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The traditional lecture format is the not the best method for teaching science. Again to draw an analogy with physical education, lectures are of limited use when the subject being taught is an activity.

The competitive model for science education, and for education in general, is poor training for how work is actually accomplished. Corporations compete, athletes compete, politicians compete, but the vast majority of working people have to cooperate if they want to get anything done.

Competitive grading systems discourage recreational interest. This is true in school athletic programs and it is also true for science classes. Just as students who get picked last for sports teams conclude athletics is not for them, students who fail to make the cut in science classes, conclude that they lack the "science gene," and should not even try to understand the subject.

Support for climate science doesn't increase with science literacy, a survey suggests. Rather, people with technical backgrounds just dig in harder on their views about global warming, finds the study in the Nature Climate Change journal.

What's going on? Basically people with technical smarts just use their abilities to better rationalize their already-held views. And why is that? Fitting in with your friends matters a lot more to people than getting climate science right, suggests Kahan, by email (see his Cultural Cognition website for more details):

Traditionally, science in the United States has been taught in isolated disciplines such as chemistry, biology and physics without clear connections being made between the subjects. The 8+1 effort encourages K-12 teachers to use the eight science concepts to build understanding within and between their courses as students advance through the grades.

Today's frontiers in science often occur at these disciplinary edges. Aided by the explosion in technology and scientific discoveries, new fields are arising that were hardly imagined a generation ago such as synthetic biology, digital organisms and genomics.

Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming’s eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it — a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria — and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory?”