Making Biology Meaningful: Nature of Science Matters

As another school year begins, we often reflect on what we teach and why we teach it. Students are eager to engage in learning, but they often find the typical content irrelevant. Even skilled instructors with buoyant enthusiasm may fail to inspire them. However, students respond to authentic challenges. They readily invest effort in learning about real, substantive issues related to personal and public decision-making, often characterized as central to scientific literacy. Such cases typically revolve around understanding not just scientific concepts, but how science works. They are gateways into learning about the nature of science, or NOS. First, survey the news. What is going on that matters to a better society, to our daily lives, and to students? Here is a sample list of topics rich with NOS potential from just one week (from the March 29 issue of Science magazine):