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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.
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
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.
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).