Chapter 27: A Model for Reform in Teaching Integrated Science: Promoting Scientific Literacy Among Undergraduate Non-Science Majors

Faculty members from the University of Idaho’s Colleges of Letters and Science and of Education joined in a cooperative effort to modify an existing interdisciplinary science course, INTER 103: Integrated Science for Elementary Education Majors. The course introduces students to the nature of science and scientific inquiry through the approaches of science, technology, and society, and of Earth system science. Classroom and field activities include developing data-gathering and interpretation skills, addressing alternative science conceptions (with remediation where necessary), and participating in an ongoing study of a local watershed. The course presents a progression of inquiry skills from scientific observation through experimentation. The students are involved in scientific research utilizing protocols developed by the GLOBE program, an environmental monitoring program to examine inputs into the earth system and the interactions surrounding the biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere (soils) around a watershed. Students must collect hydrology data, map the land cover at their study site, and use historical data to find changes over time. From the data, students in the course prepare scientific reports and participate in a scientific poster session. The goal is for the students to understand the process of doing science, improve inquiry skills, and promote scientific literacy. The course succeeds in employing strategies to help education students re-envision science as a “way of knowing” that involves an ongoing process of finetuning perception, evaluating evidence, refining insight, and continuously applying self-reflection as a means of gauging their own reactions to learning as it occurs in the classroom and in the field.