What Research Says (And What It Does Not) About Reconceptualizing K-12 Science Education Amidst Eroding Public Trust in Science by Meredith Bittel

Science education faces a grave challenge in our current social and political moment. In this “post-truth” era, the currency of empirical fact loses value to emotion and personal belief, and this growing social phenomenon is capitalized on and wielded by politicians and other influential people as a tool of propaganda. The internet spreads and monetizes mis/disinformation related to science with alarming speed and ease (Osborne and Pimentel 2023). This contributes to a waning public trust in scientific authority and expertise, creating a landscape in which the public vehemently disagrees about scientific facts on which experts largely agree. This impedes democratic deliberation on important science-related social issues such as global health pandemics (e.g., COVID-19), global climate change, and AI technologies (Kennedy et al. 2022, Nelson et al. 2020, West & Bergstrom 2021). On a social scale, this not only weakens democracy by impeding access to reliable knowledge, it also threatens health and safety. Science denial and misinformation have been propelled into mainstream conversations – people across society are impassioned by this topic and many believe K-12 science education to be a cornerstone of building public trust in science.

Researchers offer a wide range of ideas about how science education should be reimagined to address the erosion of public trust in science. However, science educators are not ignorant or passive amid this growing distrust, and the strategies that they already draw upon in response are understudied. These insights are necessary to improve theoretical frameworks for science education that intend to build public trust in science.

What Research Says

Researchers tend to agree that current K-12 science curricula and practices inadequately prepare students to grapple with important social issues centered on science as adults and citizens. However, they vary widely in what they perceive the problem to be and how they propose science education should be reconceptualized. Research tends to either focus on reinforcing science credibility through reforming curriculum or incorporating the sociocultural context of science engagement and focusing more on pedagogical change.

Credibility and Curriculum

Osborne and Pimentel (2023) focus on the problem of scientific misinformation. They argue that the Next Generation Science Standards target of “communicating, obtaining, and evaluating information” comes the closest to addressing their goals but lacks the necessary depth and clarity to sufficiently prepare students to be “competent outsiders” to science, equipped with the skills needed to evaluate the credibility of science information. Because the internet allows the average citizen a certain level of intellectual independence (“do your own research”), it can perniciously increase overconfidence in one’s own capabilities while decreasing confidence in well-established scientific findings. Osborne and Pimentel believe that this problem of misinformation and epistemology should be addressed throughout the science curriculum. In their framework, K-12 science education should first focus on preparing students as science consumers who can “think like a scientist”, rather than science producers.

Crucially, the current objective of science education does not align with this. Rudolph (2022) argues current practices are designed to meet the more dominant goals of social mobility and political accountability. Thus, science education is driven by an educational credential marketplace that promotes easy access and mechanisms to sort students. It acts as a (tremendously leaky) pipeline for future scientists, geared towards technical training and economic growth, despite only about 7% of students going on to work in a science-related career. Rudolph points out, “what sense does it make to continue down the rutted path we’re on, to invest in a system that we hope will produce more scientists and engineers but has, in fact, created a society in which too many citizens routinely ignore the recommendations of the scientists we already have” (Rudolph 2022, 164). He argues that science education needs an unprecedented, fundamental shift to re-center it around a civic mission of schooling and to re-build public trust in science by shifting curricular and pedagogical emphasis from what scientists know to how they came to know it, and, by doing so, de-alienating the public from science.

However, Rudolph recognizes that this requires consideration of a host of equity issues that have persisted in science education. Mistrust in science is generally greater for historically marginalized groups (e.g., women and people of color), for a host of social and historical reasons that are exemplified by systemic racism and bias in the healthcare industry (Skloot 2017, Gamble 2016, Schiebinger 2014, Bajaj and Stanford 2021). Part of building public trust in science is transforming the institution of science to reflect better the diverse public it serves, and this starts with creating science classrooms that are welcoming environments for all students.

Sociocultural Contexts and Pedagogy

Feinstein and Waddington (2020) take a more pluralistic approach in considering how science education should respond to the “post-truth” era. They question the appropriateness of focusing on using scientists’ epistemological tools to discern truth, given that by its very nature science does not offer foundational truth, and reckless claims of such truth may intensify the problems they intend to solve. They encourage consideration of a more contextualized, sociocultural approach to science education based on the concept that each student encounters science through their own sociocultural lens, which is shaped by (and shapes) their identities. Thus, students (and the public more broadly) tend to seek scientific information through existing social networks, and it is through drawing on people they know in these networks that they process and interpret scientific findings.

Kahan and colleagues’ (2007, 2011) theory of cultural cognition, which suggests that individuals’ beliefs are a product of their identities, values, and worldviews, aligns with this conceptualization. An individual’s cultural cognition affects perceptions of scientific consensus and causes individuals to evaluate evidence in ways amenable to their pre-existing beliefs and values. Students do not abandon their identities when they encounter science, and understanding how a student approaches science can provide a great deal of insight into how they will interact with it. This highlights the importance of incorporating culture into science education rather than attempting to filter it out so students can more readily engage in collective sensemaking in science. This revitalizes Aikenhead’s (1996) concept of cultural “border crossings” in the science classroom, which recognizes that, depending on a student’s sociocultural background, science education either harmonizes with one’s view of the world or disrupts it. Sociocultural identity operates in a political climate that produces increasingly polarized beliefs and opinions related to scientific enterprise. Considering the border crossings between students’ life-world subcultures and the subculture of science is important for expanding public trust in science as an institution.

Looking Ahead: Further Contextualized Research Needed

Recent scholarship calls on science education to attend to a function outside of simply content-based instruction on basic science facts and skills, a function that plays little role in shaping public perceptions and decisions related to science-related social issues. What is notably missing from this research is contextualized qualitative research into what is already happening in science classrooms to address complex issues of scientific mistrust, especially how socio-cultural identity (of students and teachers) influences classroom experiences in science. Reworking science curricula to incorporate more of a focus on discerning credible information is important, as Osborne and Pimentel note, but is this type of instruction responsive and durable to students’ pre-existing culturally shaped ideologies? Are there strategies in science classrooms that function to isolate or alienate students who come from different cultural backgrounds, or those that effectively incorporate diverse students into the discussion? There may indeed be a disconnect between theory and practice, and insight into these issues can be gained by bringing practitioners and students into the discussion.

Whether they want to or not, science teachers must confront the ramifications of failing public trust in science. The social landscape surrounding science impacts all students and shapes the classroom experience – students themselves likely have their own opinions on what science education should (or should not) look like in our current social and political moment, and more research should interrogate these perspectives. Teachers are also faced with the possibility of community backlash based on how they approach socio-scientific issues, and localized practices of science teachers likely vary quite widely depending on the teacher’s philosophy of science and the community of students they serve. It is naïve to think that science teachers are not devising their own strategies to address public mistrust in science despite the curriculum not addressing it directly or fully. Thus, theory could be tested: What is working? In which contexts is it working? Why? Does reinforcing the authority of science convince students to accept this authority, or does it polarize students? Does acknowledging various ways of knowing and the limits of science damage the legitimacy of science or encourage more students to consider scientific perspectives? Theoretical research must be paired with contextualized classroom research to understand better what is already happening in science classrooms to approach socially relevant topics related to scientific mistrust and misinformation and how this might inform and advance theoretical work.

About the Scholar

References

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