchers—contain a mix of in-class activities and out-of-class references to aid student learning, and they represent some of the best resources we could find for teaching how science works and why evidence-based judgments are more credible than a simple belief. The exercises range from activities that give five-year-old students a sense of how scientists evaluate evidence (“Growing Seeds and Scientists”) to those that teach much older students how scientists determine the safety of medical treatments through clinical trials.
We have posted these tools, along with the revised essay and the Smartwork assessment questions, on the website mentioned earlier (https://whytrustscience.org.uk/).
Image Credits: Peter Kováč/Alamy Stock Photo (left), UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology (right)
Readers of This Blog Can Help Make This Effort More Effective
We welcome your ideas for spreading the explicit teaching of this type of material throughout the world. Please share with us any additional teaching tools you feel might be useful for understanding the scientific process and/or teaching students to identify information they can trust. And if you would like to author additional assessment questions that help students hone their abilities to critically evaluate scientific information, we would be delighted to incorporate those questions into the suite we’ve started building.
To contribute to the effort, please email Norton Biology at biology@wwnorton.com with ideas, comments, or questions to open a conversation.
In the future, science will become increasingly central to humanity’s shared concerns, from the perils of pandemics to the ethical concerns raised by the development of ever more powerful techniques for editing genes and genomes. To make intelligent, well-reasoned decisions on these issues that affect our personal lives—and to protect the health, integrity, and future of society as a whole—we all must be able to identify good science and separate science fact from science fiction.
We hope that you will join us in trying to explain why it is so important that we trust science. Our future as a species depends on it.
MEET THE AUTHORS
Image Credit: Bruce Alberts, Karen Hopkin, and Keith Roberts
Karen Hopkin received her PhD in biochemistry from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is a science writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is a regular columnist for The Scientist and a contributor to Scientific American‘s daily podcast, “60-Second Science.”
Bruce Alberts received his PhD from Harvard University and is the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education, University of California, San Francisco. He was the editor-in-chief of Science magazine from 2008 until 2013, and he served as president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1993 to 2005).
Keith Roberts received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and was deputy director of the John Innes Centre, Norwich. An emeritus professor at the University of East Anglia, he received the Order of British Empire for his service to sciences.