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Public trust in science has taken a hit during the pandemic, and experts argue that helping students understand the natural uncertainty in science could help restore it.

“When scientific findings change, the public perception, understandably, is often that something has gone wrong, when in fact that is intrinsic to how science progresses,” said Joshua Rosenberg, assistant professor of STEM education and faculty member of the Center for Enhancing. Education in Mathematics and Science at the University of Tennessee. “We have evidence that is inherently uncertain, and we weigh that evidence in light of what we already know, and update how confident we are over time. But this is often not how science is communicated. That is often not how science is learned.”

For example, when the SARS-COV-2 virus first caused a global pandemic in 2019, scientists struggled to understand how it spread, mutated, and affected different groups of people. Research findings and the public health recommendations based on them changed over time as studies looked at larger groups of people in different areas and situations.

Many were frustrated and confused by what appeared to be conflicting findings. The proportion of American adults who expressed some trust in scientists fell from 86% in January 2019 to 77% at the end of 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. Only 29 percent reported being “highly confident” in the field.

“When we teach science as a collection of facts, it’s easy to think of those facts as fixed,” Rosenberg said. “Whereas, if we teach science as a way of discovering how the world works, then it’s much easier for students to see that that generates things that we can count on, but that it’s also noticing when we learn new things that change what we know. .”

In a report published June 14 in the journal Science & Education, Rosenberg and Marcus Kubsch, professor of physics at the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education in Kiel, Germany, argue that students need more exposure to the concepts of subjective probability and uncertainty in the early grades.

Alex Edwards, a sixth- through eighth-grade science teacher at the independent Tate’s School in Knoxville, Tennessee, said mistrust of science among his students in recent years has become “really hard” and they often struggle to understand why. the findings should change over time. or how confirmation bias can develop.

The way science curricula structure lessons can instill distrust in the subject if students don’t accept degrees of uncertainty, Edwards said. “We teach small fragments at a time. We teach things that are not necessarily exactly correct but understandable, so that we can come back later and teach them more.”

For example, students may learn in the early grades that the Earth is a sphere rather than a flat one, and later learn that the planet’s rotation makes it an oblate spheroid rather than a perfect ball. “That’s a better explanation, but it’s a little harder to explain [to young students] than ‘the world is a sphere.’ The world as a sphere is wrong, but it’s less so than the world being flat,” Edwards said. . “But people can get the idea that if something is a little bit wrong, then everything is wrong.”

Instead, Rosenberg and his colleagues argue that science teachers should help students understand variation, probability, and uncertainty as part of the normal process of science. While the Next Generation Science Standards developed in 2013 include these concepts, the researchers said students often only read or hear about them, but have fewer opportunities to conduct experiments on their own and discuss how and why their findings. they can vary.

For example, Kubsch has started a program in which prospective German teachers learn, in three or four 90-minute sessions over the course of a school year, how to teach students to reason about uncertainty using a three-part strategy:

Kubsch also developed an app called “Confidence Updater” that teachers can use to help students think about their own claims and the truth of their findings.

A little less confidence can help

Every year, Alex Edwards poses a deceptively simple question to sixth grade science students: Are sixth grade boys or girls taller?

This could be a very basic data collection task: measure yourself and your classmates, graph the data, compare averages, and report. But Edwards likes to back down. Students notice that some classmates round heights to the nearest inch, while others round heights to the nearest quarter inch. A uniform, multi-measure system is redeveloped for each student. They realize that boys are more likely than girls to be very tall or very short, and discuss how to deal with outliers. The class goes round and round, until finally the students present their final height charts.

“That graph [of the average heights of boys and girls] will usually be almost equal. And they’ll just look at it and walk away, this one is higher. …so whoever guessed the girls was right and whoever guessed the boys was wrong,” Edwards said. “And then I say, ‘Hey, my question was, are the boys in this class taller than the girls in this class?’ They’ll say, no, it was every 6th grade boy and girl in the world. So how do we know we’re right about this? And that’s where I start to put a little bit of that uncertainty into them.”

Hee-Sun Lee, a senior research scientist at the Concord Consortium, a digital science and education research group, asked more than 6,000 students to analyze data from scientists or computer models, then make a claim and explain the reasoning for the claim based on about the data, your level of certainty in your statement, and possible reasons for the uncertainty. Lee found that students’ written scientific arguments improved after performing tasks that made them think explicitly about their sources of uncertainty.

Edwards agreed that it’s important to regularly remind students how variation and uncertainty support science. Begin every science test, grades six through eight, with a cover of the same set of questions that act as mental reminders that scientific models are not always correct and that science is a process and not just facts to be studied.

Students also know that they will get 10 points on a lab report for describing a hypothesis as “correct” or “proven” rather than “supported.”

“Vocabulary matters, and the way [students] perceive it in their minds, if they just say ‘we’re right,’ then that’s such a defining thing. There is no room for anything else to happen,” Edwards said. “But if they use terminology like ‘compatible,’ hopefully they’ve made the little connection that the data supports this, doesn’t necessarily confirm it, but at least supports it. It doesn’t mean there aren’t other explanations, but this is the one we had the most evidence for.”

Sarah D. Sparks covers educational research, data, and the science of learning for Education Week.

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