If the task at hand is to create a class that results in students loving science—which I believe is a highly worthwhile goal—what should your formal course goals be?
Most college guidelines strongly suggest, if not require, that course syllabi explicitly list course goals. I agree. If students and their professors specify what students are supposed to learn and what professors are supposed to teach, you have a much better chance of success. The converse isn’t very attractive. Remember that the beloved Cheshire Cat in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland sagely said that if you don’t know where you want to go, it doesn’t much matter what you do.
What if you had one, just one, overarching goal, that students will love science at the end of the class. I think you should tell your students what you want from them. I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised how that changes how they feel about you and your class.
YOUR GOAL: Students will love science.
Naturally, the next step is figure how are you going to help them achieve such a lofty goal.
Who Are My Students and What Do They Want?
You are probably fortunate to have a wide diversity of students in your class. Just look at your students. Your students come in all different sizes, colors and ages—just like a beautiful cluster of galaxies or a field of wild-flowers. And in much the same way, the most interesting parts of galaxies (and wild flower ecosystems) are the underlying mechanisms and processes, things far deeper than their superficial good looks. If you’ve got a wide variety of students, then you need a wide variety of techniques to help them understand and love science.
Folklore long shared from professor to professor tells that there is an unresolvable conflict between you and your students. On one hand, so the story goes, professors want students to learn as much as possible and, on the other, students want to learn as little as possible. If you tacitly hang on to this false dichotomy, teaching science isn’t going to be nearly as pleasant as it could be.
What if you reframed it to be a win-win? What if what professors really wanted was for their students to start to love science and what if, at the same time, students most desired to be different and be transformed by enrolling in your class? That’s a vastly different frame of reference and begs the question, what is it that professors want their students to know about science?
When we asked hundreds of astronomy professors what they thought the goals of their astronomy class should be, we were prepared for a really long list. After all, we are talking about professors whose job it is to teach about the entire universe, often in a single course! To our pleasant surprise, we found that nearly all their responses clumped into three big ideas. They emphatically told us that they wanted their courses to engender in students:
• an understanding of the nature of science and how this science is done,
• an appreciation for the size, scale, and structure of the the world, including understanding the predictable and observable processes, and
• an interest in studying current new events in science as a life-long learning activity.
Not a single person, even as a joke, listed that they wanted their students to memorize our Sun’s diameter or the number of kilometers in a light-year. If we read between the lines here, what we see is that many people want their students to love science too. Almost nothing in this list looks like memorizing a long list of fragmented facts and formula. We’d like you to consider the possibility that your seemingly apathetic students might buy into these three goals too.
We’re certainly not the only people to wrestle with this question. The elder-statesmen of the Society of College Science Teachers also posed the question of what is it that college students completing an introductory survey course should understand. After laborious meetings on both coasts of the United States, they came up with the following list of astronomy content goals and values goals:
Society of College Science Teachers Position Statement
https://www.scst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Statement-on-Courses.pdfThe Society for College Science Teachers takes the position that the major goals of introductory college science courses are to contribute to the scientific literacy and critical thinking capability of all college students and to provide a conceptual base for subsequent courses taken in the disciplines. The Society defines science literacy as the knowledge and understanding of a) the nature and role of scientific knowledge and process, b) the major principles and concepts that transcend the various sciences, c) the relationship of science to technology, and d) the applications of science to the individual and society.
https://www.scst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Statement-on-Courses.pdf
I argue that this is a reasonably good list from a group of very well-intentioned professional college science teachers. It might not be perfect, but it’s a place to start our discussion. You are welcome to disagree with some of the fine details here and there just as I do, but you’ve got to start some where and your Departmental colleagues might commend you for using this SCST-endorsed list
More to the point, if you match these concepts—or any reasonable list of concepts for that matter—with your passionate and unwavering goal of helping students love science, it becomes an exceptionally good launching point.
Tim Slater, University of Wyoming, Tim@CAPERteam.com
Suggested Citation: Slater, T. F. (2018, September). What are realistic goals for the non-majors general science survey course? Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 4(2), https://www.scst.org/blog