“Beyond the scientific method” features a guest post by Dr. Charles Ault, a prolific science education author. His two latest critically acclaimed books are research-based visions of the Next Generation Science Standards (Challenging Science Standards–2015, Beyond Science Standards (20210). Dr. Ault is an Emeritus Professor of science education at Lewis and Clark College.

Following this brief introduction is a recent paper of Dr. Ault’s that provides insight into the myth of the so-called “scientific method.” The myth is that scientific methods do not vary from one discipline to another (e.g., geology vs chemistry). Indeed, science educators and corporate entities like the NGSS have advocated that a set of science processes co-exist in every science content discipline.

Dr. Ault, has, for years, challenged this “unity” of science and suggests, as an example, that the way geologists “think and do” is different than physicists “think and do.” Indeed, Ault provide specific examples of a new way to think about the Core Ideas that are embedded in the NGSS. The study of core ideas in different content disciplines should based on the idea that thinking and doing varies from one content discipline of science from another.

Science educators on the front line of preparing future science teachers should realize that Ault is providing them with a way to rethink the scientific method. Instead of emphasizing a set of science processes that support unity across the disciplines, we ought to rethink this idea and look carefully at the disciplinary areas to discuss how thinking and doing vary from one area to another. This is an important concept in our understanding of pedagogical content knowledge. In this paper, Dr. Ault provides concrete examples of how this can be done.

Science education researchers might consider using Ault’s concept of “scientific diversity” vs “scientific unity.” What truths can be uncovered in the context of elementary, middle, and high school science classrooms?

Teachers will be aided by reimagining the thinking and doing of science in their content area.

Reimagining the Role of Core Ideas in the NGSS: An Epistemic Perspective

Charles R. Ault, Jr., Professor Emeritus

Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education

Abstract

The reform of science education in the United States has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to organizing instructional aims according to broad categories of thought presumed common to all the sciences. From the 1980s forward, national standards have codified these categories, most recently as two of three dimensions: scientific and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts. Not until made tangible by context do practices guide teachers and curriculum authors. The disciplinary core ideas of the third dimension are specific, and their achievement is measurable in terms of performance objectives.

However, the perfunctory alignment of core ideas and generic categories of practice obscures the inventive ways of thinking and responding to the challenges of specific problems and overlooks how core ideas imply a hierarchy of principles governing reasoning. Such principles synchronize methods of investigation and conceptions of phenomena, historically transforming a new claim into a trusted strategy suitable for evaluating the quality of an inquiry. Principles such as “substituting place for time” in geology and “demonstrating the effects of a geographic barrier on gene frequency” in biology, for example, combine ideas with practices in context. In the next iteration of standards, an expanded role for core ideas based on an epistemic analysis of their implicit hierarchies would overcome their perfunctory alignment with broad practice categories.

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In 1983’s A Nation at Risk the Reagan Administration announced that the country’s “mediocre educational performance” placed the future of the United States in peril. The report claimed the harm from this mediocrity amounted to wartime-level destruction (United States, 1983). Hyperbole aside, the standards reform movement of the 1980s responded to the perception that school curricula had devolved into a smorgasbord of offerings lacking quality and depth. Standards advocates sought a tighter focus of range and more explicit delineation of progress (Ravitch, 2010).

In 1996, the National Academy of Sciences published the original National Science Education Standards. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), characterized by consolidating the multiple content domains in the original standards, followed in 2013. Revision of the NGSS feels imminent as they enter their second decade of influence. One place deserving of attention is the relationship between scientific practices and disciplinary ideas.

The purpose of the standards is twofold: (a) to organize expert knowledge judged vital to public education and (b) to scaffold student learning in a manner conducive to assessment. These goals function to facilitate comparisons of student achievement and improve school performance. The standards presume to enhance equity by clarifying testing expectations and monitoring students’ progress disaggregated by race, gender, and ethnicity.

Matrices

The matrices of the NGSS depict three dimensions of learning science: crosscutting concepts, scientific and engineering practices, and disciplinary core ideas (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Hierarchy governs the disciplinary core ideas, and categorization organizes practices and crosscutting concepts. Performance expectations specify learning progressions by grade level for each core idea. Aligning instruction with the NGSS offers permission to try multiple approaches and address diverse topics. Nevertheless, the generic nature of scientific practices and crosscutting concepts, separately listed from core ideas, reflects the quest to unify the sciences, an effort long embodied as teaching “the scientific method” (Ault, 2023). The epigraph to this essay encapsulates the contrary view drawn from historiography: rather than a unified entity, the sciences have evolved into a diverse set of enterprises, sometimes tightly and sometimes loosely allied, that respond to distinct problems with different methodologies and explanatory ideals (Toulmin, 1990, p. 193).

This perspective reduces “the” scientific method to the status of a tenacious myth. John Rudolph laments that the “desire to instill in every generation an understanding of the scientific method seems to know no bounds” (Rudolph 2019, p. 222). In its attempt to displace science education’s tenacious and naïve obsession with the universal scientific method, Project 2061: Science for All Americans espouses teaching the “themes and habits of mind spanning all the disciplines” (Roseman, 2003, p. 3). There’s little difference. Appeal to “the” scientific method stays in vogue, partly because special interests hope to discredit climate modeling and evolution by arguing their methods depart from tried-and-true-stereotypical experimentation (Rudolph, 2007).

In framing learning with three dimensions of science, today’s standards go well beyond and beneath the myth of the scientific method yet still deter explorations of diversity (even disunity) among the disciplines. The quest for universals, by papering over diversity, compromises bringing authentic practice into the classroom.

Perfunctory Expectations

“Performance expectations” attempt to integrate scientific practices and core ideas (and, for good measure, the crosscutting concepts) but achieve only perfunctory success because the NGSS codifies a serious, epistemological flaw, born of the bifurcation of knowledge into (a) broad categories of practice common across disciplines and (b) disciplinary core ideas that assert specific claims. History has baked this bifurcation, once expressed as “process and content,” into the DNA of science education. The standards continue to obscure how disciplines confront radically different phenomena pursuing different aims and invoke equally different criteria to warrant their claims (Schwab, 1962, p. 204).

Typically, performance expectations call upon students to construct an explanation based on evidence. For example, a performance expectation for the disciplinary core idea “Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity” calls upon students to “construct an explanation based on evidence for how natural selection leads to adaptation of populations” (NGSS HS-LS4-4). A student might explain that “geographic barriers contribute to a change in gene frequency” as part of their explanation.

Categories of Scientific Practice

There are two broad categories of scientific practice to perform in this expectation: construct an explanation and argue from evidence.

The fundamental biological assertion to learn captured by the expectation is: “Natural selection leads to adaptation of populations.”

The clarification statement for the expectation elaborates on forms of evidence to draw upon in constructing an explanation (e.g., geographic barriers in the ecosystem), and thus incorporates a third broad practice: analyze and interpret data.

Distinct Challenges: Historical (interpretive) Compared to Experimental Inquiries

Scientific inquiries vary in style, most basically between a historical (or “interpretive”) style of science and an experimental one (Dodick & Orion, 2003; Frodeman, 1995; Gould, 1986). Biological (and cosmological) research straddles both styles. Disciplinary conceptions (e.g., biology’s “natural selection,” geology’s “geologic time scale,” physics’ “frame of reference,” and chemistry’s “covalent bonding”) nurture the discovery of hypotheses (Hanson, 1958, p. 3). Conceptions synchronize with methods to achieve diverse explanatory ideals. A conception anchors what to observe, how to measure, and even what is perceived. As an invention of the mind engineered to reason effectively, a conception enhances and limits imagination. “On this conception, all else depends,” Schwab presciently declared in 1962 (p. 199).

Disciplines vary in their dependence upon geometrical and statistical methods and reliance on physical or biological data (Bueno, 2012, p. 658). Physics, for example, forges links in high-energy particle experiments in response to the challenge of synchronizing mathematical models and empirical data. Universality, beauty, and naturalness characterize the discipline’s explanatory ideals (Hossenfelder, 2018).

In contrast to the aim of creating elegant mathematical theory (and, ultimately, a “theory of everything”), molecular biology follows where complex, messy phenomena lead, thus “maximizing contact with the empirical world” (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 79).

How do biologists, physicists, chemists, and geologists figure things out? “They integrate thinking and doing.”

How does their work get done? What makes their reasoning compelling? What counts as evidence and why? Is an explanation trustworthy? Of course, scientists argue, seek evidence, and explain. Again, what’s missing? Absent are tangible, high-level principles for (a) guiding an inquiry and (b) judging an explanation. In responding to distinct challenges, such principles transform core ideas from inert propositions into dynamic strategies. They integrate thinking and doing.

Consider the clear case of the distinct challenge to geologic inquiry presented by time’s vastness. In response to this challenge, geologic reasoning often substitutes “place” for time (Gould, 1986: Ault, 1998). This strategy overcomes the obstacle of time’s vastness by conceiving the present time as a sampling distribution of stages in an unfolding geologic process.

An observer cannot sit and wait to see what happens to a volcanic island surrounded by a coral reef in the Pacific over millions of years. By considering another island as an example of its past and still another of its future, Charles Darwin attempted to account for the formation of Pacific Island atolls. Around some islands that he observed, a coral reef enclosed a lagoon. In others, a coral reef fringed a volcanic island. He proposed that a volcano rose, then subsided, all the while with coral growing around it at a critical depth (Darwin, 1842/2002). Each type of island—volcanic, reef-fringed, lagoon-enclosed—thus represented a stage in forming an atoll. The present sampled various stages of a continuous process that had unfolded over a vast expanse of time.

His plausible mechanism has become a clear case of the historical style of science, but his solution faced a fundamental challenge. Historical explanation demands that events cohere in time. Did the ages of the islands arranged in stages agree with the explanatory sequence he hypothesized? Darwin lacked dating tools, and reliable dating, independent of an arrangement in hypothesized stages of a geologic process, is essential to historical explanation.

The standards top organizers embody science education’s long-standing quest for certainty and unification. The standards remain silent concerning reasoning responsive to the characteristic demands of distinct problems. To summarize, current national standards do not feature principles for guiding inquiry within well-defined domains.

Explanatory Ideals

In geology, “substituting place for time” is a problem-solving strategy. To work, the strategy must meet the criterion of “independent dating.” Meeting the demands of substituting place for time functions as an explanatory ideal to warrant an argument. The two principles argue that a causal process unfolds as a series of stages. Adjudicated by temporal logic and informed by careful observation, hypothesizing stages in a process spanning immense amounts of time often functions as a causal explanation of diverse geologic phenomena.

Other examples of strategies of investigation from geologic inquiry are: (1) integrating solutions across scales (mineral crystal to regional structures), achieving temporal coherence (simultaneity, sequence, duration), finding modern analogs (Himalayas for ancestral Rocky Mountains), and resolving anomalous associations (patterns of extinction and the stratigraphic distribution of the iridium layer at the end of Cretaceous time) with a common cause (Ault, 2014; Cleland, 2011). These are principles trusted to respond to the challenge of time’s vastness. In that role, they reach the status of explanatory ideals, high-level principles that shape the practices of a discipline.

Core Ideas

Core ideas assert claims, and their form is declarative, i.e., “scientists know [claim] that ‘ABC’.” For example, in the case of LS4, “biologists claim that geographic barriers contribute to a change in gene frequency.” This proposition functions as an explanatory statement for solving a problem and suggests evidence to look for—the existence of a geographic barrier correlated with differences in gene frequency of populations on either side of the barrier. Implicitly, LS4 embeds a tangible principle trusted to guide inquiry.

“Know that” differs from “know-how,” the procedural form typical of practice. “Know that . . .” expresses an inert proposition, not an amalgam of thinking and doing. It takes “know-how” to determine gene frequencies and measure correlations. “Know how” responds to the challenge of context; generalizing “know how” to “the scientific method,” or context-independent categories of practices, offers little guidance for solving a specific problem.

Initially a hypothesis, evolutionary biologists now trust the “geographic barrier—gene frequency” relationship as a contributor to solving the problem of speciation. Ernst Mayr notes that biologists did not reach a consensus on the relationship between geographic isolation and speciation until 60 years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Mayr 2001, p. 175). Progress in solving the speciation problem required developing methods for comparing populations at the level of gene frequency, a response to the nature of the challenge analogous to substituting place for time in geology.

LS4 embeds other trusted principles (as does every NGSS core idea), each with a historical pedigree. Therein lies an implicit hierarchy and the opportunity to transform core ideas from inert propositions into dynamic content. Ferreting out such a hierarchy begins with focusing on a question and its hypothesized answer. Verified, the answer becomes a claim. The claim’s value increases is confirmed repeatedly and able to withstand doubt and skepticism. It becomes a trusted principle and a worthy component of theory. This confidence elevates the proposition to the status of a strategy for guiding inquiry. By proving itself dependable and fruitful in multiple contexts, the strategy assumes the role of an explanatory ideal. As an explanatory ideal, the principle may function as a criterion for evaluating the quality of an inquiry and the value of its conclusions (Gowin, 1981).

There are at least two examples of explanatory ideals implicit in LS4: (1) the convergence of evidence from multiple and independent lines of investigation and (2) the correlation of gene frequencies with geographic barriers. The former is applicable in many contexts; the latter is more context-dependent. They are principles that guide thinking and doing, principles that match ideas to practices. The hierarchy embedded in a core idea ranges from the claim, through trusted principle, to the strategy of inquiry. At the summit of the hierarchy, a core idea functions as an explanatory ideal governing the symbiotic relationship between thinking and doing.

Tangible Principles

Matching thinking and doing—responding conceptually and methodologically to the nature of a challenge—happens in context, not as short lists of abstract categorizations, the residue of a discredited myth. Naïve unification sacrifices depth, ironically the fundamental aim of standards reform in the first place. What are the challenges faced by an evolutionary biologist attempting to explain the adaptation of a population to a changing environment? What forms of evidence might bear upon an answer? These questions are implicitly present in the disciplinary core ideas of the NGSS, ideas poised for elaboration as principles, strategies, and explanatory ideals made tangible by context.

Why does a researcher go about solving a problem in a particular way? Why are the methods chosen deemed adequate to the challenge? These open-ended questions ask a student to go beyond knowing the evidence that supports a claim to consider the diversity of “confrontations with radically different phenomena in pursuit of clearly different aims” emblematic of scientific enterprises (Schwab, 1962, p. 204).

In effect, curriculum is a musical score that, when played by students under the conduction of the teacher, makes the music (science) happen. Done well, the student experiences reasoning and insight analogous to the original inquirer (the composer of knowledge) and demonstrates understanding through performance. Hanuscin and Zangori (2023) have stressed the importance of “deep knowledge of content” (the score) and “specialized content” among prospective elementary teachers’ efforts to assess student mastery of core ideas (playing the music) with performance objectives. An arrangement of core ideas as a melody of specific claims, tangible principles, and trusted strategies gives meaning to the phrase “deep content” and guidance to alignment with standards.

Authentic Scientific Thinking and Doing

Authentic scientific thinking and doing in a well-defined context goes beyond knowing what scientists claim and what evidence supports their claims. In the next iteration of the NGSS, tangible principles, extrapolated from (and aligned with) core ideas, might replace broad categories altogether. Without the guidance of tangible principles, strategies, and explanatory ideals, reasoning remains perfunctory, and performance is often achievable through memorization.

References

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