Survey
In order to find out what humanities students think of science and their knowledge of key scientific concepts a survey was carried out that had four objectives:
- To trace their pre-university education in science.
- To establish the reasons why students had chosen to avoid science subjects at university.
- To get in insight in their attitudes and impressions towards science.
- To establish what the qualitative knowledge of six science key concepts among humanities students.
The survey was carried out among 300 undergraduate students at the University of Newcastle in the Schools of Historical Studies and Geography, Politics and Sociology and University of East Anglia in the School of History.
To establish the six most widely used scientific concepts in environmental history and humanities based environmental education in general a survey was conducted among colleagues working in the field of environmental history. This was done through the H-Environment discussion list and generated twenty two responses from colleagues in half a dozen countries. The answers were very consistent among the respondents and the six concepts used in the survey were based on these results to test the knowledge and understanding of these concepts.
This small survey resulted in an interesting and revealing list, which is shown below.
- Ecosystem dynamics
- Biological exchange
- Climate Change
- Greenhouse effect
- Evolution
- Gaia hypothesis
- Resource management
- Species history
- Malthusian population theory
- Exponential growth
- Deep time
- Radiocarbon decay (C14 method)
Most difficult to teach:
- Climate Change
- Gaia hypothesis
- Ecosystem dynamics
- Evolution (US only)
- Radiocarbon decay (C14 method)
- Exponential growth
Most of the concepts mentioned are not single scientific ideas such as Newton’s gravity laws. Instead they are all large overarching concepts that are descriptive and deal with change over time, such as evolution, climate change or eco-systems. This indicates that narrative and development over time are important, something historians are used to do. This is a far cry from Braudel’s almost motionless framework of the longue durée, in which nature and the physical world is the unchanging backdrop of history. This suggests that the one of the approaches that could be used to teach science in a humanities context is to use large overarching concepts that form narratives that describe change over time.
These cobnncepts were the basis of the knowledge part of the student survey.
Survey results
To gain an insight into the science background of the students I asked until what age they had studied the science subjects, maths, physics, chemistry, biology and the hybrid subject geography.
The result is summarised in the following graph:
At the age of 14-15 all students studied maths and at GCSE level, only one had dropped the subject.
By A-Level age 72% of the students had dropped maths; History 74% and Geography 75%.
By GCSE age only 4 students had dropped physics but at A-level age 80% had dropped the subject; in history 79% dropped it and in geography 87%. The latter is surprising since physical geography requires physics.
Chemistry only 2 had dropped this subject at age 16 but at A-levels age 79% had dropped it, comparable to maths and Physics. History 76% and geography 87% had dropped it. Again number of Geography students dropping it is surprisingly high.
12 students dropped biology at the age of 16.
At A-level age 63% has dropped it but the number of history students studying this subject at A-levels is quite high at 35% and for geography it is even higher at 44%.
Geography scores badly and is dropped to 76% of students at GCSE level. At A-level it drops further to 55%.
97% of the polled geography students did geography at A-level, compared to 33% of history students.
General conclusion is that of all humanities students at university level roughly a quarter to a third studied one or more science subjects at A-level. Biology is most popular amongst history students perhaps because it is not regarded as a hard science. One interesting question that remains is now these figures compare to those of two decades ago. Are more students combining science with humanities subjects at A-level?
Another question is why so many students drop science at A-level in favour of humanities subjects?
That was the subject of the next question of the survey: Why did you decide not to study a science subject?
Striking is that almost a fifth of students perceived science as difficult.
However, if you combine the responses that science is DULL, NOT Interesting and "Did not enjoy it" and "science does not allow discussion" the picture changes considerably. This was mentioned by almost 50% of the students. Analysis and conclusions will be provided in the summary section.
The next question was designed to gain an insight into how students value science and whether they think they will ever need it in their work or study.
Just over half of the students responded positively to this question: 53%.
Another 25% believed they would need it occasionally and less than 20% did not see the need of any science in their work.
Interestingly enough the majority of history students thought that the need of science in history is mainly to understand the role of science in society, e.g. the science of the scientific revolution.
Some students also commented that some science is needed for environmental history.
They added that in this case only a very basic understanding of science is needed for doing this.
In the second half of the survey students were confronted with a series of questions to test their knowledge of some key science concepts used in environmental history teaching.
Table 1: Knowledge of scientific concepts of humanities students at university level
Global warming and ecosystems are large concepts incorporating many other concepts, ideas and theories. Evolution is a large and rather complicated concept but students do here quite well. This suggests that this theory is well taught in schools and that the quality intensity of instruction as well as contemporary relevance matters.
The following concepts, CO2, time since last ice age and exponential growth are small singular concepts. The poor score of CO2 is probably related to the poor score on the question what global warming is. Deep time seems not a problem for students and this knowledge is for most readily available. Exponential growth is a numerical concept and more students struggle with this.
Conclusions based on this survey can be found in the project summary.