4
THE BOOKS John L. Rudolph, Section Editor Scientific and Technological Thinking, edited by Michael E. Gorman, Ryan D. Tweney, David C. Gooding, and Alexandra P. Kincannon. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, USA, 2005. xvii + 320 pp. ISBN 0-8058-4529-1. Empirical studies of professional scientific activity are, in the scheme of things, a rela- tively new endeavor but one with identifiable predecessors. These include the philosophy of science which began with the pre-Socratics and the history of science, a field whose detectable origins date back to the end of the nineteenth century. Studies that try to capture science as it happens, however, are only about a generation young. This volume repre- sents some of the most prominent work in this newer vein, what the editors call “cognitive studies of science.” Flying under this banner is research conducted by scholars trained as psychologists, or who use methods from psychology and cognitive science. Another style of empirical research on science as it happens is called Science and Technology Studies (STS), which has primarily sociological and anthropological roots. For readers of this journal the question that bears asking is why empirical studies of science, of either style, are relevant or important for science education. Answering this depends on what one takes to be the goals of science education. Here we may distinguish a monocular view—utilitarian and seemingly well focused—from a binocular view. The monocular view trains its gaze within the frame of K-12 schooling to explore and consider the form and content of science education. This view takes it that science education is mostly as it should be and that the work of science education research is to productively tinker with and improve instruction for a body of slowly evolving content or to figure out how to extend the fruits of science education to more students. For those who take this monocular view, research about science as it happens in places other than schools, as is found in Science and Technological Thinking, probably will appear like an academic exercise of little practical relevance. What I am calling a binocular view looks at science education alongside the scientific activities outside of school. Some researchers, of whom I include myself, have taken a binocular view for about a decade, comparing scientific and technical work in K-12 schools with that in professional settings and domestic ones. From a binocular perspective, these “outside” images of science as a source of comparison with those in school are nothing less than essential. Consider for example this high-profile statement about the relation between science education and science’s role in society, found in the seminal standards document Science for All Americans: For its part, science education—meaning education in science, mathematics, and technol- ogy—should help students to develop the understandings and habits of mind they need to become compassionate human beings able to think for themselves and to face life head on. It should equip them also to participate thoughtfully with fellow citizens in building and protecting a society that is open, decent, and vital. America’s future—its ability to create a C 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Page 1: Scientific and technological thinking

THE BOOKS

John L. Rudolph, Section Editor

Scientific and Technological Thinking, edited by Michael E. Gorman, Ryan D. Tweney,

David C. Gooding, and Alexandra P. Kincannon. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,

Mahwah, NJ, USA, 2005. xvii + 320 pp. ISBN 0-8058-4529-1.

Empirical studies of professional scientific activity are, in the scheme of things, a rela-

tively new endeavor but one with identifiable predecessors. These include the philosophy

of science which began with the pre-Socratics and the history of science, a field whose

detectable origins date back to the end of the nineteenth century. Studies that try to capture

science as it happens, however, are only about a generation young. This volume repre-

sents some of the most prominent work in this newer vein, what the editors call “cognitive

studies of science.” Flying under this banner is research conducted by scholars trained as

psychologists, or who use methods from psychology and cognitive science. Another style

of empirical research on science as it happens is called Science and Technology Studies

(STS), which has primarily sociological and anthropological roots.

For readers of this journal the question that bears asking is why empirical studies of

science, of either style, are relevant or important for science education. Answering this

depends on what one takes to be the goals of science education. Here we may distinguish

a monocular view—utilitarian and seemingly well focused—from a binocular view. The

monocular view trains its gaze within the frame of K-12 schooling to explore and consider

the form and content of science education. This view takes it that science education is mostly

as it should be and that the work of science education research is to productively tinker with

and improve instruction for a body of slowly evolving content or to figure out how to extend

the fruits of science education to more students. For those who take this monocular view,

research about science as it happens in places other than schools, as is found in Science andTechnological Thinking, probably will appear like an academic exercise of little practical

relevance.

What I am calling a binocular view looks at science education alongside the scientific

activities outside of school. Some researchers, of whom I include myself, have taken a

binocular view for about a decade, comparing scientific and technical work in K-12 schools

with that in professional settings and domestic ones. From a binocular perspective, these

“outside” images of science as a source of comparison with those in school are nothing less

than essential. Consider for example this high-profile statement about the relation between

science education and science’s role in society, found in the seminal standards document

Science for All Americans:

For its part, science education—meaning education in science, mathematics, and technol-

ogy—should help students to develop the understandings and habits of mind they need to

become compassionate human beings able to think for themselves and to face life head on.

It should equip them also to participate thoughtfully with fellow citizens in building and

protecting a society that is open, decent, and vital. America’s future—its ability to create a

C© 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Page 2: Scientific and technological thinking

BOOK REVIEW 575

truly just society, to sustain its economic vitality, and to remain secure in a world torn by

hostilities—depends more than ever on the character and quality of the education that the

nation provides for all of its children. (Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1989)

Implied here is the assumption that we know more than a little about how science is used

and useful in society, yet missing from this and nearly all other similar statements about

the rightful future of science education are concrete, research-grounded images of scientific

activity in society, outside of school. For those who want to develop a binocular view,

the edited collection Scientific and Technological Thinking (2005) will be of significant

interest, since its chapters represent a range of studies and research programs that seek to

depict “scientific and technological thinking” as it happens among professional scientists

and technologists.

Actually, only a subset of the chapters in this volume are examples of studies that represent

science as it happens—those by Nersessian; Dunbar and Fugelsang; Trickett, Schunn, and

Trafton; and Shrager. An equal number of chapters are representations of science as it

happened. The authors of these (Tweney, Mears, and Spitzmuller; Thagard; Ippolito; and

Bradshaw) have sought to reconstruct how scientists thought from archival evidence. Other

chapters fall best into the category of programmatic or theoretically synthetic work (Klahr;

Gooding; Gorman; Allenby).

As a whole, the volume is more coherent than some edited collections and less coherent

than many. In this case, though, less coherence has a silver lining. By this I mean that the

tradition being represented here—cognitive studies of science and technology—has until

this volume been rather theoretically and methodologically homogenous. On the theoretical

side, most prior studies have represented scientific, mathematical, and technological activity

with a narrow individual-mentalist conceptual vocabulary. On the methodological side, prior

studies have been equally narrow about the recognizably legitimate ways to study science as

it happens—primarily through posed laboratory tasks or computer simulation of individual

minds. This earlier work failed to take seriously the idea that there is a great deal more to

scientific practice than an individual’s thinking. The upshot of these limitations is that in

most earlier work it was hard to see scientific and technical practice, as it happens, through

the thick veil of cognitivism.

The largely ethnographic approach of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has lifted

that veil and exposed us to much more of what scientific and technical practice involves.

Work in this field often deals with scientific bodies (rather than minds) and therefore analyzes

the character of embodied skill among scientific and technical practitioners working with

devices, machines, and representations. It nearly always focuses on units of organization

larger than the individual scientist’s mind (e.g., the group, the lab, the project, the “actor-

network”). This attention to larger units of analysis typically leads to close attention to “the

place of knowledge” and to the distributed networks of people who work in those places.

And STS scholars often analyze the rhetorical and political practices of science not as a

separable pollutant to an otherwise rational process but rather as part of what constitutes

science as science.

In my view, the stronger chapters in Scientific and Technological Thinking—those by

Nersessian; Shrager; Gooding; Gorman; and Allenby—are those that substantively engage

relevant work from STS. These chapters are not without their limitations, though, mainly

of the all-things-to-all-people variety. They are, nonetheless, full of intriguing images of

thinking and working; they make openings for further transdisciplinary conversation and

point a way toward getting a richer picture of scientific thinking as it is embedded in

scientific practice. The weaker chapters are those that treat STS as if it did not exist or

that use it merely as a straw position (Dunbar and Fugelsang; Klahr; Trickett, Schunn, and

Page 3: Scientific and technological thinking

576 BOOK REVIEW

Trafton; Tweney, Mears, and Spitzmuller). These chapters are weaker not because they

fail a citation litmus test but because what the chapters are about (e.g., making causal

claims, handling anomalies, replication) are all topics that been the focus of ethnographic

research in STS. The chapters here would have been stronger if the authors had engaged this

work.

The two chapters in this volume that I see as most successfully realized are the ones that

ironically highlight the volume’s biggest weaknesses when taken as a whole. This first is

Shrager’s “Diary of a Mad Cell Mechanic.” This is a first-person account of the author’s

attempt to learn to do molecular biology. In so doing, he identifies a gaping absence in

this volume—accounting for the ways that people become participants in scientific and

technical work. Shrager gives an account of his struggles and triumphs in learning to do this

work as part of an account of its doing. He shows, without an explicit intention to do so,

what ethnographically informed accounts of learning have often shown: learning and doing

are not best seen as separable activities as our enduring common sense about the division

of labor between “school” (learning) and “work” (doing what was learned) would have

us believe. Instead, learning and doing happen together. Nifty as it is, Shrager’s chapter is

not without its limitations. First, Shrager’s diary represents the scene as if he was a lone

bio-wolf rather than as was almost certainly the case—as a worker and learner enmeshed in

a dense beehive of people and projects characteristic of contemporary Big Science. Second,

he describes his study “as the first of its kind” (p. 120), an overstatement to be sure. Despite

these limitations, this chapter surely makes my short list for exemplary studies of how

scientists think.

The other chapter that stands apart from the rest, seemingly in quiet protest, is Thomas

Hughes’ “A Systems-Ordered World,” a revision of an article written 25 years earlier. In

this chapter, Hughes does not mention “cognition” or “thinking” a single time; instead, he

talks about the ways that human-built social and technological systems like modern electric

grids and manorial agricultural systems order our world. When Hughes does mention

individuals he seems to be arguing indirectly with the individualist, rationalist cognitive

studies of science and technology style and their unwillingness to take these systems into

consideration:

Finally, a question arises about the capacity of individuals and society to foster technological

revolutions and control those already underway. Judging from the consideration of the ones

discussed earlier, I conclude that they result primarily from unintended and unanticipated

confluences. Individuals and societies can help shape them only if they observe the unfolding

events and give gentle nudges at critical junctions. (p. 284)

If we look at the roles that science educators play (e.g., designing and implementing

curricula, training teachers, teaching science learners), all are informed by either implicit

or explicit images of what science is. Images of science are literally embodied in curricula,

teacher training, and teaching practice. If we look at a traditional science textbook and its

classroom uses, we see an implicit image of scientific work as the unproblematic application

of concepts, facts, and theories acquired through instruction. If we look at how science

teachers are usually “trained,” we can see the same focus from the other side—on clear

communication of concepts, facts, and theories, with little or no focus on the material and

social infrastructures for doing science that STS has established so clearly. This list of

examples could be extended, but I leave it to the reader to work out for her or his own

professional activities how an image of science is embedded in them. And how different

images might lead to a rethinking of these various practices of science education.

Page 4: Scientific and technological thinking

BOOK REVIEW 577

What I have called a binocular view is necessary and it matters where it comes from. The

volume Scientific and Technological Thinking is about half way successful in moving beyond

a stubborn methodological and epistemic commitment to a particular research style and to-

ward a commitment to understanding science and technological work as it actually happens.

Half way is a long way for research coming out of the cognitive science tradition, and there

is plenty here to engage those looking for a broad view. I recommend this volume and hope

that it indeed opens up greater discussion about scientific and technical thinking and where,

how, and why it matters.

REFERENCE

Rutherford, F. J., & Ahlgren, A. (1989). Science for all Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.

REED STEVENS

College of Education406A Miller HallUniversity of Washington–SeattleSeattle, WA 98195USA

DOI 10.1002/sce.20145Published online 23 March 2006 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).