General college science courses need overhaul

The National Climate Assessment that was released in April gives me and some of my colleagues nightmares.

Every state requires highschool students to take several science courses before they graduate. Most American colleges and universities also have general science education requirements for graduation.

I have helped shape some of Ohio’s high-school biology content standards, and I teach college generaleducation biology courses. Curriculum planners justify these required courses as a way to prepare students for jobs and careers.

We also justify these courses as preparing students to become scientifically literate citizens — the target audience of the National Climate Assessment.

Comparing the content and approach of many required science courses and the climate assessment’s information scares me.

Major governmental and private scientific groups have called for reforms in how and what we teach in general science courses. These reforms should lead to changes in science courses.

These changes should better prepare students to understand and respond to reports such as the climate assessment. Yet, many science courses fall far short of this goal.

No wonder climate deniers can delay and often stop adoption of public policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the impacts of the climate changes.

The climate assessment describes how those impacts already have begun. Current high levels of greenhouse gases and their rates of emissions guarantee those impacts will intensify.

Students often graduate knowing the terms of science without understanding the scientific processes of inquiry and hypothesis testing. Those processes depend on objectivity and peer review. They generate data, not red herrings.

Scientific processes rarely gain immediate consensus. They provide, however, new insights and useful applications.

Copernicus’ works on the central position of the sun in our solar system immediately permitted a 16th-century ship to navigate the Mediterranean more safely and quickly. However, church officials denied heliocentrism for a century longer.

Alfred Wegener’s peers derided his ideas of plate tectonics for four decades after he proposed them in 1912. Today, his ideas help identify areas prone to earthquakes.

The biotech industry has embraced molecular genetics with great success and profit. Yet scientists debated the molecular basis of the gene and refused to accept the essential role of DNA for 50 years.

All of these discoveries had doubters and deniers, yet all of them persisted because the processes of science and the data they generated supported them.

The National Climate Assessment also summarizes and presents a growing body of data that supports its major conclusions and calls for action. Increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, caused by burning fossil fuels and deforestation, are causing climate changes obvious around the world today.

The assessment is everything that many general science courses are not. It’s synthetic and relevant.

The assessment ignores traditional academic boundaries that often constrain the scope of general science courses. It requires readers to evaluate the implications of statistical analyses and mathematical models.

It has no formal tests, yet the stakes of getting it right are high.

We have more research into the causes and impacts of climate change than we have into effective methods to help students understand reports about it.

Steve Rissing is a biology professor at Ohio State University.