Unscientific Beliefs

In the Astronomy Education Review there is an awesome article by Chris Impey, Sanlyn Buxner, and Jessie Antonellis about Non-scientific beliefs among undergraduate students. They polled over 11K typically freshman or sophomore students over 22 years(!) about their non-scientific (signifying beliefs not acquired by application of the scientific method). They conclude that 'nonscientific ways of thinking are resistant to formal instruction, changing surprisingly little over the course of a college career that typically includes three science courses. The level of basic science knowledge among undergraduates is only weakly coupled to attitudes towards pseudoscience, and it coexists with attitudes and beliefs that are faith-based.'

The nonscientific beliefs probed range from those that are (I'd argue) antiscientific (e.g., 'The positions of the planets have an influence on the events of everyday life.' or 'Some numbers are especially lucky for some people.') to attitudes towards science or discussions of science ethics (e.g., 'Nuclear power is an important energy source and its use should be expanded.' or 'We should devote more of our money and scientific resources to repair damage done to the environment.').

Some of their interesting results:

• The degree of nonscientific beliefs varied very little with the stage within undergraduate education or the number of science classes taken. Courses fulfilling distribution science requirements apparently do little to diminish nonscientific beliefs.
• There was very little difference between the mean science literacy scores of cohorts with high and low scores for unscientific beliefs (it accounted for only 4% of the science literature score variance). Having unscientific beliefs appears to have little effect on your science literacy(!)
• Quoting from the paper : 'Completion of the college science requirement leads to very little improvement in science knowledge score. Educators cannot be satisfied with a situation where one in three graduates thinks antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria, one in four thinks that lasers work by focusing sound waves, and one in five thinks atoms are smaller than electrons, are unaware that the Earth goes around the Sun, or that humans evolved from earlier species.'

While I don't see that this question is addressed directly in this paper, the fact that such a tiny fraction of science literacy variance correlates with unscientific beliefs implies that even having (what I'd argue) antiscientific beliefs does little to degrade the quality of the students' science literacy - this surprises me. And, the sobering realization that basic scientific literacy is essentially unaffected by college distribution requirement courses is pretty depressing. I'm still digesting this - this may influence how I teach next semester's class....

Google docs used for before-class activities

Having used Google docs for in-class activities and having found it really useful, I wanted to try to use it for out of class asynchronous preparation for a challenging class. The goal of the class was to start the process of synthesizing all of the physical processes they had been thinking about into a picture of how galaxy formation works.

I decided on the following plan:

• Have the students do an activity where they describe their understanding of how a dark matter halo of a given mass forms, how it gets its gas from the intergalactic medium, what kind of galaxy lives in the center of the halo, what lives in the subhalos, etc. [I know this is technical gibberish, apologies - those are good questions that help them assemble the pieces of information and physical processes that they need to know for understanding how the galaxies in that halo works]. I had three groups, each with a different halo (=galaxy) mass. Each group had a different page on the same google doc (to stop too much editing on a single page). 
• They were asked to fill their part of the document out before class asynchronously and collaboratively, and I kept an eye on this process, asking leading questions or offering clarifications. 
• I added a final section where they were invited to write their questions [I have an area for writing questions down in all pre-class assignments, but they've never been public to the whole group before; I think you want to have a certain level of trust in the class before doing this?]. I worked on answering their questions, which in some cases turned into a nice dialog.
• They spent 10 minutes at the beginning of class in their expert groups coming to a consensus and identifying common questions.
• Then we discussed as a large group their answers, drawing parallels and creating links between their three different examples. 
• One of the particular topics we discussed was used to segue into a mini-lecture on an important physical process that they had not explored yet that was relevant for just one of the cases, this was pre-planned but worked out quite naturally.

I felt like this use of Google Docs was also very worthwhile. Almost all students engaged well with the exercise, they were able to do their activity in increments, making progress in the areas they understood, asking questions and getting feedback [from peers and myself] in areas they were less sure about, and being able to take their time to come to a better and more complete understanding of how their galaxy works. They were very well prepared for class, and our group discussion was very efficient, focused on common concerns and high-level synthesis.