According to the interviewee, what is the problem of the present science education?

W: Today’s show is all about this week’s special issue on Grand Challenges in Science Education, including science education for non-scientists. Noah Feinstein, thanks for coming on our show.
M: Pleasure.
W: Now please share something about your paper on re-imagining science education for non-scientists.
M: Well, what science education has tried to do for a long time is to give students a sort of minimal complete set of scientific facts and principles.(1)Instead of doing that, we should make the connection between science and real life, or daily life. It is not just a way to teach the same old science content. It’s actually one of the most important skills, so they are able to make those connections on their own when the teacher isn’t there to help them.(l)We don’t spend, I would say, nearly enough time teaching kids how to connect science with their daily experience.
W: And then there’s the fact that we tend to categorize people as scientists and non-scientists or scientists and "other". What’s the problem with that?
M: Right. Non-scientist is a category that really only makes sense to scientists. The reality is that everybody is a non-scientist. Even scientists are non-scientists most of the time when they’re not at their labs, and there are so many different groups of people who respond to science differently because of the demographic group they belong to, because of their earlier exposure to science, because of their particular personal and cultural values.
W: Now you mentioned some alternative pedagogies that may help students to... to better interpret and evaluate the science that they may come across later in life. So tell me about those.
M:(2)So one cool thing which a group of education researchers has done in the past five years is engaging students in science journalism through a project called SciJourn, which employs a professional science journalist as an editor and has students not only investigating scientific topics that they find interesting but also thinking about how they would have to explain those scientific topics to other people who might have different interests than them. Another one that’s attracting a lot of attention these days is called problem-based learning.
W: Problem-based learning?
M: Yeah, it starts with a troubling question—a question that’s not neatly defined in scientific terms or in disciplinary terms.(3)Students have to work usually in a team to look for new information and develop an answer. That’s the kind of pedagogy which has proven enormously effective in medical schools. I think it has a really wide range of applications that we could take advantage of to help students learn to cross back and forth between the world of their daily experience and the world of science.
W:(3)And these all have something to do with one of your other priorities, which is cultivating appreciation for science.
M:(3)Absolutely. One of the things which -and this really gets me—we don’t really make room for students, especially, to develop the sort of deep, weird personal interests in topics that relate to science.
W: And what are some ways in which we can develop and cultivate that kind of interest in young students?
M: There are so many things that are going on right now in the world of public engagement with science. There are things like makerspaces, which are attracting a lot of attention. A makerspace is not necessarily going to lead you to science, but that kind of deep technical involvement in building things.
W; That sounds interesting.
M:(4)And there are also an increasing number of technological platforms for kids to learn about science, like Fold It or Galaxy Zoo. These games which scientists have come up with enable people who are not scientists to actually participate in the scientific process. Finding space to get that kind of project into schools is, I think, a high priority, and I think it’s something that would make science education more fun.
W: So what can scientists do in all of this? Is there a role that they can play in arming non-scientists with the skills that they may need?
M: Scientists may not know this, but they are actually quite influential in science education, both in schools and out. And there are some more general things that I think that scientists can do, and there are also some more specific ones.
W; What is the most general thing?
M: The most general thing is to be willing to question the way that we’ve always done things and to bring the same skepticism to our assumptions about science education. We have to be willing to change the balance and to let go of some of this stuff that we’ve always done in order to come up with the science education that is really going to be useful for future citizens.
W: And the more specific one?
M: Well,(5)don’t hide how science really works. When scientists write and talk about science, they don’t necessarily talk about how frustrating it can be, how careful you need to be to make sure that everything is as right as it can be, and how likely it is that that’s going to turn out to be wrong next year or not quite the right solution.
W: I hope that science education will become more attractive. Noah Feinstein, thank you so much.
M: Thanks so much.