By far the best panel on science education I’ve seen recently was given by a few of the most important people in the field: kids.

I met them at LogiCon, an Edmonton-based science and critical thinking outreach event held annually at The Telus World of Science. The two-day meeting, April 14-15 this year, was open to all science centre visitors, adults and kids, and featured talks by researchers, writers, educators and more. There were talks on scientific topics, from vaccines to particle physics, and scientific thinking, such as how to evaluate claims in the media. One section of the conference was devoted to sessions for families and kids, and of course that’s the part I couldn’t resist attending.

The first session I attended was “What Is Science, Really?” led by University of Alberta philosopher, John Simpson. Simpson also runs a terrific philosophy for kids program at the university including Eurekamp, a summer philosophy camp, which I am unfathomably jealous didn’t exist when I was young. The room was divided with two large tables, kids at one table (mostly 9-13 years old), parents and other adults at the other. Both groups were given a stack of unlabeled photographs of people and objects and asked to rank them based on how important science is to each. There were pictures that were obviously scientific, including ones of famous historical scientists (e.g., Charles Darwin) and people in lab coats doing bench work, but there were also challenging ones like photos of the Prime Minister and of athletes, fictional characters, and writers. I was fascinated watching the different ways the adults and kids approached the task.

The kids stuck fairly closely to the assignment of creating a continuum but they argued vehemently about specific examples. They went back and forth about whether a picture of Harry Potter represented the character or the actor. They thoughtfully discussed a photo of a visual artist and whether doing art required science, finally settling on the conclusion that anyone who systematically thinks about and analyzes their materials and tasks is doing science (oh yes, these were very cool kids). Standing up to place the photo of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one boy stated emphatically, “I’m not sure where to put him because he doesn’t use science, but he really really should.”

The adults, on the other hand, fixated on defining the terms. They argued not about the examples but whether science included technology or if they needed to create a second continuum. Simpson in the end gave them a second set of the photos so they could place particular examples in both science and technology. They argued about the definition of science versus social science, and they wanted to sketch a model of the relationships before they started categorizing. They hardly ended up with any of the photos sorted by the end of the hour-long session, but their discussion was fascinating as well. This is probably the only time I’ll ever hear this question posed seriously, “So, is Lance Armstrong more sciency or less sciency than a jet or are they both technology?”

The highlight of the day, though, was a panel session featuring four 10-13 year old science enthusiasts and moderated by the host of Skeptically Speaking, Desiree Schell:

The Petri Dish: Engaging Children in Science

What keeps kids interested in science? How can parents, teachers and other adults encourage and inspire kids to keep digging in to science and learning more? Our panel of science-enthusiastic kids sit down with Desiree Schell and discuss what adults do right – and wrong – to inspire scientific curiosity and interest.

As Desiree opened the panel, she emphasized that the goal was to really listen to the kids, to step back and hear about science education from their perspective and to give them a forum to express these views in the way that they wanted. She then introduced us to the panelists, all public school students from around the city:

• Alex B., a 10 year old who was inspired to ask questions by toys he had as a toddler: “Puzzles and things often have stars on them and I wanted to know: Wow, what are those things? That really inspired me.”
• Jadyn, an 11 year old who was drawn into science by books like Into the Universe by Stephen Hawking. To him it was, “simple enough that almost anyone can get it but not so simple that it’s not interesting anymore.”
• Evin, a 13 year old who finds science everywhere and is fascinated by its never-ending questions: “You can never know everything about science. There’s always more to know. That makes for a never-ending interest in science.”
• Alex E., an 11 year old who loves robotics and Lego: “I really like making things that can do anything that you want them to. If you can do that yourself you don’t have to wait for someone else to do it.”

The opening discussion focused on their interest in science, what first inspired it and what maintained it. They expressed broad views that focused not only on the products of science but also science for its own sake. Evin, in particular, showed a deep commitment to the importance of communicating widely about science for the good of all people. Science is about “making the world a better place,” he explained, “One thing we’re really facing now is climate change. We need to enlighten the human race that when we’re doing is really destructive, explain to people that this world isn’t an infinite source of resources.”

All four showed a sophisticated appreciation for science and its relationship to society. I was very impressed by the different views they held, from science as the underlying mechanisms of all of the natural world, to a description of science as a set of methods for understanding that world. They had all clearly has a lot of opportunities to engage with science in different ways. The topic soon turned, of course, to school science and what adults can and should do to encourage kids. It was here that this really turned into a most insightful panel, as they presented a nuanced critique of school science.

Evin began by calling out the emphasis on facts and not the reasoning behind them. He argued that it makes science both intimidating and also less interesting. “The tell us these things, but they don’t tell us why these things happen. Like the lines left by glaciers. They told us the information we should know and not why we should know the information or why and how that happened.”

They also argued that lots of kids are interested in science, even if their teachers don’t know it. Alex B. described how interested he and his peers were, even as very young students, in space and flight but that keeping those topics out of the curriculum until age 10 or 11 meant that students had gotten bored and given up on science long before they got there. “As early as kindergarten lots of us shared common interests in space and aerodynamics but then we don’t get those until Grade 5 and 6. We could have been catapulted forward if we’d done that earlier.” Desiree smiled and said that surely they were exceptional students and lots of their peers might not feel the same way. Alex, though, shook his head and emphatically stated no, he meant most of the students in his class. Almost all of them thought science was interesting in kindergarten and would have eagerly learned about topics they were drawn to, like space and flight or other individual interests they had. he said that most kids just don’t seem interested later on because they had already lost the spark.

This isn’t an uncommon idea, that young children have a curiosity about the world that we could do a much better job of encouraging. It was very striking, though, to hear it from an articulate 10 year old and backed up with specific statements about the kids in his class sharing an interest as youngsters and then losing that interest.

Alex E. added, however, that when students aren’t interested teachers shouldn’t force them. “You shouldn’t force people to do science because then they’ll end up hating it,” he said. Instead, show them the cool products of science or help them learn science that will be useful for them and try to help them develop a real interest. “Show them how they can make the world a better place,” added Evin.

Alex B. and Evin also wanted teachers to give students, especially young ones, more time to explore and experiment. Alex felt that many of the theoretical concepts of science might be hard for young students but that experimental procedures are a much better way to enter into science and build your interest. “When you’re at a young age just getting into science, it’s experimental science that you really want to get into. You won’t get very far with theoretical science, but experimental science can really get you in and then you can go further.” Evin emphasized that this doesn’t happen enough in schools. “That’s one problem that our school teachers have,” he said thoughtfully, “they don’t let us explore, they just give us what the curriculum says.”

This theme of not giving students what they need was carried over into a discussion of role models. A physicist in the audience asked the students what people like him could do to be better role models for young people in science. It’s a common solution proposed for encouraging and maintaining student interest: provide more and better role models. All four panelists, though talkative and eloquent, were silent. They looked at each other, raised their eyebrows, and shrugged their shoulders. Desiree rephrased the question asking them who their role models are and why they are good role models. Not surprisingly the ones they listed where people in their lives, mostly family members and teachers. The justifications, though, were a little more surprising and explained their confused silence. The students didn’t focus at all on the what the role models were like, other than they should be generally nice people. It wasn’t about the role models; it was about what the role models did for the kids. Good role models challenged them just enough. They asked good questions, and most importantly, let the kids find out the answers. Each student repeated essentially the same answer. Role models should encourage and inspire questions and exploration, that’s all. The kids themselves need to do everything else. There were no comments about having role models that were like the students or role models who broke stereotypes or role models who had overcome challenges and no indication that they really wanted to learn from someone else’s experiences. There was instead a lot of reinforcement that the process of role modelling isn’t modelling at all, it’s all about what the kids get to do and it’s really easy to forget that. Alex said it clearly, “You just want to prepare many many paths for students and let them take them.”

We spend a lot of time in science education talking about role models, the importance of the right kind of role models and providing a diversity of role models. Surprisingly we talk very little about what those role models actually do – and that’s the part that matters.

See what I mean? This was definitely one of the most insightful and thoughtful panels on science education I’ve been to (and I’ve attended and sat on many). From the reactions I saw and conversations I heard, the student panelists succeeded completely in making every adult in the room think a little bit differently about science education. Taking time to really listen to what kids have to say is something we need to do more often: there’s a lot to learn.

This is an updated version of a post written as Song of the Week at The Finch & Pea on March 23, 2012.

Nearly 20, 000 people were beating on the doors of a venue that could hold less than 10, 000 shouting, “Let us in!” The tickets for the  second night had all been printed with the same date as the first. Faced with the overwhelming numbers, the police waded into the crowd and ordered the opening act, Paul “Huckerbuckers” Williams to stop shortly after he began. A man was stabbed as the confused crowd dispersed. On the surface, The Moondog Coronation Ball, March 21, 1952 in Cleveland, was a total disaster. It was also a defining moment for 20th century music.

Organized by radio DJ Alan Freed (who the crowd was apparently surprised to find out was White), it was a showcase for the music he played on his show: a mix of rhythm and blues, jazz and boogie that he thereafter called rock and roll. The Moondog featured a mixed bill of White and African-American performers and, uniquely at the time, was intended for a racially mixed audience. It is widely considered the first rock and roll show, and March 21, 2012 marked its 60th anniversary.

Joe Soeder, a music critic at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, described it at the “big bang of rock’ n’roll” but that analogy doesn’t seem right to me. Rock and roll didn’t just come suddenly into existence that night. The music was a variation on rhythm and blues that had been developing for almost two decades. What was new was the name, and the name came to mean so much more than just a particular band arrangement and style of song. Rock and roll became a way of life. It brought with it danger, sex, rebellion, and youthful energy. The Moondog Coronation Ball was about naming and claiming that spirit. Without it, there were just scattered DJs enthusiastically playing R+B records.

So it wasn’t the big bang, but we don’t need to leave science to find a good analogy. If there’s one thing that scientists and natural historians have loved over the centuries, it’s naming and classifying things. I think what Freed, promoter Leo Mintz, the crowd, the police, and everyone involved did that night was create the musical phylum of rock and roll.

Popular music at the time was heavily divided by race and generation with little sense of shared musical culture. Somewhat similarly, early classification systems tended to view large kingdoms of life as divisible along a continuum of simple to complex without always noting the relationships and similarities between them. French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier proposed that the animal kingdom was better thought of as divided into four broad categories (embranchements) with similar body types that performed similar functions. Within an embranchement (e.g., vertebrates) contemporary animals had evolved to make the best of use of one of the basic body plans. Cuvier was stubbornly wrong about the relationship between the embranchements, arguing to the end that they had no evolutionary relationship to each other, but the categories he proposed have largely persisted in what we now call phyla. That classification highlighted a different way of looking at the relationship between animals, not as a march from simple to complex but as unified groups sharing common elements.

Calling this music rock and roll  highlighted that it wasn’t just the same rhythm and blues and it couldn’t be dismissed as race music. It was rhythm and blues with country influences and jazz influences. It was music that could be shared by young people across racial lines. Calling it rock and roll made everyone look at it differently.

So why did I mark the 60th anniversary of the first rock and roll show with an indie band’s song from the late 1990s? I could have stuck with Paul Williams’s hit The Hucklebuckle, which includes the terrific dancing call, “Push your baby out, then you hunch your back, start a little movement in your sacroilliac.” I can certainly get behind any song that’s precise about naming body parts. The new category of music, rock and roll, wasn’t just about good songs though. It touched off excitement and wonder in music loving young people everywhere. Randy Bachman (of The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive) hosts a weekly show on CBC radio in which is love for music is the centrepiece, and he often shares insider stories about the songs and artists. My favorite ones are about how magical it was for a cousin or friend from the US or the UK to come to Winnipeg and bring with them new rock and roll records. They were like treasures, listened to with awe and wonder.

It only seemed fair to celebrate with a song that did that for me. In Ottawa, 1997, good new music was still relatively hard to find. No Pandora, no Pitchfork. Living in a small city meant that music was still a treasure passed from friend to friend. Already great fans of Guided by Voices  (I wore out my first tape copy of their classic Bee Thousand), one sunny day a friend and I walked to a local restaurant that also sold music. The owner kept a small but impeccably curated selection of albums for sale and, best of all, you could listen to any of them at one of the listening tables outfitted with two sets of headphones. We had heard there was a new Guided by Voices EP out and were desperate to hear it. We sat down, donned our big black headphones and this was the first track. We listened in awe. After it was done, my friend took off his headphones and said in a hushed and almost stunned voice, “That is like the purest rock and roll song ever.” I nodded seriously with butterflies in my stomach that I’d just heard something special. Calling it the purest rock and roll song ever might be debatable, but  it’s the closest I ever came to feeling what Freed’s listeners must have felt discovering this new category called rock and roll and why nearly 20, 000 of them tried to break down the doors of the Cleveland Arena 60 years ago to hear it. Happy Anniversary rock fans everywhere.

Side note: We may not have been the only ones who saw a connection from GBV to classic rock and roll. GBV’s new single is called fittingly “The Unsinkable Fats Domino“

It’s been just over two months since I started writing regularly about science and music as the DJ at the online science pub The Finch & Pea. It has quickly become one of my favourite things to do each week. To celebrate, I’m posting a few of my favourite ones here at Boundary Vision. These are the ones that best represent the intersection between science and culture that I aim for here. Enjoy!

“It’s partly the problem of what happens when you become famous and bored.”

What sounds like a description of the latest rehab-destined movie star is instead how science writer Tom Levenson introduced me to  Sir Isaac Newton’s unexpected transition from one of the greatest scientists of his time to a detective doggedly pursuing criminals.

I interviewed Tom recently on Skeptically Speaking about his book Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist. It tells the compelling story of Newton leaving his position as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge to become Warden of the  Royal Mint. Not unexpectedly, he put his impeccable experiment skills to work improving the Mint’s production processes. More surprisingly, and reluctantly at first, he was drawn into battle with members of London’s underground working to produce fake and devalued coins.

What does it mean to be a good role? Am I a good role model? Playing around with kids at home or in the middle of a science classroom, adults often ask themselves these questions, especially when it come to girls and science. But despite having asked them many times myself, I don’t think they’re the right questions.

Studying how role models influence students shows a process that is much more complicated than it first seems. In some studies, when female students interact with more female professors and peers in science, their own self-concepts in science can be improved [1]. Others studies show that the number of female science teachers  at their school seems to have no effect [2].

Finding just the right type of role model is even more challenging. Do role models have to be female? Do they have to be of the same race as the students? There is often an assumption that even images and stories can change students’ minds about who can do science. If so, does it help to show very feminine women with interests in science like the science cheerleaders? The answer in most of these studies is, almost predictably, yes and no.

Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa’s recent study “My Fair Physicist: Feminine Math and Science role models demotivate young girls” seems to muddy the waters even further, suggesting that overly feminine role models might actually have a negative effect on students. [3] The study caught my eye when PhD student Sara Callori wrote about it and shared that it made her worry about her own efforts to be a good role model.

Betz and Sekaquaptewa worked with two groups of middle school girls. With the first group (144 girls, mostly 11 and 12 years old) they first asked the girls for their three favourite school subjects and categorized any who said science or math as STEM-identified (STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). All of the girls then read articles about three role models. Some were science/math role models and some were general role models (i.e., described as generally successful students). The researchers mixed things even further so that some of the role models were purposefully feminine (e.g., shown wearing pink and saying they were interested in fashion magazines) and others were supposedly neutral (e.g., shown wearing dark colours and glasses and enjoying reading).* There were feminine and neutral examples for both STEM and non-STEM role models. After the girls read the three articles, the researchers asked them about their future plans to study math and their current perceptions of their abilities and interest in math.**

For the  most part, the results were as expected. The STEM-identified girls showed more interest in studying math in the future (not really a surprise since they’d already said math and science were their favourite subjects) and the role models didn’t seem to have any effect. Their minds were, for the most part, already made up.

What about the non-STEM identified girls, did the role models help them? It’s hard to tell exactly because the researchers didn’t measure the girls’ desire to study math before reading about the role models.  It seems though that reading about feminine science role models took away from their desire to study math both in the present and the future. Those who were non-STEM identified and read about feminine STEM role models rated their interest significantly lower than other non-STEM identified girls who read about neutral STEM role models and about non-STEM role models. A little bit surprising was the additional finding that the feminine role models also seemed to lower STEM-identified girls current interest in math (though not their future interest).

The authors argue that the issue is unattainability. Other studies have shown that role models can sometimes be intimidating. They can actually turn students off if they seem too successful, such that their career or life paths seem out of reach, or if students can write them off as being much more talented or lucky than themselves. Betz and Sekaquaptewa suggest that the femininity of the role models made them seem doubly successful and therefore even more out of the students’ reach.

The second part of the study was designed to answer this question but is much weaker in design so it’s difficult to say what it adds to the discussion. They used a similar design but with only the STEM role models, feminine and non-feminine (and only 42 students, 20% of whom didn’t receive part of the questionnaire due to an error). The only difference was instead of asking about students interest in studying math they tried to look at the combination of femininity and math success by asking two questions:

1) “How likely do you think it is that you could be both as successful in math/science AND as feminine or girly as these students by the end of high school?” (p. 5)

2) “Do being good at math and being girly go together?” (p. 5)

Honestly, it’s at this point that the study loses me. The first question has serious validity issues (and nowhere in the study is the validity of the outcome measures established). First, there are different ways to interpret the question and for students to decide on a rating. A low rating could mean a student doesn’t think they’ll succeed in science even if they really want to. A low rating could also mean that a student has no interest in femininity and rejects the very idea of being successful at both. These are very different things and make the results almost impossible to interpret. Second these “successes” are likely different in kind. Succeeding in academics is time dependent and it makes sense to ask young students if they aspire to be successful in science. Feminine identity is less future oriented and more likely to be seen as a trait rather a skill that is developed. It probably doesn’t make sense to ask students if they aspire to be more feminine, especially when femininity has been defined as liking fashion magazines and wearing pink.

Question: Dear student, do you aspire to grow up to wear more pink?

Answer (regardless of femininity): Um, that’s a weird question.

With these questions, they found that non-STEM identified girls rated themselves as unlikely to match the dual success of the feminine STEM role models. Because of the problems with the items though, it’s difficult to say what that means. The authors do raise an interesting question about unattainability, though, and I hope they’ll continue to look for ways to explore it further.

So, should graduate students like Sara Callori be worried? Like lots of researchers who care deeply about science, Sara expressed a commendable and strong desire to make a contribution to inspiring young women in physics (a field that continues to have a serious gender imbalance). She writes about her desire to encourage young students and be a good role model:

“When I made the decision to go into graduate school for physics, however, my outlook changed. I wanted to be someone who bucked the stereotype: a fashionable, fun, young woman who also is a successful physicist. I thought that if I didn’t look like the stereotypical physicist, I could be someone that was a role model to younger students by demonstrating an alternative to the stereotype of who can be a scientist. …This study also unsettled me on a personal level. I’ve long desired to be a role model to younger students. I enjoy sharing the excitement of physics, especially with those who might be turned away from the subject because of stereotypes or negative perceptions. I always thought that by being outgoing, fun, and yes, feminine would enable me to reach students who see physics as the domain of old white men. These results have me questioning myself, which can only hurt my outreach efforts by making me more self conscious about them. They make me wonder if I have to be disingenuous about who I am in order to avoid being seen as “too feminine” for physics.”

To everyone who has felt this way, my strong answer is: NO, please don’t let this dissuade you from outreach efforts. Despite results like this, when studies look at the impact of role models in comparison to otherinfluences, relationships always win over symbols. The role models that make a difference are not the people that kids read about in magazines or that visit their classes for a short period of time. The role models, really mentors, that matter are people in students’ lives: teachers, parents, peers, neighbours, camp leaders, and class volunteers. And for the most part it doesn’t depend on their gender or even their educational success. What matters is how they interact with and support the students. Good role models are there for students, they believe in their abilities and help them explore their own interests.

My advice? Don’t worry about how feminine or masculine you are or if you have the right characteristics to be a role model, just get out there and get to know the kids you want to encourage. Think about what you can do to build their self-confidence in science or to help them find a topic they are passionate about. When it comes to making the most of the interactions you have with science students, there are a few tips for success (and none of them hinge on wearing or not wearing pink):

• Be supportive and encouraging of students’ interest in science. Take their ideas and aspirations seriously and let them know that you believe in them. This turns out to be by far one of the most powerful influences in people pursuing science. If you do one thing in your interactions with students, make it this.
• Share with students why you love doing science. What are the benefits of being a scientist such as contributing to improving people’s lives or in solving difficult problems? Students often desire careers that meet these characteristics of personal satisfaction but don’t always realize that being a scientist can be like that.
• Don’t hide the fact that there are gender differences in participation in some areas of science (especially physics and engineering). Talk honestly with students about it, being sure to emphasize that differences in ability are NOT the reason for the discrepancies. Talk, for example, about evidence that girls are not given as many opportunities to explore and play with mechanical objects and ask them for their ideas about why some people choose these sciences and others don’t.

There are so many ways to encourage and support students in science, don’t waste time worrying about being the perfect role model. If you’re genuinely interested in taking time to connect with students, you are already the right type.

__________________________________________________________

* There are of course immediate questions about how well supported these are as feminine characteristics but I’m willing to allow the researchers that they could probably only choose a few characteristics and had to try to find things that would seem immediately feminine to 11-12 year olds. I still think it’s a shallow treatment of femininity, one that disregards differences in cultural and class definitions of femininity. (And I may or may not still be trying to sort out my feelings about being their gender neutral stereotype, says she wearing grey with large frame glasses and a stack of books beside her).

**The researchers unfortunately did not distinguish between science and math, using them interchangeably despite large differences in gender representation and connections to femininity between biological sciences, physical sciences, math and various branches of engineering.

[1] Stout, J. G., Dasgupta, N., Hunsinger, M., & McManus, M. A. (2011). STEMing the tide: Using ingroup experts to inoculate women’s self-concept in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 255-270.

[2] Gilmartin, S., Denson, N., Li, E., Bryant, A., & Aschbacher, P. (2007). Gender ratios in high school science departments: The effect of percent female faculty on multiple dimensions of students’ science identities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44, 980–1009.

[3] Betz, D., & Sekaquaptewa, D. (2012). My Fair Physicist? Feminine Math and Science Role Models Demotivate Young Girls Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612440735

Further Reading

Buck, G. A., Leslie-Pelecky, D., & Kirby, S. K. (2002). Bringing female scientists into the elementary classroom: Confronting the strength of elementary students’ stereotypical images of scientists. Journal of Elementary Science Education, 14(2), 1-9.

Buck, G. A., Plano Clark, V. L., Leslie-Pelecky, D., Lu, Y., & Cerda-Lizarraga, P. (2008). Examining the cognitive processes used by adolescent girls and women scientists in identifying science role models: A feminist approach. Science Education, 92, 2–20.

Cleaves, A. (2005). The formation of science choices in secondary school. International Journal of Science Education, 27, 471–486.

Ratelle, C.F., Larose, S., Guay, F., & Senecal, C. (2005). Perceptions of parental involvement and support as predictors of college students’ persistence in a science curriculum. Journal of Family Psychology, 19, 286–293.

Simpkins, S. D., Davis-Kean, P. E., & Eccles, J. S. (2006). Math and science motivation: A longitudinal examination of the links between choices and beliefs. Developmental Psychology, 42, 70–83.

Stout, J. G., Dasgupta, N., Hunsinger, M., & McManus, M. (2011). STEMing the tide: Using ingroup experts to inoculate women’s self-concept and professional goals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 255–270.

Curved potato rows, Hamilton, PEI

On Prince Edward Island for vacation this week, this view is everywhere. Rows of potatoes maturing in the early summer sun. Those rows look pretty perfect, though. And I’d have trouble drawing concentric curves, let alone driving a massive piece of farm equipment to get it just right. The answer? GPS. While I’m told there’s debate about its cost effectiveness, planting potatoes is just one of many tasks that has been automated with precision GPS tracking.

It caught my attention because I’d just read Scott Huler‘s On the Grid in preparation to interview him on Skeptically Speaking. The book is a thoughtful look at infrastructure systems in the city of Raleigh, and it surprised me in detailing the important role of GPS in planning of all kinds. It’s way more than a tool for lost drivers! (Okay, I knew that but didn’t know much about the specific uses). In one chapter Scott takes us on a surveyor’s tour of an in-progress housing development where GPS drives the bulldozers and takes the place of most of the stakes that would have marked the curbs, road boundaries, and water, power and sewer lines. Thanks to Scott I’ve also stood in parking lots wondering about transitions from asphalt to concrete, looked more carefully at storm drains that I ever imagined and started paying attention to urban streams.

For this week’s episode of Skeptically Speaking I had the chance to ask him all about the book, which he describes as his “love letter to engineers and taxes.” Given my own background, I couldn’t help but think that engineers are much deserving of the love. Along with Scott, I chatted with Tim DeChant, an environmental journalist who writes the density-themed blog Per Square Mile. Tim has done some fascinating writing about urban trees (who knew that cities might actually have a net positive effect on tree population in some areas?) and relationships between wealth and urban green spaces. You can listen to the episode or download the podcast from the Skeptically Speaking website.

“Canadian scientists aren’t normally among the placard-waving crowd on Parliament Hill” wrote Janet Davison for the CBC, describing plans for the funeral-themed protest by scientists the next day. Her statement says a lot about the significance of the protest. Something has changed in the way that many Canadian scientists perceive their relationship with the federal government, and it has changed so much that they were willing to take the largely unprecedented move to protest.

Did I first hear about the protest from the CBC though? No, the first news I read about it was from the The Guardian in the UK, where it was reported a full four and half hours earlier. Similarly during the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference hosted in Vancouver in February 2012 there were panels and gatherings addressing the alleged muzzling of Canadian scientists. Where did I hear about them? From the BBC.

It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that both stories were broken by UK media, where a public conversation about science is a visible part of public discourse. A similar scientific protest (even including a funeral theme) called Science is Vital received wide coverage and thorough analysis, both of its successes and failures. It has grown into an ongoing campaign. Studies from British sociologists of science even make the news. I don’t mean to idealize public scientific discourse in the UK – just point out that there is one.

The same cannot be said here.

Asking questions about the role and place of science in Canada seems almost completely outside of our field of view. Events like this need analysis, discussion and careful consideration. But who ran a commentary piece the day after the protests? The Guardian again with Alice Bell’s thoughtful essay on the larger global implications of Canadian scientific issues.

The discussion of the protest has been sparse and significantly short on analysis in Canadian national media. The Globe and Mail ran a Canadian Press piece on it as a news item but has published no commentary or analysis. The protest hasn’t appeared at all in The National Post. Only Macleans has hosted commentary, written by Julia Belluz on her blog Science-ish. CBC has also engaged also in some critical conversations, hosting a live blog and, on Ottawa radio, pressing for a government response. The story doesn’t seem to have made it, however, to any national current affairs programming such as The Current.

This is a serious problem. When science or scientists feature at all in our national conversation, the only message seems to be “see aren’t Canadian scientists great” (and they are), but moments like this protest are a rich and important opportunity to ask about the place of science in Canadian culture. What should the relationship be between university scientists, industrial scientists and government scientists? How should they all be interacting with policy makers and parliament? Do we value government supported research centres like the Experimental Lakes Area?

It feels sometimes like almost no one is asking these questions, but that’s not true.  There are excellent and thoughtful science journalists and writers in Canada, but science in national newsrooms has been gutted and concerns raised by organizations like the Canadian Science Writers Association* are only starting to gain a little traction.

Where is the place for these conversations our national media?

Update July 13, 15:05 MT: The Toronto Star, which on Tuesday ran the same Canadian Press article as the Globe and Mail, has posted a commentary by urban issues writer Christopher Hume.

Update July 18, 9:11 MT: A week later there has still been little analytic coverage or discussion of the implications of the protest. It has, however, received a mention as part of other articles related to federal funding of scientific research.

Globe and Mail: “Ottawa’s wind-farm study a case of suspiciously political science” The Globe’s editorial for Monday, July 16th highlights new federal funding to study the health effects of wind turbines despite little evidence to support claims of dangers. The editors use it as another example of funding decisions not made scientifically, the same concern they saw raised in the Death of Evidence protest.

Vancouver Sun: “Arctic coal-mining plan draws criticism” In an article published on the same day as the protest, Randy Boswell examines a new arctic coal mining plan, following on the heals of one that was rejected by the Nunavut Impact Review Board in 2010. Boswell notes that the controversy has emerged at the same time that scientists across the country are raising alarms about cuts to environmental research centres. (Thanks GeneGeek for the tip on this one.)

CBC:

The CBC carried a national interview on CBC News Network with one of the protest organizers, Dr. Scott Findlay of the University of Ottawa. (I’m not of fan, though, of the “Gosh, I just don’t understand” style of science interviewing that Suhana Meharchand uses here. I understand the intent but it gives an impression of lack of preparation.)

Radio One’s Information Morning in Fredericton picked up that interview and used it to begin a more detailed look into how local research centres have been affected by federal cuts.

With the Maritimes leading the way, Radio One’s New Brunswick drive-home program, Shift, conducted an in-depth interview with Findlay as well.

And so did Whitehorse’s Radio One drive-home, Airplay.

Postmedia:

No word yet from The National Post but Postmedia did provide a story that was run on it’s Canada.com site as well as by papers such as the Vancouver Sun and The Ottawa Citizen. Strangely, The Citizen seems to have run two version of the same story on their site, one that is credited as a Postmedia story and one (a slightly shorter version with a new headline) that is written by the same person (Ottawa-based Teresa Smith) but credited as a staff writer.

I’m proud to say my local Postmedia outlet, The Edmonton Journal, ran their own story on the protest, written by staff writer Graham Thomson: Political science on the Hill.

________________________

* Disclosure: I am a member of the CSWA but have not been directly involved in these efforts.

I have a confession to make: I cringe a little every time I see a school science or science outreach program justified by saying something like, “Young children are natural scientists, truly curious about the world” (That particular quote is from the Delaware Museum of Natural History). I feel like a curmudgeon about it because it often comes with really good intentions to get students actively involved in doing science (something I definitely support).

The problem is that it’s an analogy that gets taken way too far. The analogy has its roots in cognitive science, as a way to talk about what was at first a radically different way of thinking of how children make sense of the world. Instead of thinking of young children as trainable blank slates, it is much more accurate to recognize that they are actively trying to understand the world around them (both the physical world and the social world). Their actions are a bit like those of scientists: They experiment and propose explanations, they ask questions, make predictions and see what happens (an idea often traced back to Piaget).

Describing them as scientists is a wonderful and rich analogy. The problem is that like all analogies, it breaks down, and this one breaks down especially clearly when it’s applied specifically to science learning. Child-as-natural-scientist arguments tend to equate curiosity and exploration with the expert practice of science, something that under-plays and devalues the difficult and complex world of scientists. Sometimes it is even used to say that as they grow up students somehow lose something they had that made them natural scientists. Taken to the extreme it sometimes comes across as saying that they actually become less scientific as they get older. This completely misses point: science isn’t just a grown up version of a child’s curiosity. While kids have the fertile beginnings, becoming a scientist requires that they learn and skillfully practice many abstract skills that are far from intuitive. When students struggle with scientific thinking later in life it isn’t because they have unlearned or lost the ability, it’s because they (for any number of reasons) didn’t get to take the next steps to developing those skills and understandings[i] (This is something I’ve written about before, and Matthew Francis at Galileo’s Pendulum has reflected thoughtfully on it from his perspective as well.)

Despite my curmudgeonly protestations it continues as a common refrain, especially among my undergraduate science education students, mostly future science teachers. I normally respond with approximately what I said above, but I find that in the process of convincing them to be a bit more critical of the analogy we lose a really nice part of it: the way it seems to motivate teachers and science outreach educators. It feels good to think about kids that way and it makes our work with them feel important and valuable , which it is.

In an unlikely place, though, I think I’ve found a better way to talk about it with my students.

The Association for Psychological Science recently posted a summary of a panel from their 24^th Annual Convention. The panel was called “Music, Mind, and Brain” and featured psychologists and neuroscientists talking about their research into music appreciation and behaviour. For example Aniruddh D. Patel explained the complex social interactions that result from following a beat along with a crowd. I clicked through to read it because of my interests in science-music connections, not at all expecting to make a link to science education. The surprise came at the end with the panel’s coda speaker: bassist Victor Wooten (best known as a member of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones).

Wooten talked about his experiences growing up and learning to play in a completely immersive way, joining the family band at a time when most kids are being sent off somewhere for their first piano lesson. He explained that he learned music in the way that most of us learn our first language – by jumping in and doing it. We don’t send toddlers off to controlled environments to learn about subject-predicate orders. They don’t get practice exercises and aren’t confined to a beginners’ book of words and phrases. They learn by being in and around experts, interacting with them. “Basically, said Wooten, from the very start of your linguistic training, you’re allowed to ‘jam with the pros.’” There is even two way communication, where kids’ phrases and expressions are adopted by parents and siblings. Wooten apparently went on to say that while lots of people recognize that music is like a language, they don’t stop to think of how much benefit there might be in treating musical training more like first language training – something that happens naturally and immersively.

Having had my share of disappointment and frustration as a young musician, brushed aside by family members and teachers as too in-expert to participate, his views resonated with me. As I read it, I wondered how my musical life might be different if I’d had that kind of experience (My piano, that is only played when I am completely alone, probably agrees.) And them bam – those kids-as-scientists arguments slammed into the front of my brain. What would it mean to think about science learning as something immersive and natural like language?

This has some connections to Lave and Wenger’s conceptions of communities of practice, something science educators have picked up on and used as a way to talk about science classrooms and teacher development. It has built into it, the idea of legitimate peripheral participation, the idea that there should be a place for novices to be both a part of the community but also a learner. Usually though, the community of practice is defined locally, i.e., within at the level of classroom or school or municipality.

I liked the idea of thinking bigger about this, about a larger community. As with music, we do too often treat students as complete novices without the assumption that they are already part of a community. Not because they’re scientists but because they’re people. This is what I like about Wooten’s way of thinking about it. The “experts” in his first language analogy are everyday speakers of a first language rather than linguists (or literature scholars or…). Researchers like Collins and Evans, tackling the sociology of expertise, also respect first language development as an expertise. While it’s ubiquitous, it requires significant time and work to develop.

Likewise it might be helpful to think of kids not as beginning natural scientists but as natural members of a wider public community that is interested in, affected by and using science (basically everyone). I am not all the first person to think of this (e.g., linguist J.P. Gee explored using first language acquisition as an analogy for developing learning theories) but I was struck by how much Wooten’s comparison to music made it snap into focus for me.

So what would “child as immersed in a public scientific community” really look like?  It’s hard to say. School science is a very particular type of science, often divorced from both the professional practice of science and more public conversations (e.g., Roth & Bowen, 1999). High school lab internships are one type of example and some extraordinary classrooms have contributed directly to scientific literature, such as the British school children who published their bee research in Biology Letters. But this is still about participating in the professional scientific community, as junior scientists. When it comes to broader participation, even great teaching and great outreach programs can feel like the kindermusic or piano lesson equivalent of science, where students are sent off as a group to learn and practice as novices, not the natural and immersive learning of a first language. Is there such a thing as “conversational science” like the expertise of native speakers?

I’m honestly not exactly sure what it might be. My colleague Jrene Rahm, from the Université de Montréal has been involved in a cool program called Scientifines, which includes students publishing their own science newsletter. Angela Calabrese Barton, from the Michigan State, has engaged students in community oriented-research and advocacy through community food projects.  These do seem to start to get at the idea of learning naturally through immersion in a wider public scientific community but I need time to consider if further. Is there such a thing as conversational science? Is participating in the wider conversation about science something that students can be immersed in in the way they’re immersed in conversational first language?

Of course, this is of course another analogy that will have its own shortcomings but I’m intrigued about by how it’s made me see things a little differently. When the topic of child as natural scientist comes up,  I can’t wait to ask my students this coming year what they think.

Tomorrow is the Autumnal Equinox, marking the first push down the slippery slope into a cold, dark winter. As the days get noticeably shorter in Edmonton, I wanted to take a minute to look back on a busy but fun Boundary Vision summer. While I haven’t been that active here, the spirit of blog has been a part of several summer projects. A big highlight for me has been that chance to go a lot further in exploring connections between science and popular music.

Here at Boundary Vision, a virtuoso of funk bassist, Victor Wooten, got me thinking about some new metaphors for science education.

Over at the Finch & Pea, my DJ duties gave me some great opportunities. I got to meet and chat with Halifax-based folk singer-songwriter Nick Everett about how becoming a musician might actually be a lot like learning science in Nick Everett and the Zone of Proximal Development.

At a great new summer festival in Edmonton, Interstellar Rodeo, I saw the most energetic afternoon set I’ve ever seen from Australian band Wagons and wondered how science teachers might take a lesson from their hard-working lead singer: Could Aussie band Wagons help new science teachers?

Certainly, though, the highlight was a lovely and deep conversation I had with Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland of the duo Whitehorse. What started out as a quick chat about one of their tracks for a Song of Week, turned into something much richer when I found out how passionate they are about science. The result of that conversation was an article published on the Scientific American Guest Blog this week: There’s another passion behind the music of Whitehorse: The sound of scientific thinking.

“Helvetica emerges in that period in 1957 where there’s felt to be a need for rational typefaces which can be applied to all kinds of contemporary information whether it’s sign systems or corporate identity and present those visual expressions of the modern world to the public in an intelligible way.”*

This is one of the opening descriptive passages of Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary Helvetica, which traces the meaning, history and importance of the near ubiquitous typeface. Think of a corporate brand that has a sleek minimal brand image? Chances are the typeface is Helvetica, from the AAs of American Airlines to the very recognizable G in the Gap, all Helvetica. Even the New York subway signs, designed by Massimo Vignelli, are Helvetica.  But what does that have to do with science communication and education?

As a teacher, researcher and writer, it’s really important to me to help people understand not only scientific ideas but also the culture and practices of science. In classes and workshops I try to share how important it is to think beyond just communicating scientific content. Catherine Anderson and I had great fun at last year’s Science Online conference moderating a session called Is encouraging scientific literacy more than telling people what they need to know? We chose a cultural practice (as good Canadians we chose the sport of curling) and explained the rules. We then passed out reading materials (various blog posts and articles about curling) and staged a funny conversation between two curling fans (HURRY HARD!). The idea was to get the audience thinking about how hard it was to engage with and participate in curling when they’d only just been told the rules. Kind of like expecting students to engage with science when all they’ve had the chance to do is memorize formulae and element properties. The discussion was terrific and the audience enthusiastic. This was really a preaching to the choir situation though. I’ve written before that the importance of a science education that includes more than facts has been recognized and advocated for much of the past century. For example, see this announcement from the Alberta Teachers Association Science Council archives:

Alberta Teachers Association Science Council Conference 1961

Thursday Afternoon Presentation and Discussion:
Consultant and Guest Speaker: Dr. Paul deHart Hurd,
Professor of Science Education, Stanford University, California USA
Topic: Recent Trends and Developments in Science Education
“Future emphasis will be on methods of science as opposed to verification of facts.”

I often wonder though why it’s sometimes so hard for the larger dialogue around science education and communication to change. Despite decades of efforts like deHart Hurd’s, why do discussions of science education and public understanding eventually circle back to the communication of facts? If only people knew more about science, then they would understand climate change and evolution or be better consumers. If only we could fix people’s scientific illiteracy. Even when it’s clear that things are not nearly that simple.

There are many reasons of course. Even when science teachers are dedicated to a broader view of science teaching, there are so many other forces in schools that can hold back their efforts. It’s bigger than that though. Deep down, sometimes I can’t even shake the feeling that maybe all that culture and process stuff is just extra and even worse a fear that it might actually take away from understanding the world. When someone argues that the facts should speak for themselves, despite dedicating myself to arguing against that, a little part of me says “Eep, maybe they should.”

Where does that feeling come from when I know from my teaching experience and from the research literature that facts can’t and don’t speak for themselves? For example, even when we focus directly on learning scientific ideas, students don’t learn difficult concepts well by just being told the facts. They need to be personally motivated to change their minds, to rethink the very nature of world (Everything is made of particles, what?!). Participating in the processes of science (such as making predictions and gathering evidence) and understanding the reasons why certain ideas are important (part of the culture of science) all contribute to that motivation. So why do I sympathize with and sometimes even fall back on thinking that maybe if we could just explain things clearly enough more people would understand and appreciate science?

It’s never been so clear to me how much that view and my own deep-down preconceptions are embedded in the mid-twentieth century modern world as when I watched Helvetica.

How and why the typeface developed is a textbook example of modernism: rejecting tradition and aiming for progress and social improvement. The typeface rejected the serif forms and other trappings of traditional typefaces and was developed with only one thing in mind: clarity of communication. Vignelli, talking about his choice to use it for the New York subway signs, talks about the instrumentality of typefaces. He shakes his head saying that there are only twelve good typefaces, if he’s generous, and he only uses three. They should be highly readable and not in any way distracting. Typefaces are not themselves communication. They are not for creating mood or generating emotions. They are only good if they disappear and let the message speak for itself. Wim Crouwel similarly scoffs and expresses dislike for contemporary designers who mix typefaces and use all sorts of different ones in search of a particular atmosphere: “I’m always interested in clarity. It should be clear; It should be readable; It should be straightforward.”*

Helvetica was meant to be neutral, not to have any symbolic meaning and idiosyncrasy. “The meaning is in the content of the text and not the typeface. It shouldn’t have a meaning of its own. That’s why we loved Helvetica very much.” Hey, that sounds a bit familiar doesn’t it? The science should speak for itself.

It’s the younger designers who make the obvious point: Maybe the designer doesn’t want to be aware of the typeface but “even if they’re not consciously aware of it they’ll always feel its effects.” Any typeface creates a mood, it communicates something about designer’s intention. It also elicits emotions tied to other uses of the same or similar type. Choose to use the same version of Helvetica as the NYC subway in a New York playbill to perhaps draw on the readers’ sense of the quotidian, the workaday life. Or do it in a rural storefront and evoke thoughts of excitement and bustling cities.

Of course the typeface always says something. How could the older designers not see that?, I thought to myself as I watched. It’s because the core of modernism–the importance of the message, of progress, of reaching people and making them think and understand better–isn’t just a passing idea, it’s part of who they are and everything they see and think about the world. And it’s part of who I am and who most of my science education and teaching colleagues, friends and students are too.

And it took another experience just to recognize how much. I’ve been working on this post for a while. I saw the documentary more than a month ago and have been working on it little by little but couldn’t quite get it right. I couldn’t get past just making the observation that struggling to change people’s views of typefaces and science education were kind of similar. It wasn’t until this past weekend that I really started to really get it.

On Sunday, I visited the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London. I was in the gallery, but no longer in that wing, when one of Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals was defaced. That’s just a side note though. The wing in which Rothko’s murals are hung is called Transformed Visions. It is in some ways the very essence of modern, filled with reactions and responses to the wars (cold and hot) that defined the 20^th century. At the entrance way to the exhibit are two pieces meant to bookend the gallery. One is Germaine Richier’s Shepherd of the Landes (1951). It’s an eerie bronze sculpture of a small otherworldly shepherd on stilts. The found object used to mold the head has given him (or her) predatory close-set eyes when seen from the side and the open observant side-placed eyes of prey animals when seen from the front. It’s sickly, with twig-like arms and legs and a rotting chest all propped up on the traditional stilts of a Landes shepherd. It is thoroughly disturbing and screams of commentary about the destruction of French life and the rot of the occupation. The other is Thomas Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads (2006). It is exactly as described, with plastic heads and bodies cocooned in packing tape and bubble wrap and mounted, seemingly haphazardly, on a messy wooden scaffold. Where Richier’s made me gasp, Hirschhorn’s made me raise a vague eyebrow and think “really?” That is until the enthusiastic gallery volunteer started to talk about the choice to place these two works together opposite each other.

He said all the expected things about Richier’s training and her reactions to the war around her but he was careful to say that her choice to sculpt the piece in bronze was deeper than her training and achieving the right look, deeper than rejecting tradition by sculpting grotesque figures in traditional materials. He explained that she and her contemporaries saw artists’ ideas as important, possibly transformative. They sculpted in metal so those ideas would last and the chaotic world could be changed. If they only spoke with enough power and impact, artists could change the way people thought and, in doing so, how they acted.

Hirschhorn’s whole view of art is different. He has something to say but seems resigned that art and ideas are temporary. Art hasn’t and probably won’t change the world. His is a piece that expresses one mans’ idea within the context that all of us will see and hear hundreds of ideas, maybe even just today. And it’s silly to think that a piece could change the world, so why not make it out of tape and bubble wrap.

Suddenly it was his that made me uncomfortable. That seemed so wrong, so pointless, so messy.

An art scholar would likely laugh at how simplistic I’ve made the difference seem but the experience said a lot to me about science education, about modernism, and about why I shouldn’t laugh at mid-century designers thinking that a typeface should disappear. Moving away from a strong modernist position that progress can be achieved if only ideas are presented clearly and strongly enough is really uncomfortable. It’s hard to truly accept that no amount of clarity in communicating scientific ideas will change the world. Developing scientific understanding is a messy, sometimes fleeting, sometimes happenstance affair that is the culmination of every experience individuals have with the world, with the people in their lives, and with science. And no matter how many times I say it to myself and others, it’s a bit like encountering Hirschhorn’s piece. The stark truth of what that actually means is hard to take. No wonder we continue to hope that the facts (and not the fonts) might speak for themselves.

I don’t have any answers and honestly thinking this all through has made me more rather the less uncomfortable in the way I see science education and communication. But maybe that’s a good thing.

Further reading of interest:

Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Larrimore Ouellette, L., Braman, D. & Mandel, G. (2012). The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change, 2, 732–735. doi:10.1038/nclimate1547

Tobin, K., & McRobbie, C.J. (1996). Cultural myths as constraints to the enacted science curriculum. Science Education, 80, 223–241.

Pintrich, P.R., Marx, R.W., & Boyle, R.A. (1993). Beyond cold conceptual change: The role of motivational beliefs and classroom contextual factors in the process of conceptual change. Review of Educational Research, 63, 167-199. doi: 10.3102/00346543063002167

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*All quotes were transcribed by hand while I watched the film. If you have a chance, do watch it. It’s excellent, and there’s so much more to it than the little pieces I’ve referenced here.

Due to what is starting to feel like an overwhelming teaching schedule*, I didn’t get a chance to properly share how excited I was to chat in December with Sean Carroll about his book “The Particle at the End of Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World.” Sean is not only a top-notch physicist, but a passionate storyteller and communicator. I’ve wanted to interview him since I  heard him speak at the 2011 Science Writers conference in Flagstaff. As a former high school physics teacher, I was in awe of how he moved effortlessly from the simplest to the grandest ideas in physics and not only held the audience’s attention but challenged us to think. So getting an hour to talk to him about Higgs Boson was a pure treat.

The Higgs Boson surprised the smart money and seems to have shown itself in July, even sooner than expected, in the sensors at the Large Hadron Collider. “They had their own timeline, as the universe often does,” Sean laughed when I asked him how he managed to write this fascinating and highly readable book about the LHC, the history of the Higgs Boson, and –more challengingly–quantum field theory in the same year as its discovery.

The Higgs was surely one of the biggest stories of the year and our interview covered everything from his desire to see more popular writing about quantum field theory to the true magnitude of the discovery, which he didn’t shy away from emphasizing: “A hundred thousand years from now when they talk about the history of particle physics, they will talk about pre-Higgs boson discovery and post-Higgs boson discovery.”

The conversation was great fun and I won’t lie, I may have blushed a little in the booth when he complemented me on having read the book in depth and asking interesting questions about it. Coming from someone who’s previous two interviews were with the Colbert Report (sorry fellow Canadians) and the iconic Canadian science program Quirks and Quarks, it was my pleasure.

You can check it out at Skeptically Speaking.

*Shout-out here though to my great students in EDSE 401 Digital Media in Science Education and EDSE 451 Physical Sciences Curriculum and Pedagogy. Aside from scheduling, I’m not complaining at all!

So. Here I am. Once again trying to find a creative way to explain why I haven’t blogged for a while. It’s the usual business of course, plus some other stuff. But this time at least, there is an exciting development that has been taking up a fair amount of my free time this spring. I am very pleased to say that, as of July 1, I will be moving to take up a new position as Research Chair in Science Education and Public Engagement at the University of Calgary. The position is being created as part of a larger science, math and technology education initiative taking place there. And I’m even more pleased to say that in addition to continuing and growing my research in language, identity and participation in science, the faculty has been very encouraging of my public outreach and communication work, both here at Boundary Vision and as part of the Skeptically Speaking team.

Over the next little while, I’ll be packing up and moving to Calgary (closer to the mountains, hooray!) and also sadly saying goodbye to my terrific colleagues at the University of Alberta. Here at Boundary Vision, I hope the move will just mean renewed enthusiasm and inspiration from new colleagues to continue to share and discuss research and policy in science education and communication. Wish me luck!

If you’re interested in hearing a bit more, here’s the formal announcement sent out recently by my new dean*:

Dear Colleagues,

I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Marie-Claire Shanahan as our Faculty’s first Research Chair in Science Education and Public Engagement, effective July 1, 2013.

Dr. Shanahan holds a PhD and MA in Science Education from OISE/University of Toronto, a BEd in Physics and Mathematics Education and a BScE in Mechanical Engineering, both from Queen’s University. Currently she is Associate Professor of Science Education and Science Communication in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta.

Dr. Shanahan’s research focuses on language and identity in the experiences of science learners and audiences of all ages, including classroom interactions, online comment spaces and creative outreach and career development programs—projects for which she has received funding from SSHRC and NSERC.

Dr. Shanahan was named an Early Career Scholar by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching International Committee, was a finalist for the American Association for the Advancement of Science Early Career Award for Public Engagement, and is the former President of the Canadian Science Education Research Group. She also is a writer and blogger who shares her own and her colleagues’ research beyond the pages of academic journals to engage with teachers, scientists, parents and journalists and is a regular guest host for a science radio program and podcast.

As Research Chair in Science Education and Public Engagement, Dr. Shanahan will play an important leadership role in our Imperial Oil STEM Initiative, and also contribute to our academic programs in Science Education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Dennis Sumara
Professor and Dean, Faculty of Education, University of Calgary

*Text of the email was edited to remove identifying details related to other faculty members.

[Yes, it's been a long time since I posted something new. One reason is that I've been busy preparing for a big move. You can read about it here.]

After our discussion about using dry ice with 8 year olds had died down, this year’s crop of space camp counsellors asked a question that plagues almost everyone who teaches, writes about or in any way works to share scientific information: what are the right words to use to explain difficult concepts?

Questions like that come up every year in my undergrad science ed classes and in almost every science communication workshop I’ve ever attended. And they’re hard questions to answer. The answers always depends on exactly who the audience is and on the purpose of the article, video or lesson. But the message often boils down to: Scientists and science communicators of all kinds need to cut the jargon and explain things simply.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

First, the specialized terms that usually get classified as jargon are often useful. They can sometimes offer precise meanings that make things easier to understand. Ed Yong is a science writer very skilled at explaining difficult concepts for wide audiences. He has argued that, even though getting rid of needless jargon is important, we shouldn’t act as if we need to ban complex words. Sometimes they really are the best words to use:

General readers are more than capable of understanding complex concepts, if you explain them. Explain a word once and you can often get away with using it again (although it’s still worth questioning whether you need to). If I’m writing a story about the difference between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, I trust that my readers will cope admirably with these unfamiliar terms if I explain them clearly from the start. If the difference isn’t core to the story, then the words aren’t important, and I leave them out.

But there’s even more to it than that: Sometimes words can seem too non-jargony.

I was reminded of this while watching a recent video from one of my favourite science communicators. Henry Reich of MinutePhysics creates fascinating and thoughtful animated explanations of physics concepts ranging from the most complex ideas in modern physics (e.g., The true science of parallel universes)  to questions that seem to be utterly simple (e.g., Why is it dark at night?). It’s a video channel that I watch enthusiastically and share widely with friends and students. And I most often use it as a great example of how something can be presented using simple language and graphics but still convey very complex ideas (I even interviewed him about that very idea for Skeptically Speaking). The one that arrived in my inbox as I was writing this is a very good example of choosing to use difficult terms but explaining them well. “How to Turn Sound Into Light” introduces and explains not only complex physics processes but also the words sonoluminescence and cavitation.

Something about last week’s video, however, struck me a bit differently. Take a look:

As you might have guessed, I’m talking about his choice to use the word jiggliness to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules in materials at different temperatures. The video opens with: “The temperature of regular stuff is basically just a measurement of the jiggliness of the atoms and molecules that make that stuff up. More jiggling, higher temperature; less jiggling, lower temperature.”

At first it just stood out for me as a more fanciful word than usual for MinutePhysics. But then I stopped and thought about it more.

On one hand, jiggliness is actually a pretty good word. In middle school, most people hear about a relationship between molecular motion and temperature, learning that the molecules in hot substances move a lot more than molecules in cool substances. This typical explanation is a bit problematic, though, because it really only works in some circumstances. In mono-atomic gases (where the material is made exclusively of single atoms) this description is pretty good: the hotter the gas, the further and faster the atoms are moving. As soon as the molecules involve more than one atom, and especially when the substance is in liquid or solid form, there is energy associated with rotation, bending and vibration within the molecule and even between individual chemical bonds inside the atom. Trying to describe all of these different types of movement, vibrations and rotations happening within and between atoms and molecules with a single word is really hard. So Henry went with jiggling. When we chatted by email about the video, this is how he explained his choice:

“I actually think it’s an excellent word to talk about temperature, because temperature really is just the jiggling of molecules, and other words like “motion” I think are too specific. I feel ”motion”, for example, implies straight-line motion or motion en masse, which, while maybe applicable for a gas, doesn’t really describe thermal vibrations in a solid. And “vibrations” doesn’t really describe the free-moving molecules in a gas. So “jiggling” seemed to work best across all cases – to me it is the most honest, the “truest” word to describe the thermal movements and motions that we call temperature. In many ways it’s even better than “kinetic energy”, since an important (and oft-overlooked in simple treatments of temperature) component of kinetic energy is the vibrational and rotational modes of the molecules themselves, as well as internal energy of electronic excitations. And at least to me, “jiggling” seems to cover these as well.”

So, it’s perfect, right? It’s a very simple and non-jargony word that actually is quite accurate, perhaps more so than other terms that are usually used.

When we think about it from another perspective, though, it brings new problems of its own. A major problem with the word jiggly is that someone watching the video already has to have a pretty sophisticated understanding of temperature to see why jiggly is a good word. It only makes sense when you already know that temperature is a lot more complicated than the movement of atoms in straight lines. Without that knowledge, the word may seem too simple. Jiggly is a fun word, that we would be happy to use even with the youngest of kids. It conjures images of jello and gummy worms and Santa’s belly. And in this case, it might leave someone thinking, “I know that temperature is related to molecules moving, why doesn’t the video just say that? Why use a kids’ word like jiggling?”

Word choices always send messages to science audiences. Whenever we read or watch something, from mystery novels to documentaries, we interpret what we read and see based on our experiences – no matter what the author or creator intended. One way to think about this is by identifying the intended audience and the implied audience (usually called the intended reader and the implied reader when we’re talking about text). The intended audience is the people the creator had in mind. Often in science writing we talk about the moms, uncles and neighbours outside of science that we think about writing for.  As David Dobbs said about interviewing scientists, “Make sure, when they start talking like a scientist, to ask them how they’d explain it to your brother the plumber.”

The implied audience, though, is the other side of the coin: It’s who the reader feels like the creator had in mind. It often comes down to feeling like “Was this written or created for someone like me?” When a writer says something like “We’ve all felt at one time or another as if…” a reader will quickly get a feeling about whether they are part of the implied audience. If you’ve never felt the way the author assumes that everyone has, it can be alienating. Similarly, this is one of the reasons why jargon is dangerous. It can send equally alienating messages like “If you don’t already understand these words and ideas, then this isn’t for you.” But shying away from technical terms can also have the same effect. As Ed Yong also wrote in the piece I quoted above, “The opposite mistake to using wanton jargon is treating complicated terms like linguistic lepers, and introducing them nervously. You can see this in some writing. Words like ‘basically’ or ‘effectively’ can often mean ‘Here comes the difficult bit; stand back, I might crack out a metaphor.’”

Those choices send the wrong message to a reader. They say, “Hey, I don’t think you’ll understand this” and, even worse, “I don’t think you’ll understand the real explanation so I’ll make it clear that I’m really simplifying this for you.” It’s another way of saying, “This piece wasn’t for you.”

And here’s where jiggly gets tough. Given the topic, I suspect that the intended audience is people with basic scientific understanding, vocabulary and interest but not necessarily a deep background in these particular underlying processes, including the complicated rotations, vibrations and excitements in solid materials. This means that even though jiggly was meant as a descriptive and accurate word, it probably sounds different to many people watching it. Instead of seeing how it encapsulates several complex phenomena, it might say instead “This is really complicated, so I’m going to use a very simple word. You don’t need to worry about the details.” And even though it’s not at all what Henry had in mind, it can be just as alienating as using too complicated of a word.

There’s no good answer to this, because to be honest, I can’t even think of a word that I’d suggest instead. As Henry pointed out, motion and movement don’t quite work because they are inaccurate for all but the simplest gases. But if you don’t already understand how complicated the process is, jiggly sounds even more inaccurate and possibly off-putting. So, my intention here is not to call Henry out for using the wrong word (it’s actually a great word) but just to point out that constantly saying “Don’t use jargon” doesn’t solve the problem either. Sometimes there is a great word, that is both simple and accurate, but if it won’t mean the same thing to the audience, then it can be almost as bad as jargon.

***

For more on how language choices can affect readers and students in science:

Here’s a new one for the coincidences-leading-to-cool-ideas file: Who would have guessed that stacking up old journals in someone’s office could inspire a new field of research! For my latest Skeptically Speaking episode, I spoke with applied mathematician Samuel Arbesman about his book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. He filled me in on the many ways that mathematical modeling can be used to better understand scientific knowledge, from predicting how the number of scientific studies will grow to how quickly different types of knowledge are overturned or modified.  One of the fields that is most concerned with these questions, scientometrics, got some of its first inspiration when Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store some journals on the floor in his office. The library at Raffles College (now part of the University of Singapore) was undergoing renovations and they sent various volumes out to staff offices for safe keeping. De Solla Price wound up with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1665 to 1850 stacked up in piles on his floor. The piles looked suspiciously like an exponential growth curve, and he was struck with a great idea. During our interview, Samuel shared many more stories like this of unexpected patterns that are found in everything from operas to how cities grow.

Continuing on that theme I also chatted with Mark Daley from the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University. Mark is a professor of both computer science and biology (and a musician and composer!). He uses computational modeling to understand the network connections in our brains and how different areas work together on tasks. Much to my delight, he also surprised me with some cool examples of how his work applies to popular music, but I’ll let you check out the episode to hear more about that one.

So why do an episode about why mathematical and computational models are so valuable? Mark expressed it perfectly:

Math is a tool for helping you understand the world. It’s by far not the only one, but it’s a very useful one, a profitable one. So when kids ask “Why should I learn math?” — because it gives you power to understand your world, to model your world and maybe even to predict your world.

You can find the episode on the Skeptically Speaking website: Episode #224 The Half-Life of Facts

Scientific literacy is a difficult idea to pin down.[i] To some people it means having a basic level of scientific understanding, though nobody fully agrees on how much understanding is needed or even which specific ideas should be understood. To others, it is more important to understand the core processes of science, which can be applied to any area of science. Again the problem exists of figuring out exactly which processes are most important (and which are distinctly scientific).[ii]

Even when people disagree about what it means, there is almost always this common thread: scientific literacy somehow involves preparing students and adults for the science they will encounter outside of school, very often in media reports. George DeBoer highlighted this in his history of scientific literacy:

Science education should develop citizens who are able to critically follow reports and discussions about science that appear in the media and who can take part in conversations about science and science-related issues that are part of their daily experience. Individuals should be able to read and understand accounts of scientific discoveries, follow discussions having to do with the ethics of science, and communicate with each other about what has been read or heard. (DeBoer, 2000, p. 592-593)[iii]

Robert Hazen and James Trefil[iv]  put it bluntly in their 1991 book:

“If you can understand the news of the day as it relates to science, if you can take articles with headlines about stem cell research and the greenhouse effect and put them in a meaningful context—in short, if you can treat news about science in the same way that you treat everything else that comes over your horizon, then as far as we are concerned you are scientifically literate.” (p. xii)

There is wide agreement then that engaging with science media is an essential element of scientific literacy. But where do people develop actually develop these abilities? Do these skills receive enough attention in science education? Do people really have the chance to develop them in school before the end of their mandatory science education courses, usually around age 16? While studies in journals like Public Understanding of Science have often asked about adults’ relationship to science media, there are only a few that have stepped back to look at the relationship between those adult skills and the science media skills and knowledge that students develop during their final encounters with formal science education.

One that I often come back to is Stein Dankert Kolsto’s (2001) ‘To trust or not to trust,…’- pupils’ ways of judging information encountered in a socio-scientific issue. In it, Kolsto works with a group of 22 Norwegian Grade 10 students. They were drawn from four different classes and picked for their expressiveness in describing their reasoning and as representing a variety of views. It’s a selective sample but seems reasonably appropriate for exploring a wide range of views among students. This isn’t meant to compare different types of students or test any interventions but just to get a sense of where 16 year olds might stand in their engagement with science media. In particular, they were all taking a course for students not planning to study science any further. So it was very likely their last experience in formal science education.

One thing that sets this study apart from others is Kolsto’s desire to focus his attention to how students deal with a real controversy that they have likely already encountered in the media, rather than presenting them with a new and unknown controversy or one that has been created for classroom purposes. The issue involved a Norwegian company that wanted to upgrade an existing 150kV electrical transmission line to 300kV and later build a second new 300kV line that partially crossed residential areas. The plan had sparking fears of health issues such as a possible rise in childhood Leukemia rates. At the time, early epidemiological studies of high voltage lines were mixed in results and there wasn’t yet a consensus on the effects. Coverage in the media often reported on contradictory findings from different researchers. By interviewing the students after they had read and discussed several media articles on the proposed high voltage lines in class, Kolsto wanted to explore how the students judged the information that they read. How did they make their decisions about supporting or opposing the power lines, and how did they decide which sources of information and which specific claims were trustworthy?

One of main things that Kolsto noticed about their responses was that very few of the students attempted to assess the content of the claims being made by various parties (power companies, citizen groups, epidemiologists, etc.). They rarely used their own scientific knowledge to try to judge if the claims made sense or were congruent with their understanding of electricity and the human body. They spent most of their time concerned with evaluating the sources: were the people or organizations trustworthy? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Prior work by my former colleague Stephen Norris[v] even suggested that students should be encouraged to make judgements in this way because it would be impossible for them to have the specialist knowledge required to truly assess many scientific claims. But it is interesting to note that these students don’t even seem to attempt it, even when they have covered relevant material in their course. To me, it also calls into question why scientific literacy is so often thought of as a body of knowledge that everyone should learn. If people aren’t inclined to use that knowledge when they encounter controversies, maybe that’s not the most useful way think about preparing students for science outside of school. But that’s my conjecture, not something the Kolsto argues.

Kolsto points out that this reliance on evaluating the sources but not the claims can also be a problem. Once a source is accepted as trustworthy, the students were leaving all other judgements up to that source. They effectively treated all trustworthy sources as authorities, even when that may not be appropriate. For example, a researcher may be a very trustworthy source but he or she can maybe only speak authoritatively to some of the elements of the controversy. On the positive side though, almost all of the students were hesitant to give out trusted source status to many of the parties involved, especially those they felt had a vested interest (e.g., the power company and property owners’ groups) and they were most likely to describe scientists and researchers as trustworthy.

Unfortunately, this status also led to biggest challenge that the students faced: what does it mean when researchers (who are trusted sources) disagree? How do you decide which claims to trust then? About half of the students said explicitly that when researchers disagree, it is very difficult to know whom to trust.

so what did the students do? Kolsto found that when they tried to sort of disagreements among scientists, the students’ views were clouded by the way that science appears in schools. In school science, there is almost always a right answer. Even when a teacher lets students debate a solution or an explanation, at some point there is almost always a true answer that the teacher eventually shares or endorses. This is the one that students must then understand for tests and exams. In school science, laboratory activities are also supposed to be definitive. There is most often a correct result, one that illustrates or supports the right explanation that the teacher wants everyone to understand. And while differing results can spark interesting discussions about experimental error, that’s usually where the discussion stops. When everyone is following the same procedure, if you get a different answer from everyone else, the only possible explanation is that something went wrong. School science doesn’t always look like this but, especially in high stakes assessment contexts, it very often does[vi]. And it’s not necessarily always a bad thing, there are many settled and well understood ideas in science that can be well taught with strategies like this. The problem is that it gives students a very poor foundation for understanding science that isn’t settled yet.

The effects of “right answer” science teaching were clear in the way the students responded to disagreements among researchers. Their only resources for making sense of those disagreements were their school science experiences and their experiences with disagreements in everyday life. As a result, the students tended to see the disagreements as illustrating either incompetence or bias. Either: a) One or the other of the researchers had done their investigations incorrectly or maybe no one had done the “right” experiment because they didn’t know how or b) one or the other of the researchers was personally biased and letting that cloud their results. These are certainly both possible explanations but they ignore the fact that sometimes valid and well-conducted studies disagree, especially when the questions are about health effects that have to be observations. You can’t randomly assign people to live or not live near high voltage lines and experimentally control the voltages they are exposed to. Researchers’ only choice is to observe the health of people who live near and far from these lines. It takes a long time for a balance of evidence to emerge from numerous studies of health effects like this, and there is no definitive experiment that the researchers could or should have conducted to settle the matter and find the right answer.

But the students wanted the teacher and Kolsto to tell them who was right. They wanted to know what the truth really was, and they became suspicious of the various scientists for not knowing how to study the issue properly or for going in with biased preconceptions. One student said, “It is probably because they have made their own opinions. They might have different backgrounds and have come across different information. Maybe they have made up their mind in advance, and then found that their opinion is right and taken that as a starting point” (p. 884)

What made it especially difficult is that the students felt they had no way of knowing which researchers were highly biased and which were not. They wanted the researchers to be mostly neutral and objective, but they had few tools for figuring out which ones were. They did look for information about the background of the researchers (such as their area of specialty), which is a very good beginning strategy. As one student said, “I have more confidence in those who have put more work into the subject, researchers and people who have worked on it” (p. 895). They also, however, tended to be swayed by the claims that included the most numbers. It’s good that they were looking for supported evidence but this is also a strategy that can be manipulated if the audience isn’t careful about assessing the meaning of the numbers. And as Kolsto found, the students tended not to apply their understanding to assess the evidence provided by any of the parties. They didn’t evaluate the evidence and numbers but were still swayed when more were given.

Possibly more serious was their tendency to believe the more dire warnings. Researchers that claimed more serious effects were more often believed. If that’s the case, it’s easy to see how health scares (e.g., vaccines and autism) can quickly gather steam. One student said “In my opinion, they [the politicians] should listen to those [researchers] who say it’s dangerous. Because if you do something about it, and it is not dangerous, then there is no problem. But if it is dangerous, and they don’t do anything, then it will have harmful consequences” (p. 892). And while this might make some sense, it’s easy to miss out on weighing the costs of doing something when there is no risk. The risks of doing something about vaccines (e.g., encouraging people not to vaccinate their kids) have been severe, such as outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases. Paying too much attention to dire interpretations (of flawed research in that case) has had severe consequences.

Overall Kolsto’s exploration showed some promising signs, such as students wanting to distinguish between trustworthy sources with expertise in the relevant field. These were overwhelmed though by the lack of resources that they had for following through on those good intentions. And because they lacked an understanding of the role of legitimate disagreement in science and abilities to dig into the content of the claims themselves, they had to fall back on superficial judgements. Students were swayed by the presentation of numbers and by those who made more worrisome claims. They thought that disagreeing scientists must either be personally biased or incompetent. And they tended to categorize expertise dichotomously: someone was either an expert to be believed or not, without noting that most experts have very small areas of deep expertise and varying degrees of expertise in other areas. Kolsto noticed though that the students felt that they were being very careful and critical in making up their minds. About half of the students made direct statements about the importance of autonomy in decision making, that one had to listen to both sides and then think for themselves.

And that was the main problem that Kolsto was left with. Students seemed to be leaving their compulsory science education with good and valuable ideas about what they should do when the encountered science in the media, but have few deeper skills to actually follow through.

“They wanted to listen to the disinterested and neutral researchers, but few of them expressed any ideas as to who that might be. They wanted to trust those risk estimates that several researchers agreed upon, but they did not indicate how they were to judge the level of agreement….The pupils’ basic problem, disagreement among the researchers, was not resolved by their analyses.” (p. 897)

And further, it was something that seemed to frustrate the students.

Kolsto acknowledges, and I agree with him, that it’s very hard to draw any firm recommendations from a small exploratory study like this. But he says that if there is one idea that should come out of it, it’s that students need much more exposure to real inconclusive and controversial science, not just contrived examples where the teacher has a right answer in mind. These students have learned that scientists can be biased, that they should be careful of information from sources that have vested interests (e.g., the power company), that they should look for agreement among scientists, but they are at a loss for what to do when there legitimately isn’t an agreement yet or, importantly, when science news is presented in a way that suggests that there isn’t agreement. Kolsto argues, and here I agree too, that there still needs to be more emphasis on the social processes of science in school, not just that scientists work together but exactly what that means. Before leaving compulsory science education, students need a much better understanding of how scientific consensus happens, how ideas go from contested and tentative to sometimes firm and widely supported and how arguments and disagreement can be an important part of getting to that place. They also need better ideas of where to look or whom to ask when media reports make it difficult to see where general agreement is. Kolsto’s study illustrates some very promising steps that have been made to helping students (and the adults they will become) to thoughtfully and critically engage with science media, but it also illustrates where more work needs to be done. There is a lot of agreement that skillfully navigating scientific news and controversies is very important, but I think it’s pretty clear that it still needs a lot more attention in school science and beyond if those visions of scientific literacy are ever to be realized.

Kolsto, S.D. (2001). ‘To trust or not to trust …’: Pupils’ ways of judging information encountered in a socio-scientific issue International Journal of Science Education, 23 (9), 877-901 DOI: 10.1080/09500690010016102

Many times during talks about social media in science, I’ve argued that there is a lot of room for researchers to be more open about the research process. Following along with Rosie Redfield as she blogged her lab’s attempts to grow the GFAJ-1 bacterium of arsenic life fame and publish the results was a fascinating window into how a university research lab works. I’m really excited about the possibilities that openness like that offers to high school students and anyone with an interest in science. It’s a first-hand opportunity to learn about the real day-to-day work of scientists in a way almost not possible before blogs and social media.

Setting a terrible example, though, I’ve never done anything like this myself. I’ve blogged about my own research occasionally but only after everything was completed and the paper published. It’s time to do something about that. There are lots of legitimate reasons why researchers in some fields can’t share their day-to-day work, but my field isn’t like that. We’re not dealing with patents and owned intellectual property or working on a topic where there is fierce competition to be the first to report a result. Our work in science education is highly contextual. No one else’s study, even on the same topic, is going to be the same as mine. More than likely it would help the field to have someone else ask the same questions, rather than having the potential to hurt my work or career.

So, taking a step towards making what I say personal, I’ve embarked on a really exciting project with David Ng at the University of British Columbia. While chatting at Science Online 2013, David and I found we had a common interest in creativity and science. We were both excited by the how students’ experiences in school science could be enhanced by encounters with creativity. David’s work at the Michael Smith Laboratories includes running a great program called the Science Creative Literary Symposia where students in Grades 5-7 (age 10-12) get to play around with both laboratory work and creative writing. We’ve been wondering what we could do if we joined forces.

So I present Adventures in the Science and Creativity Venn. David and I are going to share our discussions and our work as we look for ways to study and learn from the students in his programs. Our first task is seeking funding and we’ll be blogging our drafts, our questions and our struggles as we put together our first grant application for the project.

Ever want to know more about how science education research happens or about how people like David and I from different backgrounds come together on an interdisciplinary project? Then pull up a chair and watch as we try to figure it out. Comments, suggestions, and helpful hints always welcome too!

A tiny explosion happened in the online science communication world yesterday. Popular Science.com announced that they will be closing off opportunities to post comments on their news stories: no more public comment spaces. Why? They argue that uncivil commenters have an overly negative effect on readers, so negative that it isn’t worth maintaining the comment spaces. They make some scary claims too about a small number of negative commenters poisoning the way readers perceive the stories and about a war waged on expertise. They use an New York Times Op-Ed written by Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele to back up those claims.

I must, however, respectfully disagree.

Of course, the site is theirs. And as is true for any publication or online space: your house, your rules. So, really, they can do whatever they like with their comment section. More worrying to me was the series of tweets and facebook posts I saw from friends and fellow science communicators saying that more publications should do the same.

There are two main reasons why I’d like to suggest caution. 1. The evidence for the poison effect of uncivil comments isn’t nearly as damning as their quotes suggest, and 2. There is a lot of potential good in comment sections and removing them ignores those possibilities and sends some fairly negative messages about science communication.

First, it’s important to take a look at the study that they rely on as their justification:

The quotes used in PopSci’s post are from an Op-Ed piece written by two of the four authors of a study called “The ‘‘Nasty Effect:’’ Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies“, forthcoming from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The authors had 1183 adults read a blog post about risks and benefits related to nanotechnology. Some read a version that had uncivil comments (including, for example, personal attacks and name calling) and some read a version that had only civil comments in the comments section. They measured several characteristics of the participants in relation to the topic, such as their familiarity with nanotechnology, their confidence in their knowledge, and their prior support for the technologies. They also measured other characteristics such as readers’ usual reading behaviours, their religiousness, their age and their gender. The researchers  used all of these variables (including which version of the comments the participants saw) to figure out which ones would explain how the readers would rate the risks of nanotechnology after reading the blog post and comments.  I have a few minor quibbles with the methods but they are on the level of things I’d like to chat with the authors about over coffee, not things that jeopardize the results. The major problem I have is with the large gap between the way the results are presented in the Op-Ed (and then taken up by PopSci) and how they actually appear in the study.

The first glaring issue is that even all of the variables put together (from age to prior beliefs, up to and including the civility of the comments) seem to have a small effect on the readers. All of these things put together only explain 17% of the differences in readers’ responses. So, 83% of what influenced the way readers responded to the article had nothing to do with any of things the researchers measured, including the civility of the comments. Following directly from that, it would be tough to tell from the Op-Ed that the civility of the comments had NO SIGNIFICANT DIRECT EFFECT on readers’ perceptions of nanotechnology. Here it is straight from the paper: “Our findings did not demonstrate a significant direct relationship between exposure to incivility and risk perceptions. Thus, our first hypothesis was not supported.” (p. 8).

The things that did have an impact weren’t too surprising. Readers who were familiar with nanotechnology and who already supported nanotechnology tended to perceive lower risks than those who weren’t familiar and those who went in not supporting the technologies. These factors explained more of the readers’ perceptions than any others, and they support decades of work that prior beliefs are one of the largest factors in how readers (both adults and students) interpret what they read (for example, this study by Stephen Norris and Linda Phillips)

So where in the world do the dire and scary quotes come from? The last piece of the analysis looked for interaction effects. That’s where even if something doesn’t have an effect on the whole group we can sometimes find that it does have an influence on some people in the group in a unique way. They found two very small interaction effects. First, when they looked just at the group who read the uncivil comments, those who already supported nanotechnology expressed even lower risk than they did in the civil comment group and those who already didn’t support it, expressed even higher risks. So among those who already held strong views, the uncivil comments tended to polarize them a bit further. They found a similar relationship around religiousness, although I think it’s harder to explain this one. The authors seem to have come in with the assumption that religious people would generally perceive higher risk than those who are less religious. In the overall sample this didn’t come through though. Risk assessments were evenly spread among people with all religiousness scores. The only difference was that when the comments were uncivil the religiousness factor then (and only then) acted in the way they expected. So highly religious people reading uncivil comments expressed higher risk and vice versa. Both effects were very small though, increasing or decreasing risk perceptions by 1-2%.*

So, in sum, the uncivil comments seemed to slightly heighten the views that people already had, and when we divide them by religion they tended to react slightly differently to the uncivil comments. But both of these effects together explained a whopping 1% of the differences in readers’ risk assessments. So almost all of the factors that influenced of how the readers reacted had nothing to do with the civility of the comments, nothing at all.  I didn’t find any support in the actual study for claims that  people’s views become “much more polarized” when uncivil comments were read.

Does that seem like solid evidence for publications to decide to do away with commenting all together? I don’t think so.

Second, I want to turn my attention to the potential problems with removing comment sections.

In addition to being on shaky justification grounds, I also see a serious problem with the gut and knee-jerk reaction to remove all comments. I know we’ve all been there, reading a perfectly great article about science and then having our faith in humanity shattered by the comments. I totally understand the impulse to say, “Ya, these guys have it right and maybe science communication would be better if more publications did this.”** And I want to clearly say that I’m generally in favour of strong moderating policies. Even if they don’t really change people’s minds about the risks of nanotechnology, I have no problem at all with the idea that uncivil comments may be undesirable for many other reasons. My issue is with the idea of doing away with the incivility by doing away with the comments all together.

A few years ago I completed a study of comments left in response to health stories in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. My study was about how commenters claimed expertise not about risk perceptions but I think there’s a piece of it that might be valuable to look at. For the study, I gathered all of the comments posted on four health stories one week after the stories had been published. For the analysis, I was only interested in comments where the commenters related their expertise or inexpertise in some way that was related to their scientific experience or their experience with the health condition in question. This basically meant all on-topic and civil comments. So my faithful undergrad assistant that summer had the joyous task of reading all the comments first and removing the off-topic and uncivil ones. You may wonder what was left. It turned out there was a lot left and a lot of important and valuable comments at that. Extensive contributions were made by parents, patients and people with medical expertise. Questions were asked and clear thoughtful answers were often given. The comments including a long discussion of whether it is possible for scent to trigger severe peanut allergies with clear explanatory answers from commenters with medical expertise, for example:

The chemicals that are responsible for the odor and flavor of peanuts are called pyrazines. Pyrazines are volatile organic compounds and have no protein structure, and as far as I know they can not cause allergic reactions, they only cause odors and flavors. For anaphylactic shock to occur (from nuts) there has to protein which triggers the reaction, this, possibly can be air born.

There were patients challenging wrongful assumptions made in the way the reporter described a condition:

While I agree that a more thorough study needs to be done, I am more disturbed by the severe misunderstanding of what ADHD is. It is a neurological disorder where a person is unable to filter out distractions, usually has a lack of inhibitions, exhibits jumpy thoughts, ha s a hard time concentrating and finishing tasks, and may fidgit. It is not a made up reason for drug companies to sell drugs, nor is it due to a lack of “fatherly” affection. …I both have  ADHD and have taught children with ADHD. It is a truly mixed blessing, the worst part being the ignorance and cruelty of people who assume you are just lazy, had bad parents, stupid, and duped.

Commenters also challenged each other for evidence of the claims they made in their comments:

Dr. T, Can you at least post a link or another source that backs up your story? An anonymous quote saying ‘this is just plain wrong’ really doesn’t persuade anyone.”

To which Dr. T responded: “You’re quite right. The British Medical Journal has been running a series of interesting comments under the heading For and Against: Are the dangers of childhood food allergy exaggerated?
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/75”.

Similarly, Esther Laslo from the Israel Institute of Technology and her colleagues studied the comment sections of Israeli newspaper articles that addressed ethical issues in science. Not only did they find the comment sections to be rich and valuable, they noted that the most fruitful discussions and interactions were initiated by topics raised in the comments, not in the articles themselves.

There are often calls in popular science publications for people outside of traditional scientific communities to become more interested and engaged in science. Comment spaces are a real and viable place for that to happen.

At their best they can be a place for different types of people to actually hear from each other and for people who usually don’t have much of a voice in science conversations to actually have one. How often in everyday interaction does a patient get to challenge a doctor for evidence of his claims? Ed Yong even facilitated a collaboration between a scientist and a farmer through the comment section of his blog.

And like any actual place of conversation, they also fall victim to domination by extreme voices and need to be well managed. Town hall meetings and public consultations are a great example, and they’ve often been a focus of research in public understanding of science (see, for example, James Wilsdon and Rebecca Willis’s book See through Science: Why public engagement needs to move upstream). When they’re good, they’re fascinating and offer real insight that the panel members or politicians could never have fully appreciated without opening the floor to members of the public or a particular community. The can provide access and a voice for people to actively influence science and technology as it affects their lives and communities. At their worst they can be reactionary shout-fests of frustration to all involved. But I don’t see many tweets or posts saying that no one should have them any more. The problem isn’t the idea of a town hall or public consultation but a recognition that they really have to be thoughtful and well planned to be successful.

But back to the idea of engagement. How are people supposed to do that if the very venues for that engagement, which are unprecedentedly afforded by online science communication, are closed? The message then becomes “Well we didn’t really mean for people to be engaged, we just want you to listen to us more.” This is a return largely to outdated models of science communication where the sole purpose is to push scientific information out to people for their ready and unquestioning uptake. If science is truly about discussion of evidence and a willingness to be open to new findings, then the public cannot be left out of that process.

What does it also say about people with expertise in scientific topics? Their justification claims that there is a decades long war against expertise, but this choice also contributes that war. A no-commenting policy is also a no-experts-commenting policy. I often comment on news stories related to science education, sometimes to answer questions that I see in the comments and often to try to counter misunderstandings that I think the media pieces sometimes perpetuate. Instead of a place to engage in conversation and even clarify or correct media stories, the message to people with expertise is “Hey now, leave the communication up to us writers, we have it all under control and don’t need your input.” I have no desire to start a scientists vs. science writers thing here, and I think online spaces have gone a long way to helping everyone involved in those debates see how they can work together. I’m just saying that’s another message that’s embedded in saying no comments allowed. That’s especially troubling when it comes to new technologies, where there are serious and evidence-based disagreements and discussions to be had about risk. I’m pretty uncomfortable giving back complete control to how those risks are presented in a forum where no expert has a space to disagree with what PopSci or another venue says. I really want the opportunity to comment on science education stories because I think I have something to contribute to the conversation that may be missing from the stories as written. There are likely scientists and engineers (and science writers!) who feel the same way. What a no-commenting stance like PopSci’s says to me is that they don’t need or want those contributions associated with their articles.

I totally understand the feelings that people have in relation to comments, but I really don’t think the answer is to get rid of them all together. The incivility, first, doesn’t seem to have nearly the dire effect that PopSci seems to think it does in terms of influencing readers’ perceptions. Comments are often annoying and frustrating (sometimes even heartbreaking) but readers are still making up their minds based on other factors. So the benefits PopSci is hoping for are unlikely to be realized. Second, getting rid of comments to get rid of the incivility seems like a serious baby meet bathwater situation. Instead of looking for better ways to manage, guide, moderate or selectively publish comments we lose all of the potential benefits for real engagement.

Yes, comments can be highly uncivil and polarized. Should we encourage popular science publications to find better ways to foster civil discussions? Absolutely. But give up and stop comment spaces all together? Please, I really hope not.

__________________________________

*The authors don’t discuss effect sizes but from the regression coefficients it looks like being 1 pt more religious on a scale of 1-10 and finding yourself reading the uncivil comments seems to add to the risk you perceive by .07/5. In other words, it increases the risk you perceive by 1.4%, a very small amount. Similarly, being 1 pt more in favour of nanotech (also on a scale of 1-10) and then finding yourself reading the uncivil comments seems to decrease the risk you perceive by .09/5, or 1.8%. That hardly supports what is said in the Op-Ed “Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.”

Also, I might be doing some of the mental math wrong but the table of results actually says there’s negative relationship between religiousness and risk in the uncivil condition, which would actually mean that more religious people see nanotechnology as less risky when they read uncivil comments. It also says there’s a positive relationship between prior support and risk, so people in the uncivil condition actually perceive slightly higher risk than they would have otherwise. I’ve gone with what they’ve reported in the text in case the sign error is mine and not theirs.

** This is a paraphrase of an actual tweet I saw a friend post, but I’d rather not call out anyone specifically. That’s not the point of this post. And, as I said, I completely understand the impulse.

Diving headlong into motherhood this year has meant less blogging (obvious to anyone who subscribes here…), but it has also made me think a lot more about the scientific life that I would hope for my new daughter and girls like her. Currently her research interests include ceiling fans, her toes, her soother, the dogs and the penguins at the Calgary Zoo. But should she be interested in pursuing science as a career, what would I want her to know?

Despite tremendous change in science over the past decades, making a scientific life is still difficult for many women. There are strong institutional and personal biases in place, chilly climates, difficult job structures and sometimes daily aggressions that women face. If my daughter were heading off to grad school (rather than daycare) in the near future, I would want her to know this up front but also know that women find many different ways to follow their scientific passions. Some do it by finding ways to succeed in the academic system and others make completely new career paths for themselves. Anthropologist Jessica Brinkworth and I are working on just the kind of book that I would want to give my daughter as she packed her bags to head off for her first fieldwork or her first position in a lab, a book of stories of what women have faced in their careers and how they’ve made a scientific life work, inside or outside of academia. We’re hoping to provide support, hope and the closest thing to mentoring that a book could offer.

The full call for papers in below. If you have a story to share of how you live your scientific life, please consider sharing it with us or passing this on to anyone who might have something to share.

Women in Science: Call for personal experience essays
“Surviving the Sexodus: Practical advice from women in science”
Edited book, 2016 (tentative)

Many young women dream of a life in science, inspired by the opportunity for a meaningful and rewarding career involving curiosity, passion, mentorship and discovery. Indeed, a desire to reap such rewards can help explain the representation of women in the early stages of some scientific careers (e.g. graduate enrollment), especially in biological and life sciences. Women are, however, very underrepresented in senior research positions. It is fair to say that the proportion of women employed at the senior research level does not nearly reflect the numbers of women who initially express interest in science career.

The reasons behind women staying in science, progressing through the academic/corporate hierarchy or leaving science entirely are complex, but we likely can all point to pivotal moments and challenges that we faced over the course of our experience with the scientific lifestyle. For some of us, these are singular standout moments, for others it is the accumulation of small aggressions that wear us down. Whether it be low pay, long work hours, the pressures of publish or perish, loss of potential retirement fund years, new career interests, spousal career conflict, change in family arrangements or responsibilities, difficult job searches, bullying, harassment or exclusion, there are a myriad of reasons that
women are not proportionally represented in science jobs. Those of us that have worked in science have, however, found one way or another to deal with these challenges and have something valuable to share with our peers and those who are coming up behind us.

The aim of this book is to present the shared wisdom of women who have worked in science to girls and women contemplating or actively pursuing scientific careers. We are collecting personal essays describing the challenges, large and small, experienced by women over the course of education and career development and the strategies they developed to cope and move forward, including finding other avenues for their scientific passions. The overall goal is to provide a collection of relatable stories that can offer support and hope to those at all stages of pursuing a career in science.

If you are interested in participating, please send an email with a provisional subject/title by September 10th, 2014 to Jessica Brinkworth and Marie-Claire Shanahan at jfbrinkworth@gmail.com and mcshanah@ucalgary.ca. Provisional abstracts (250-500 words) are due to us by September 30th, 2014. Essays will be approximately 1500-5000 words long and can include images if desired. The suggested topics below are a guideline only. We are willing to consider any essay that describes challenges and negative experiences and specific strategies and coping mechanisms that you used, even if it changed the direction of your work or life.

We are sensitive to concerns about privacy and will work with authors to ensure that their stories can be conveyed fairly while preserving their personal and professional security.

Please forward this call for essays to anyone you think might be interested in participating in such a project. We are seeking authors from a broad variety of fields and backgrounds.

The publication timeline is as follows:

September 10^th 2014 – subject/title due
September 30^th 2014 – abstract due
June 10^th 2015– essays for review due
September 10^th, 2015 – revised essays due

Hope to hear from you,

Jessica Brinkworth
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology (starting 2015)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois, USA

Marie-Claire Shanahan
Associate Professor
Research Chair in Science Education and Public Engagement
Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Potential starting areas for essay topics include, but are not limited to:

Real life
Starting a family early or late career
Real life interruptions of science career
On being an adult student in grad school
Finding work life balance
Mixing family and field work
Mental or physical illness

My friends are buying apartments and I’m pipetting for my dissertation at 3 am
The wrong mentor
Poorly funded grad programs
The wrong program
Being interested in another life completely
When your advisor doesn’t make tenure, or leaves

Underrepresented
Being an ethnic minority in science
Being LGBTIA in science
Being alternatively abled in science

Pocketbooks and suitcases
Personal financial challenges during study/career
Life of the scientific spouse
Working in a place where you do not speak the language
Working in another country/culture

Thievery, loss and recourse
Not making tenure/losing tenure
Failed job searches
Loss of funding
On getting scooped

Over the line
Bullying
Infantilization
Harassment
Racism
Sexism
Wrongful dismissal
When a mentor can’t seem to keep their nose out of your personal life

When we quit and where we go
The decision to leave academia
The decision to leave science
Adjuncting for life
Returning to academia

When a CNN article titled “The Myth about Women in Science” came crawling across my feed, I have to admit that I wasn’t optimistic. I wondered what could possibly count as “THE Myth about Women in Science”. Maybe that women and girls have lesser skills in mathematics and spatial reasoning? That is truly a myth about women in science but I couldn’t see why it would be news as it’s been widely disputed.

A quick skim of the article resulted in a briskly raised eye brow. The myth apparently is this: women are less likely to be hired than equally qualified men when they apply for tenure track position. The authors (Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci, both of Cornell University) claim that this misunderstanding is the major cause of women’s underrepresentation in scientific careers.

“The prevailing wisdom is that sexist hiring in academic science roadblocks women’s careers before they even start.” It is?

“Many female graduate students worry that hiring bias is inevitable.” They do?
Certainly, hiring bias is an issue discussed in relation to women’s careers in STEM areas, but it is nowhere near the top of the list of barriers and obstacles that come up frequently. Bullying, aggression, withholding of resources, stereotype threat and imposter syndrome: sure. Hiring bias, “meh, not so much”, to put it colloquially. To put this in context, Jessica Brinkworth and I recently solicited personal essays of women’s experiences in science. We asked all of the potential authors to specifically describe obstacles they had faced and how they tried to address them to move forward or move on. This included women who persevered on the tenure track and those who chose other scientific lives. We received over a hundred submissions and not a single one was about hiring bias. There were essays about mental health, about struggling to raise a family, about sexual harassment and assault, about bullying and even having a job offer rescinded due to pregnancy. But not one women mentioned even being worried about hiring bias.[i] I’m not saying it doesn’t exist or isn’t an issue,  but to say that it’s the “prevailing wisdom” on why women are underrepresented in science is a big stretch.

The study they are describing was published this week in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. In it, Williams and Ceci contacted several hundred science professors (faculty members in biology, economics, psychology, engineering) and asked them to rank three made-up candidates for a hypothetical job in their department. The professors were asked to make that decision based on narrative descriptions of the candidates’ research accomplishments and the impressions they made on the hiring committee. The candidates always included: two top candidates (one male, one female) and a third slightly weaker candidate (always male). The two top candidates were paired in 20 difference combinations to experimentally test whether factors such as their marital status would make a difference. Based on professors’ rankings, Ceci and Ryan suggest that there is actually a preference for women candidates and that it can be as strong as 2:1.

As you can probably see, this design presents some real challenges. Ranking candidates on a narrative description does not replicate how actual hiring happens (although the authors do try to address this with a small follow-up study based on applicant CVs). But hypothetical hiring is not real hiring. It’s easy to say you that you would make what could be seen as the socially acceptable choice, but when asked to really devote resources to a candidate and make them your department colleague, many other factors (including biases) would come into play. (Physicist Dr. Skyskull addresses this with some wit in what he calls “A one-act play about a study in hiring practices in STEM”). These, and several other methodological issues, have been discussed by others such as sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos, marine scientist Claire Griffin, and philosopher Helen De Cruz.

But from my corner of the world as a science educator, the way the study is justified and how its implications are explained are what interest me the most. The way that issues about women in science are discussed in public spaces, such as in schools, around the dinner table and in media outlets is one very important factor in women and girls choosing and then persisting in scientific careers. We are all influenced by what our parents, friends, teachers, role models and colleagues say about what it means to be women in science. So presenting findings in a prominent mass audience media space like CNN and saying that “THE myth” of women in science is untrue is bound to influence those conversations.

So, the part I want to dig into is the support they provide for the major claims they make about why this study is important. The reasoning goes like this: this experiment found that women are ranked higher in hypothetical hiring therefore any differences in women’s representation in research positions is due to women choosing not to apply for those jobs in the first place. In particular they say if women were less afraid of hiring bias, they would apply for tenure track jobs in greater numbers and this part of the problem would be solved. From the CNN article, they conclude “The low numbers of women in math-based fields of science do not result from sexist hiring, but rather from women’s lower rates of choosing to enter math-based fields in the first place, due to sex differences in preferred careers and perhaps to lack of female role models and mentors.” This reasoning is not confined to the media summary though and is presented in the published study as well. They are actually even more blunt there in identifying hiring bias as the major issue: “The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring” (p. 1). And they conclude the paper with this: “We hope the discovery of an overall 2:1 preference for hiring women over otherwise identical men will help counter self-handicapping and opting-out by talented women at the point of entry to the STEM professoriate, and suggest that female” (p. 6).

My problem is the evidence they provide for these claims, which is weak at best.

In the article, they cite four studies to support their claim that fears about hiring bias are prevalent and could be a major reason for underrepresentation of women.

The first is a study by Sheltzer & Smith (2014) published in the same journal and titled “Elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women”. This study uses publicly available data about junior scientists (graduate students and postdocs) employed in elite labs scientific labs. They find a gender gap in the labs but are very clear that bias is only one possible explanation: “Thus, one cause of the leaky pipeline in biomedical research may be the exclusion of women, or their self-selected absence, from certain high-achieving laboratories.” In fact, they cite a wide variety of factors that impact hiring gaps including societal expectations related to which partner should move to benefit the other’s career, self-chosen and socially implied ideals of work-family balance, and biases that preferentially provide access to scientific resources (mentoring, supplies, public visibility). They say explicitly “Notably, our current data do not show conscious bias on the part of male PIs who employ few female graduate students and postdocs. It may be the case that women apply less frequently to laboratories with elite male PIs” (p. 10110) . So, that study is not making the claim that Williams and Ceci say it is, they are merely noting that for many different reasons, women a less represented in elite labs something that likely impacts their future career prospects.

Ok, next up is a report from the American Association of University Women (Hill, Corbett & Rose, 2010) titled Why so Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

This report is not about hiring bias. With chapters on topics such as “Spatial skills”, “Self-Assessment” and “The College Student Experience”, it’s a summary report on the immense variety of factors that impact girls and women at all points in the science career journey. When it does come to talk about hiring, it actually quotes a study with the same findings that Ceci and Williams are saying should come as a shock: “Although recent research found that when women do apply for STEM faculty positions at major research universities they are more likely than men to be hired, smaller percentages of qualified women apply for these positions in the first place (National Research Council, 2009).” Williams and Ceci cite this same NRC report in their conclusion as something that supports their findings. So Hill, Corbett and Rose (2010) does not address hiring bias except to cite a report that Williams and Ceci say shows no anti-women bias. This report does not support their claim that hiring bias is a major explanatory factor used to explain gender gaps.

Next!

The third piece of evidence they provide is Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering from the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering (National Academies Press, 2007). This report does make an unsupported claim in the document summary the women are less likely to be hired. But a deeper look into the documents shows that the chapter on hiring related bias instead looks at gaps between the available talent pool and those who are hired. The report explains those gaps with a long list of challenges that impact productivity (such as access to resources and mentoring) and with the usual list of reasons that women self-select out of tenure-track jobs (from work-life balance to poor working environments). Except for a brief mention in the summary, this document makes no claims that hiring bias is even present let alone that it is a major factor in women’s underrepresentation.

And finally, the fourth piece that they cite to support these claims is the American Association of University Professors Gender Equity Indicators 2006 (West & Curtiss, 2006). This report is mostly a summary of statistical representation of women in various positions. It suggests that there is a mismatch between those who are hired (especially at research universities) and the presumed talent pool of doctoral students. There is no data collected to explain the mismatch. Discrimination is mentioned as a possibility but it is not clear if this means that women leave because of discrimination they experience in the workplace or if they are discriminated against during the hiring process. And again, this is only one small part of a larger analysis of issues related to tenure, promotion and graduate school persistence. So to say that it supports claims that hiring bias is the major explanation seems unrealistic.

And in reference to the impact of hiring bias, absolutely no evidence is provided that hiring bias is a major fear among young female scientists or that it even one of the reasons women choose not to apply for tenure track jobs. None. For the record, studies that do ask them what they fear and what they experience instead highlight bullying, sexual harassment, and hostile environments. (And this is not even to touch on the fact that this study treats fears and experiences of bias as homogenous among all women, including presumably women of colour, women with disabilities, LGBT women,…)

To their credit, the question of whether bias is really prominent as an explanation is something Ceci and Williams address in the supplementary materials published alongside their study. But I don’t think the answer is very compelling because, as above, most of the support they cite isn’t actually about hiring bias or includes hiring bias as only one small factor. For example:

“Psychological research has shown that most people–even those who explicitly and sincerely avow egalitarian views–hold what have been described as implicit biases … There are countless situations in which such mechanisms are triggered: classroom situations, hiring committees, refereeing of papers for journals, distribution of departmental tasks (research, teaching, admin.) etc.” Oct. 2, 2010 at http://www.newappsblog.com/2010/10/implicit-biases-1.html

“It is now recognized that (sex) biases function at many levels within science including funding allocation, employment, publication, and general research directions” (Lortie et al., 2007, p. 1247).

“Research has pointed to (sex) bias in peer review and hiring. For example, a female postdoctoral applicant had to…publish at least three more papers in a prestigious science journal or an additional 20 papers in lesser-known specialty journals to be judged as productive as a male applicant…The systematic underrating of female applicants could help explain the lower success rate of female scientists in achieving high academic ranks” (American Association of University Women: Hill, Corbett, & Rose, 2010, p. 24).

Huh, the way this is quoted in the supplementary materials excludes the important information that this quote is from a study of bias in peer review during funding applications not hiring. The actual quote is “Research has also pointed to bias in peer review (Wenneras & Wold, 1997) and hiring (Steinpreis et al., 1999; Trix & Psenka, 2003). For example, Wenneras and Wold found that a female postdoctoral applicant had to be significantly more productive…” Wenneras and Wold were looking and postdoctoral funding applications to the Swedish Medical Research Council. And for the record, Trix and Psenka (2003) is a study of the discrepancies in the reference letters that male and female scientists receive. It too is not a study of hiring bias of the type that Ceci and Williams have examined.

A few of the quotes they provide due refer to one study of hiring bias that they directly refute as inappropriate because it is not about faculty hiring (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012). It’s about hiring a hypothetical laboratory manager. And that’s a fair point about that study really but the authors of that study are clear that the impact is on students and not faculty hiring, an appropriate interpretation of the data I think. But saying that some people have cited a single study that you disagree with isn’t enough evidence to say to CNN that the prevailing wisdom is that hiring bias in the main factor in underrepresentation.

Okay, at this point, it’s probably important to ask if this level of scrutiny is really valuable. How much does it matter that they haven’t supported this argument very well. It’s the data they collected that matters, right? Well no, actually. The data is interesting (even if a bit flawed) and it’s something that will help focus attention on more salient issues. That is important and I’m glad someone is doing experimental research on hiring bias. The problem is the way they are talking about and promoting the study, especially in public venues. As I said earlier, a huge influence on girls and women in science (and all people in science really) is what the important people in their lives think about their participation in science. If parents and peers value science and express confidence in girls’ abilities, they are far more likely to persevere. The social support they receive during times of difficulty is essential. Without much evidence that this is major obstacle, this study adds a strong voice to the public conversation about science that says: “Guess what, no bias in science! Just choose to apply to tenure track jobs!” The framing of the CNN piece (and even the study) is: “That thing about women in science struggling to get jobs, totally a myth.”

The implication then is that women are at fault if they experience bias or discrimination or bullying or harassment or withholding of resources. I think, and I’ll be clear that I’m speculating here, that promoting studies like this by saying that there are simple and clear reasons for women’s underrepresentation and suggesting that they’ve been solved will actually have the opposite effect from I think Williams and Ceci intend, causing women to blame themselves when they experience bias and discrimination. Blaming themselves and receiving less support from family and friends who may now doubt the challenges they face could turn more women aware from science critical junctures such as job application.

So I would ask us all to take care in how we share this story and how we talk about it. Potentially interesting, sure, but also potentially damaging when presented as something that it isn’t.

Further reading and references:

Bevan, V., & Learmonth, M. (2012). ” I Wouldn’t Say it’s Sexism, Except That… It’s All These Little Subtle Things”: Healthcare Scientists’ Accounts of Gender in Healthcare Science Laboratories. Social studies of science, 0306312712460606.

Clancy, K. B., Nelson, R. G., Rutherford, J. N., & Hinde, K. (2014). Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): trainees report harassment and assault. PloS one, 9(7), e102172.

Johnson-Bailey, J. (2014). Academic Incivility and Bullying as a Gendered and Racialized Phenomena. Adult Learning, 1045159514558414.

Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(41), 16474-16479.

Simpson, R., & Cohen, C. (2004). Dangerous work: The gendered nature of bullying in the context of higher education. Gender, Work & Organization, 11(2), 163-186.

Wenneras, C., & Wold, A. (2001). Nepotism and sexism in peer-review. Women, science, and technology. Routledge, 46-52.

[i] Jessica recently presented a summary of the project motivations and submissions: Brinkworth, J.F., & Shanahan, M.-C. (2015, March). Surviving the Sexodus Project: How STEM Women Approach Career Challenges. Presentation at the American Association of Anatomists, Boston, MA. And we are embarking on a related research project: more on that soon!

A few months ago I wrote a blog post in response to Williams and Ceci’s paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: National hiring experiments reveal 2: 1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. I was concerned about the way that the findings were interpreted, generalized and compared to the wider literature. In the media comments that followed their piece, Williams and Ceci were very clear, however, that they felt that critics of the paper were being unfair and unscholarly. I didn’t agree and I wanted to ensure that genuine scholarly concerns were discussed not only in a blogged and public venue but also through traditional channels. So I wrote a letter to the editor, expressing the concerns raised in my blog post.

I think Rosie Redfield’s dual work in criticizing NASA’s arsenic life paper both on her blog and through a letter to Science, for example, is a very important model. High visibility science, reported in large media venues, often doesn’t receive public critique. People may write letters to the editor or complain to each other at conferences, but too often that critique is not available to most of the people who have read about a story in the news. Or it is only available so long after the initial results are reported that it has little impact on how that science is understood publicly. As I’ve written before, the back channels of criticism of cold fusion were quickly refuting the findings, but those of us reading about it on the sidelines were left out of that conversation for a long time. Blogged commentary and social media responses are a very important way of making all of science–including the messy processes that go into building scientific consensus about a topic–available.

The editors of PNAS weren’t entirely moved by my letter and declined to publish it. The letter and the editor’s comment are below. Even though it wasn’t published, I’m still happy to have worked to express my concerns both publicly here and through the more formal channels of the journal. This is an important model for scholarly critique, and I would do it again in heartbeat.

Editor’s Remarks to Author:
While interesting we do not feel this adds weight to the discussion.

Lack of hiring bias in STEM? Interpretive caution needed

The recent article by Williams and Ceci [1] addresses an important issue: identifying precisely where women leave or are shut out of scientific careers. The results of their study suggest that when hypothetical faculty candidates are identical except for gender, women may be favored at the point of hiring. Within the constraints of experimental research of this type, their study addresses a meaningful and specific literature gap. In a context like this, however, where findings will contribute (and are explicitly intended to contribute) to public discourse and policy making, the interpretations of the evidence and the implications that are drawn are of at least equal importance. So it is especially troubling that, in this article, the interpretations stretch well beyond the experimental evidence.

The experiment is framed with two base assumptions: that hiring bias is the most prominent explanation for women’s underrepresentation and that fear of hiring bias is a key motivator for women to withdraw from seeking tenure-track positions; neither is compellingly supported. On the latter assumption, no evidence is provided that hiring bias is a central worry for women despite claims such as “One reason (for fewer applicants) may be omnipresent discouraging messages about sexism in hiring”. In reference to the former claim (“The underrepresentation of women…is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring”) the evidence provided is contradictory and weak. Of all of the literature they cite in support of this claim only one study [2] examines this type of hiring bias. Sheltzer and Smith [3], for example, examined the employees of elite labs and found fewer women employed there. They, however, are appropriately tentative in their interpretation saying explicitly that they have no evidence to suggest or negate hiring bias and they propose multifactorial explanations for their observations. Similarly, the 2010 American Association of University Women report “Why so Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” [4] is used to support the claim that “numerous blue ribbon panels … have concluded that implicit, and sometimes explicit, attitudes pervade the hiring process“; but on hiring bias, which it addresses only briefly, the report references the same National Research Council (2010) report that the authors cite to support their own findings. This report concludes that women declining to apply for tenure track jobs is a more pressing issue than bias at the point of hiring.

Gender-based hiring bias, as a factor isolated from the many other day-to-day experiences that influence women’s participation and progression, is not the dominant explanation for women’s underrepresentation in the literature. That hiring bias may not (under experimental conditions) be a barrier to women on the tenure track is therefore just one of many contributions to understanding a complex phenomenon. There is little to support the far-reaching conclusion that, as a result of these findings, this “is a propitious time for women launching careers in academic science”. A great deal more nuance and tentativeness in interpretation would have been appropriate.

[1] Williams WM, Ceci SJ (2015) National hiring experiments reveal 2: 1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112(17): 5360-5365.

[2] Moss-Racusin CA, Dovidio JF, Brescoll VL, Graham MJ, Handelsman J (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(41): 16474-16479.

[3] Sheltzer JM, Smith JC (2014) Elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111(28):10107–10112.

[4] Hill C, Corbett C, St. Rose A (2010) Why so Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (American Association of University Women, Washington, DC).

[5] National Research Council (2010) Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty (National Academies Press, Washington, DC).

The Seven Wonderers of Beakerhead (Photo courtesy of Raj Bhardwaj @RajBhardwajMD, used with permission)

In the warm glow of vintage stage lights, with a full house packed into worn leather and velour seats, a woman approaches the mic almost tentatively. “I used to be a dancer”, she says, “and I would probably be a lot more comfortable on this stage if I were dancing”[i]. It wasn’t a typical opening line for a science talk.

The Seven Wonderers of Beakerhead, hosted at Calgary’s Royal Canadian Legion No. 1 on September 15, was definitely not what you might expect from an evening of science talks–even I got more than I expected. The event was part of Beakerhead, Calgary’s science, art, and engineering extravaganza (they call it a “smash up” rather than a festival). The seven wonderers were seven experienced science communicators and journalists there to share their personal stories of curiosity and wonder.

Torah Kachur, science columnist at CBC Radio, opened the night sharing her realization that her grandfather had pioneered the life-saving cardiac surgery that her newborn daughter needed. Rose Eveleth, host and producer of Meanwhile in the Future, took us on a fast-paced ride to meet the scientific mentors in her life, a journey the climaxed in a dark alley in Costa Rica faced with how to answer the question: “You’re a scientist, right?”. The crowd laughed along with her and experienced for themselves what her research mentor meant when he said, “You know, not everyone has to be a scientist. You’re really good at talking to people, you should be a journalist”.

Nadia Drake, the former dancer and now science reporter for Wired, National Geographic and others, followed Rose and spoke earnestly about her first encounter with mountain lions and the difficult struggles she saw them face once she joined a research team tagging and tracking the animals. Raj Bhardwaj, a physician and CBC health columnist, was up next with a humorous tale of an awkward ER conversation (“Actually doc, you’re not going to believe this but…”) that served a rich background to explore the responsibilities that doctors have for really listening to their patients, understanding that medicine “is not about fixing bodies, it’s about communication”.

The second half kept us all laughing, with science comedian Sarah Chow sharing some of the difficult tasks she’d been given by her production company (Find out something interesting we can do about breakfast foods, now!) and Jennifer Gardy, regular guest host of The Nature of Things, sharing her acquired wisdom about TV documentary work through humourous lists, such of rejected names for The Nature of Things (“This Hour has 22 Beavers”) and unsuitable documentary titles (“Inside animal colons!” and “Myth or Science: Pants”). John Rennie, a former standup comedian and past editor-in-chief of Scientific American, wrapped the night in a scientific bow with a tale of trying to master his fear of bugs by eating them. Spoiler, this did not go well.

The evening was a great fun, but I think there was more to it than that. There was a lot more comedy than in a typical night of scientific talks, but to me the star of the show was narrative: the story telling form. All of the Wonderers spoke from personal experience and shared something that had directly happened to them, along with the self-doubt, surprises and self-reflection that come along with human experiences. And in doing that, using the narrative form, they said things about science that almost no research talk ever could.

Thinking about narrative as a valuable tool for science writing, science communication and science education is not by any means a new idea. Story Collider, for example, makes a thought provoking podcast and regular event out of it. I even tried my hand at organizing a science and story-telling event in Edmonton a few years ago. Colleagues of mine in science education have also studied how stories about science might help students to be more interested and understand scientific concepts better.[ii] The usual story about narrative in science is that it represents a familiar kind of writing and speaking so it can make science more accessible and hold a reader or audience members’ attention better than a plain explanation. Most often it’s seen as a pedagogical or communications tool, a way of connecting ideas in a more engaging way.

Tonight something else really struck me, and I thought about science narratives in a way that I hadn’t before. In my own research I’m often interested in how people find or make places for themselves in science or, on the other hand, distance themselves from it or are excluded, maybe feeling like they just aren’t the right kind of people to participate or be welcomed. Doing that kind of research means spending a lot of time thinking about how to help people articulate the relationships they have with scientific communities and concepts.

What made me so excited about these stories was how well they accomplished that difficult task and expressed very different relationships to science. In both Nadia Drake’s cougar story and Raj Bhardwaj’s ER story there was responsibility and respect. In both of those stories, being a part of science and medicine was both an honour and a duty. There was a passion and love for science in Rose’s story and a struggle about maybe not being up to the task, good enough to really be a scientist. Sarah on the other hand owned the science in her story. She told us that one of her main motivations was protecting science from the way it was often misconstrued in media headlines. And John joked about his place in science, said he was being entirely non-scientific in his fears and set himself up as maybe being different from the entomologists who were organizing the event. He was a guest into that world in his story.

What I loved about the stories was that science became a character in some way in all of them: they protected it, they loved it, it excluded them, scared them and sometimes embarrassed them. That complex relationship to science is something that is often unspoken and hidden, especially from students.

Everyone who took the stage would, I think, be considered an insider to science. Some have graduate degrees, others have come to it later or from other backgrounds but all are now deeply immersed in it in some way. Young students often think that there are only two relationships you can have with science—in or out. You’re scientific or you’re not. I love the idea that, through stories, students might be able to see more clearly the complex relationships people have with science. Maybe they could even be able to think more explicitly about their relationship to science through telling stories like this, to see the insider in their outsider stories and vice versa. [iii]

So, I want to say a big thanks to the Seven Wonderers of Beakerhead. The evening will definitely stick with me and not just for the mental image of John Rennie trying to decide whether to eat a cockroach head or back end first.

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[i] All of the quotes from that night were hand written, which is to say scrawled as quickly as I could into my notebook as the speakers told their stories. I’ve written them here as quotes but they are only my best attempt at recreating of the words of the speakers as they spoke.

[ii] For example:

Avraamidou, L., & Osborne, J. (2009). The role of narrative in communicating science. International Journal of Science Education, 31(12), 1683-1707. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09500690802380695

Norris, S. P., Guilbert, S. M., Smith, M. L., Hakimelahi, S., & Phillips, L. M. (2005). A theoretical framework for narrative explanation in science. Science Education, 89(4), 535-563. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.20063/abstract

[iii] The idea of using narrative as a tool for research and understanding also isn’t new. Narrative researchers, like Jean Clandinin, have pioneered methods for understanding all kinds of experiences by the stories that people tell. In science education, John Wallace and William Louden’s book Teachers’ Learning: Stories of Science Education opens with a really thoughtful history and framework for narrative as a research method and its relationship to science and scientific practice. What I’d personally never quite made the connection to before was the value in making science a character with a place in the story.