Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Teaching Source Criticism and Independent Investigation in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Author: James Sumner

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 10

Number: 2

Start page: 195

End page: 214

Return to vol. 10 no. 2 index page

Most of the groups teaching undergraduate history of science, technology and medicine (HSTM) in the UK offer some optional courses to students on science degree programmes. Often, such courses provide these students' only experience of humanities- style learning at university. Past work for the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies and its precursors has mapped various of the challenges involved in teaching history to students who may have no background in the field, and who do not expect or intend to pursue it further. This literature affirms that, while a minority of science students adapt readily to humanities norms, most struggle to understand the point of assumptions, values and skills radically different from what they are used to.1

Geoffrey Cantor's 2001 survey of this issue identifies the following as major stumbling blocks: managing heavy reading loads; notetaking; essay-writing; speaking in open-ended seminar discussions; and, more generally, interacting confidently with lecturers and peers familiar with humanities conventions. Yet Cantor also notes some common strengths of science students in the HSTM classroom. They are already familiar, of course, with the theory underpinning their own specialisms. More broadly, most scientific disciplines involve significant problem-solving at undergraduate level.2 Faced with a set of data and a well-defined exercise, science students may set to work more confidently than their humanities-based peers. Such confidence, however, is often built on the assumption that the problem has a definite solution, which is by no means always the case in historical research.

This paper focuses on what I identify as a further problem area: source criticism and investigation, as applied both to primary and to secondary sources. This overlaps with all of Cantor's categories, but is worth addressing in its own right, not least because a careful definition of the problem takes us some way towards its solution. Typically, science students who perform poorly at historical investigation are not merely floundering: they are consciously applying received understandings which lead them astray. I describe a series of classroom exercises which I use to anticipate, and as far as possible to head off, these difficulties. These exercises respond to the established strengths of their audience, as identified by Cantor: they are mostly disciplinespecific, and take as their starting point a carefully specified problem or enquiry, which may be gradually broadened out towards the conventional historical pattern.

The problem

Undergraduate history teaching and assessment is commonly rooted in a set of understandings along the lines of the following:

These norms closely represent real-life scholarly research practice. The typical undergraduate on a dedicated history programme will soon come to know them: indeed, they are often made explicit through essay skills training or taught courses on historiography. Science students encountering HSTM, however, typically have no such background to draw on. All too often—perhaps proceeding from recollections of school history, or from simple received opinion— they base their research and writing on a series of false assumptions:

The results will be familiar to anyone who has assessed regularly: lack of analysis and focus, extensive but pointless parroting, eccentric performances based on inappropriate literature, the unpleasant duty of assigning poor or mediocre grades to students who have worked hard, and the recriminations that occasionally result.

In what follows, I focus entirely on how to resolve this tension by bringing the students' expectations into line with the assessors'. I should therefore explain why I do not consider the alternative approach of adapting the assessment criteria. We should be self-aware enough to consider the possibility that the students' prior expectations represent productive norms of science teaching, and that these might offer lessons for humanities practice. Most science educators who have considered the question, however, agree that this is not the case.

Current science education literature stresses the importance of critical interpretation, argument and authorship, and this for the most practical of reasons: professional scientists need to comprehend changing currents in the science around them, make value-judgments and practical decisions concerning their work's influence on the world, and adequately discuss their positions with non-scientists.3 'Learning from writing' has long been part of the toolkit used in encouraging more nuanced grasp of scientific authority.4 Similarly, though most science degree programmes use textbooks, researchers usually want to make sure their students can operate beyond the walled garden; and a text which is accepted as an introduction to the discipline's internal knowledge may nonetheless be faulted for giving sterile, improbable and off-putting account of how that knowledge is developed.5

One useful study on critical thinking in undergraduate science— addressing connections not with the humanities, but with the workplace —focuses on the nature of problem-solving tasks.6 Conventionally, these tend mostly to be 'closed': each has the clearly defined goal of a distinct answer which is obtainable from given data. Such exercises may be useful in teaching course content, and help to reassure students that they are working along the right lines, but a rounded education must involve strategies for coping in situations where no single approach is clearly suggested by the circumstances of the problem – as tends to be the case in real life.

Although all of these problems may be addressed in various ways, there is strong support for the use of historical case studies and historians' methodologies, often drawing on professional HSTM scholarship. 7 This view is not general, of course: it is opposed, as Graeme Gooday has pointed out, by those science programme directors who 'quietly advise their undergraduates that studying history of science would be an unhelpful distraction.'8 To the extent that we are encouraged to recruit science students, however, we can be reassured that, in disrupting their expectations, we are not disrupting science teaching. Indeed, I have tried to show how the cases outlined below draw on the students' existing scientific awareness, and contribute to extending it.

The audiences

Most of the work described below originally appeared in a skills training course I developed for University of Manchester Faculty of Life Sciences undergraduates taking final-year dissertation projects in HSTM. We supervise 20 to 30 such students each year, all of whom have a strongly biological or biomedical background. Students' prior exposure to HSTM concepts varies, but most have taken only one or two option modules; a few have no undergraduate-level humanities experience at all. The project is a major element of assessment. It may be up to 12,000 words long, and counts for one third of the credit for the student's final year, which is the chief determinant of degree classification. The students therefore need extensive student support, both from individual supervisors and centrally, to negotiate unfamiliar techniques of source- and time-management.

In 2007-08, my colleagues and I benefited from a grant from the University's Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning to develop a skills training course to prepare students for the task of independent research.9 We found that exercises promoted under the banner of 'enquiry-based learning' in the humanities—with their emphasis on critical reading, independent research, and realistic communication formats—already corresponded quite closely with the taken-forgranted goals of the final-year project itself.10 My approach, therefore, was to bring the students up to speed through a series of small, selfcontained research exercises. The initial exercises contained elements which were reassuringly 'closed' and clear-cut, yet were also designed to provoke questions about the origins and credibility of source material. Later exercises were progressively less artificial, leading towards the much more 'open' practice of scholarly research. I draw further examples from my past and current optional courses surveying the history of technology in general, and of information technology in particular; students on these courses represent a range of backgrounds, with computer science, physics and the life sciences prominent. All such students have specialist data-handling skills particular to their core disciplines: they have often brought them to bear on the exercises in unexpected ways, and I have steered the discussion (and sometimes reworked the exercises) to examine the overlaps with, and differences from, the source-handling skills we are looking for.

Much of the work discussed here was not conceived as part of any formal research project, and I have not carried out detailed evaluation. The results, therefore, are impressionistic, though I have recorded as far as possible both the general tone of student responses and the most interesting of the isolated responses. My main purpose in writing is to encourage colleagues in similar situations to experiment along similar lines, and to share the evidence of their own experience.

Why I lie to students

'Discrepant events', as Michael Clough once put it, 'are powerful tools for initiating a sense of uneasiness with prior ideas.'11 Clough's concern was with students' received assumptions about how science works; mine is with the somewhat related question of source authority. The first item on the final-year project training course, once the orientation and housekeeping announcements are out of the way, is contrived purely to establish a distinct sense of unease.

Announcing that the class is going to discuss a case study in source criticism, I present a photograph of a man of nineteenth-century gentlemanly appearance. This, I explain, is Michael Sapway Millar, an influential Edinburgh zoologist best known for his influential taxonomic innovations. Most famously, Millar's Alphabetic Taxonomy (1870) synthesised post-Lamarckian transmutationalist currents with moves by contemporary philologists to capture the lexicon of English. Millar argued, I continue, that the development of species must have followed the alphabetical sequence: the aardvark, therefore, must be the elemental form of life, corresponding to the protozoon or monad of other systems. On the Millarian scheme, development progressed linearly through the other South African fauna with 'aa-' beginnings: the theory was not without controversy, as it made the aasvogel, a bird, an immediate descendant of the mammalian aardwolf. Contemporaries such as Thomas Henry Huxley were only provoked into public protest, however, when Millar insisted on continuing the evolutionary sequence with the abacus.

This narrative usually causes mild but increasing unrest or nervousness among the students. (Delivered in lecture format, it has never raised an unprompted challenge: it would be interesting to see what response the tale provoked in seminar discussion.) Following the abacus revelation, I break off and appeal for questions or comments. Typically, one of the more confident students will ask why contemporaries believed the story, or whether it is true. I confess immediately that it is a tissue of falsehoods from beginning to end, invariably to the students' great relief.

I then ask them to explain why they remained unconvinced by the story, when I—as lecturer, supposedly an officially sanctioned dispenser of facts—showed every possible appearance of sincerity about it. The most immediate answer is often that the story is merely ridiculous: I clarify that this is a good illustration of a gut response, yet is merely a restatement of the problem. Some students may suggest that Millar could not have promoted the theory because the theory itself is wrong: opening this up to the group, however, generally results in other students pointing out the fallacy in this reasoning.

In the course of a few minutes' whole-group discussion, more analytical answers invariably start to emerge. Students may, for instance,

  1. argue that the story should be discredited because it is alarmingly dissimilar to familiar accounts of genuine theories and systems
  2. take the empathy approach, trying to imagine in practical terms the outcome of Millar's intervention, concluding that other naturalists could not possibly have been as charitable as I suggest
  3. point out that the tale has the conventional form of a parody: since this assumption accounts neatly for all the appearances, there is no necessary reason to favour any other assumption.

Response (a) is the commonest. It allows discussion of the important point that all of us routinely assess the value of assertions relative to our own expertise, often without being aware of doing so: the trick is simply to stop suspending the faculty whenever an 'authority' makes a pronouncement, on paper or in person. Response (b) tends to come from students with some prior historical sensibility or training, whom I encourage to articulate it clearly for the benefit of those who do not. Response (c), if offered, can be invoked here as one illustration of how knowledge which might seem to have nothing to do with the enquiry can still be productive. None of these responses, of course, is straightforwardly satisfactory in general terms. Prompted to vent their frustrations, some students counter that they simply don't know how nineteenth- century naturalists thought or behaved, whereas I (presumably) do. This is the springboard for a discussion of external corroboration, which is a recurring theme across the skills course.

Given the ever-growing tendency for students to bring networked laptops and handheld devices into class, I am surprised that nobody, to date, has tried to dispel the uncertainty by running searches on the terms and concepts discussed. Were I able to run this exercise with a class of computer science students, experience suggests that several would investigate unhesitatingly and relentlessly until they achieved a concrete result (perhaps reporting that, while the phrase 'alphabetic taxonomy' has been variously used, no book of that title was published in any year by anyone). The successful resolution of the question, however, should not be presented as bringing an end to the discussion. In the following sections, I discuss how coverage may be broadened out to address the situations students will encounter in actual research practice.

Interrogating authorship

Anyone planning anything as perverse as the Michael Sapway Millar exercise should be cautious on two points. The first is that the students must not mistake it for a counsel of despair. Although sources are not automatically authoritative, we must emphasise that valid authority nevertheless exists, and that it's within the students' power to identify, and even to build it. An obvious corrective is to talk through a short and accessible piece of scholarly literature, asking how and why we know the case is watertight—perhaps following up a few supporting references or external corroborations online, or in books brought along for the purpose. You might begin by doing this with an influential paper in the students' own scientific discipline, whose content they can readily interpret: then, in a following session, do the same for a historical paper.

The second concern is to prevent students thinking the Millar case is too artificial to be relevant to serious work. Who, outside the context of a training exercise, would ever go to the trouble of passing off an entirely invented scientific figure as real? I take care to establish that this was, in some historical situations, common practice. Witness this title page from an elementary chemistry textbook of 1810: The students are given the apparently trivial task of identifying the book's author. Post-Millar, they are typically guarded, as well they might be. The Grammar was in fact one of a stream of works compiled, with varying degrees of originality, by the publisher Richard Phillips and his assorted hired hacks. As an outspoken Radical, and a wellknown figure with no obvious chemical credentials, Phillips would not have helped sales by putting his own name on the work. 'The Rev. David Blair', therefore, was one of a clutch of respectable-sounding clergymen whose identities Phillips borrowed or created to fit the part. (Phillips was also Miss Pelham, Monsieur l'abbé Bossut, and so forth, as the occasion demanded.)12

Again, it is important not to lead the students to abandon hope. Though the title page does not tell the truth, as we would define it, on a point where we would hope it to be authoritative, it remains a vitally important clue. It points us to David Blair, whom we cannot trace; but it also points us to Phillips, whom we can. Dogged exploration of the available avenues, in the light of wider reading on early nineteenthcentury literary practices, does lead to an accurate understanding of the book's authorship.

This focus on questions of authorship is a useful basis for wider considerations of the plural and changing conventions of scientific literature. When running this exercise with biology students, I compare Phillips' title page with the first page of a recent biological paper, usually one co-written by a biologist colleague whom the students know as a lecturer. Such papers usually list around half a dozen coauthors. Asked 'who wrote this?', students readily explain the name ordering convention of the field: principal author at the front; lab head or grant-holder at the end; lesser contributors in the middle. The principal author may be entirely responsible for the text, and it is probable that some of the 'co-authors' did not literally generate a word of it. Is the paper, then, another fraud? Of course not, the students quite reasonably reply: to claim this would be to misunderstand the conventions involved. I normally move from here to discuss the valid, yet incompatible concepts of authorship which exist in different disciplines. Some scientific fields place the 'lab head' first in the list; others identify no such role, often for the very good reason that they do not possess a lab group structure.13 Pure mathematics is strongly committed to purely alphabetical ordering—not on Millarian grounds, but because mathematicians value it as a stable basis for cooperation. And what are we to make of recent papers from the CERN ATLAS collaboration, which each identify around 3000 named authors?14

By analogy with this broader contemporary picture, nineteenthcentury publication—a frequent focus for dissertation projects—can be introduced in terms of its unfamiliar, yet ultimately comprehensible peculiarities. Joseph Lister, to take one example among thousands, is formally identified as the sole author of his iconic work on antisepsis. 15 Was Lister merely a towering lone genius (of a kind which, it seems, no longer exists), or did he too have some help? If so, who were his helpers, and where, if not on the title page, might we find them? Most HSTM practitioners are familiar with the literature on such questions, and this is precisely the kind of issue on which individual supervisors on the final-year projects issue guidance.16

Getting students to consider the conventionality of declared authorship may also lead onto discussion of the scientific paper more generally. Do the context-free stream of 'results' and wholly separate 'discussion', leading miraculously to the desired outcome, add up to 'a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought'? This, of course, was the view promoted not by any postmodern upstart, but by the Nobel-laureate immunologist, Peter Medawar.17

Most practising scientists would accept that the best means of representing the idea itself may give a very poor representation of the history of the idea. Asked what else would useful for a more rounded reconstruction, students can usually offer appropriate answers: drafts, diaries, letters, invoices, sheets of barely processed data.

Learning history through source criticism

A more structured exercise based on these principles appears near the beginning of my second-year undergraduate course on the history of information technology. The class (varying from 15 to 30 students) is divided into small groups, each of which is given the same set of eight short published documents. Each document describes a piece of computer technology, or computing machines in general, for a nonexpert audience. The sources include a newspaper Sunday supplement, a home computer magazine, a humorous anthology and a programming guide for children, and vary in date from 1864 to the early 2000s. This contextual information is erased, however, and the groups are directed to answer, as best they can, the following questions:

  1. When was this document created?
  2. Where was it published? (eg: in a popular magazine, a specialist newsletter…)
  3. What kind of audience was it created for?
  4. What kind of person might have created it?
  5. What does it tell you about the way 'the computer' was perceived at that time and in that situation?

Students from all backgrounds engage readily with question (a), which invites answers of a definite form. This has the advantage of offering a shared premise for debate: when different groups' answers diverge widely, it is easy to get them to reveal the approaches they used to justify them. These may refer to the internal evidence of the text, the nature of the computers described, the tone of the English, and the typography of the material. Discussion can be directed according to the lecturer's priorities. Only a small minority of students, for instance, dated an extract from a reprint of Charles Babbage's 1864 autobiography any earlier than the 1920s.18 Was Babbage really 'ahead of his time', or did he lay down the model for subsequent explanations—or do some elements of fundamental description simply tend to be relatively static?

The succeeding questions are progressively more 'open', inviting longer and more reflective responses. Question (b), for instance, generates many clear-cut answers, but students often suspect (rightly) that some of the publications belong to genres they are not familiar with, and which may no longer exist. Question (e) is probably at the limit of what can practically be considered in seminar discussion. It requires integrated examination of the text's internal evidence, the form of the publication, and any available external cues as to the context of authorship. Having been led through the preceding questions, however, students often find that they can contribute, and thereby examine changes in perceptions and promotion of computer technology—a central course theme—for themselves.

I did, however, add one thoroughly artificial complication to the exercise. Students were warned at the outset that one of the eight sources was 'fake', and did not 'come from the period or situation suggested'. This item was supposedly a 1954 RAND Corporation mockup of how a home computer might look like in 2004—in reality, a photo-manipulated image produced in that year.19 The aim, again, was to discourage assumptions of inbuilt authority, while sparking interest among habitual problem-solvers and offering another spur to discussion. This part of the exercise continues to generate interesting responses. Some students, as in the Millar case, correctly interpret the image as a parody, while others question the informal language of the text. One recent student stared intently at the image before pronouncing that it had 'clearly been shopped' (manipulated using the Photoshop package). Such responses usefully demonstrate that critical enquiry depends on a wide range of tools.

This class also served to prepare students for a source interpretation exercise I set later in the course to tie in with lecture content on the Turing Test, Alan Turing's operational definition of machine intelligence in terms of the ability to mimic human conversation. Students were first shown a photocopy of a 2004 New Scientist story describing a piece of software devised to trap 'paedophiles attempting to "groom" children in internet chatrooms', using an sophisticated artificial textgenerator to pose as a child and monitor the responses for 'suspicious activity.'20

I began, as before, with an easily specified task. The report features a sample of 'very convincing' dialogue between two individuals, A and B, inviting the reader to guess which is the artificial intelligence, and which the human. Asking the class to do likewise usually resulted in controversy: some students claimed to see unmistakeably human-generated responses in A's conversation, others in B's. I then split the students up into small groups and asked them to comment on selections from a range of documents published in response to the New Scientist report. These included personal blogs with comments by various contributors, a column by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, an entry from the Museum of Hoaxes website, and a follow-up story in the New Scientist.21 This process led us to the following instructive questions:

Developing source criticism more broadly

The preceding sections show how cases of deliberate deception can prepare the way for addressing more subtle, and more commonplace complications. It would be easy to set up a great many case studies involving authors who serve partisan aims in their selection of evidence, framing of questions, and use of language. It is important, however, that students do not start to see particular sources as inherently 'good' or 'bad', as though they were passively consumed rather than operated on by the researcher. In the dissertation skills classes, the focus is on whether the use to which a particular source is put is valid or invalid. I therefore discuss a number of situations where a potentially useful source may mislead the reader quite unintentionally. Any experienced researcher should be able to offer concrete examples relevant to the students' research activities. There is, for instance, John Marshall's famous warning to the oral historian. 'At what age did you leave school?', asks the interviewer of a former Blackburn millworker. Fourteen, comes the simple response. On a naïve analysis, fourteen is therefore the age at which Lancashire schoolgirls went out to work. In reality, the subject has been a 'halftimer', moving between schoolroom and loom-shed, from a much earlier age, 'like hundreds of thousands of Lancastrians of her generation.' It is precisely because the arrangement was commonplace that she did not point it out.22 In this case, closer examination of the source will not help: greater contextual awareness is needed to dodge the trap.

Changing terminology offers a particularly rich seam of warnings of the need to read in context. A neat, if trivial example crops up in Andrew Ure's correspondence for 1822, in which the chemist Edward Daniel Clarke mentions the 'gas which you collected from Plutonium.'23 Clarke's preferred term for the element others called barium never caught on, eventually finding a very different use in 1940. Some students will be similarly jolted to find David Brewster, in the mid-nineteenth century, stating that John Flamsteed, in the mid-seventeenth, was unable 'to pay the expenses of a computer for reducing his observations.'24 What Flamsteed lacked, of course, was not a Linux box running Mathematica, but a hired man to do his arithmetical drudge-work. Untangling this confusion yields historical insight: the expectations which clients had of their human computers informed those which eventually surrounded machines.25 Similar mileage can be had from the literature on such mutable terms as energy, Newtonianism and infectious disease—and, of course, philosophy, science, scientific and scientist.26

The next step is to consider that the sources used may be utterly guileless, representative and comprehensible, yet will still misdirect the enquiry if they are irrelevant, or insufficiently relevant, or even suboptimally relevant. Throughout the dissertation project, we emphasise that good time management is crucial, and depends significantly on source criticism: students must prioritise finding and consulting the information which seems most likely to be productive, and must change course rapidly when sources turn out to be less useful than expected. It is difficult to construct particularly sharp and memorable exemplars for this point. It is straightforward, however, to assemble a selection of sources which all sincerely address a shared topic, some of which, for any given research question, are more immediately useful than others.

Thus, I proceed by degrees from a deliberately 'closed' and artificial exercise towards the awkward overlaps, contingencies and practical limitations of real-life research. To deal with these, the students must, of course, be equipped with significant new research skills. An approach to these is covered in the final section.

A semi-closed exercise in source criticism

I end the Millar exercise with a reassurance that I am going to clear up the real history of nineteenth-century taxonomy. Redisplaying the 'Michael Sapway Millar' portrait, I explain that it actually does depict a nineteenth-century taxonomist, William Sharp Macleay (1792-1865). I briefly survey Macleay's context and activities, highlighting his promotion of the quinarian system, with its neat hierarchy of sets of five taxa. I then break off, much as before, and ask the students whether they find this story convincing: to date, no student in any group has reported doubts about it. I then, of course, point out that I have recently affirmed myself to be a desperately unreliable source. For all they know to the contrary, Macleay might be another invention; the quinarian system appears less far-fetched than alphabetic taxonomy, but still runs contrary to core understandings of present-day life science. Discussion therefore moves on to how my new story might be checked. The students tend to suggest recourse to online searching, published biographies, encyclopaedias or textbooks, but are consistently unfamiliar with particular resources such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. At the end of the class, they are provided with an annotated list of such resources, and an exercise to complete for the following week. Given twenty factual claims about Macleay, said to be the work of 'an unreliable source', they are asked to determine which are correct.

This might be called a 'semi-closed' exercise. It is designed to have a definite outcome in the series of true/false answers, which the students are encouraged to discuss among themselves. (In keeping with the exercise's progression from obvious artifice towards realistic simulation, most of the claims are in fact perfectly valid; a few display inaccuracies of a kind that could plausibly arise through carelessness.) Yet they are also directed to make a note of the sources used, the order in which they approach them, the time taken, and any problems encountered: the aim is to get accurate answers efficiently.

The follow-up discussion session, in fact, dispenses with the answers almost completely, focusing on the 'open' question of how best to approach the research. Topics which have come up in the past include the limitations of googling, the use of library catalogues, the exact situations where full-text searching is useful, the value of skimming a broad overview before looking at more detailed sources, and the usefulness of research record-keeping itself. By policy, when setting such tasks for students, I perform them myself. The result is never particularly authentic, because, of course, I design the exercises to have workable solutions and know what they are; but the process gives me some sense of how far the students might get within the time limit, and where further guidance might be useful. After the students had completed the Macleay task, I encouraged them to compare their results with my own—or rather, with what I was careful to admit was a heavily polished version of my research notes. I typed these up, preserving the order of the investigation, but adding text to clarify the thought processes and make the references traceable, with hyperlinks to the online finding aids. An introductory note stresses that mine is not the only solution, and that others might be better. With the aid of the free screen recording package CamStudio (camstudio.org), I was able to take this a stage further, producing a video of the computer-based parts of the investigation with commentary. This was an instructive experience: simply setting the recorder going and working as normal resulted in unwatchably tedious footage. Again, it was necessary to simulate. Using my research notes as an outline script, I worked through the exercise with one finger on the key that paused and unpaused the recording, adding material only when I had something coherent to do or say. The result was a useful example of the use of, for instance, Web of Knowledge and the HistSciTechMed database (now bundled into FirstSearch in a particularly inconvenient fashion). One complication was that, in real-life research, the most efficient research path often takes the researcher away from the screen: the audio commentary is full of references to the need to visit the library or check the access arrangements for remote documents.

The lessons of these group-based classes are followed up, on a one-to-one basis, by the students' dissertation supervisors in the context of the specific research tasks involved. Supervisors have generally reported that the exercises are helpful; the comments we have received from students, though rather infrequent, are likewise entirely positive, usually focusing on the breadth of skills acquired, the flexibility of the approach, and the 'real-world' nature of the enquiry. It is worth noting that there is inevitable selection bias here: students who undertake a final-year HSTM project do so at their own request. The acid test would be to apply the approach to a required course on a science programme. The abovementioned literature on science education, however, leaves me hopeful that this would be productive.

Endnotes

  1. Gooday, Graeme, 'The Challenges of Teaching History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine to 'Science' Students,' HEA Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies , 2007.
  2. Cantor, Geoffrey, 'Teaching Philosophy and HPS to Science Students', PRS-LTSN Journal 1:1 (2001), pp.14-24.
  3. Newton, Paul et al., 'The Place of Argumentation in the Pedagogy of School Science', International Journal of Science Education 21:5 (1999), pp. 553-576. Argumentation, broadly considered, has emerged as a key theme in science educationalists' literature: see Erduran, Sibel and Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre, María, (eds.) Argumentation in Science Education, (London: Springer, 2008).
  4. Prain, Vaughan, 'Learning from Writing in Secondary Science: Some Theoretical and Practical Implications', International Journal of Science Education 28 (2006), pp. 179-201.
  5. Allchin, Douglas, 'Scientific Myth-conceptions', Science Education 87:3 (2003), pp. 329-351; and see the literature reviewed in Michael Clough, 'The Story behind the Science: Bringing Science and Scientists to Life in Post-secondary Science Education', Science and Education, 2010, published online: doi 10.1007/s11191- 010-9310-7.
  6. Hager, Paul et al., 'Teaching Critical Thinking in Undergraduate Science Courses', Science and Education 12 (2003), pp. 303-313.
  7. Variations on this approach are regularly outlined by contributors to journals including Science Education, Science and Education and the International Journal of Science Education. A good starting point is the themed collection, edited by Michael Clough and Joanne Olson, on teaching the 'nature of science': Science and Education 17:2-3 (2008). For the historical background to these approaches, see Matthews, Michael, Science Teaching: the Role of History and Philosophy of Science, (London: Routledge 1994).
  8. Gooday, Graeme, 'U-rated, not X-rated: Reassessing how Science Students could Benefit from Learning History of Science', PRS-LTSN, 2003.
  9. Sumner, James et al., 'Critical Project Development Skills in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine', in Case Studies: CEEBL-Supported Projects 2007-2008, (Manchester: University of Manchester 2008), pp. 81-91.
  10. Hutchings, Bill, 'Designing an Enquiry-based Learning Course', CEEBL, 2006. Online at: http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/guides/ceeblgr001.pdf.
  11. Clough, Michael, 'Strategies and Activities for Initiating and Maintaining Pressure on Students' Naïve Views Concerning the Nature of Science', Interchange 28:2-3 (1997), pp. 191-204.
  12. Kinnell, Margaret, 'Sceptreless, Free, Uncircumscribed? Radicalism, Dissent and Early Children's Books', British Journal of Educational Studies 36:1 (1988), pp. 49-71.
  13. The existence of variations in acknowledgment and authorial ordering conventions seems often to come as a surprise to monodisciplinary researchers, and causes much frustration to those working between disciplines. It is occasionally discussed in the most general of scientific journals: 'Games People Play with Authors' Names', Nature 387 (26 June 1997), p. 831; Pearson, Helen, 'Credit where Credit's Due', Nature 440 (30 March 2006), pp. 591-592.
  14. For instance, Aad, G. et al., 'Observation of a Centrality-dependent Dijet Asymmetry in Lead-lead Collisions at sqrt[S(NN)] =2.76 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC', Physical Review Letters 105:25 (2010), 252303. This paper's PubMed entry lists each author individually: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21231581, accessed 27 April 2011.
  15. Lister, Joseph, 'On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery', Lancet 2 (1867), pp. 353-356.
  16. Shapin, Steven, 'The Invisible Technician', American Scientist 77 (1989), pp. 554-563; Russell, Nicholas et al., 'Missing Links in the History and Practice of Science: Teams, Technicians and Technical Work', History of Science 38 (2000), pp. 237-241.
  17. Medawar, Peter, 'Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?', 1963; collected in, for instance, The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 33-39.
  18. The text in question is Babbage, Charles, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, (1864), reprinted (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1991), p.30, passage running 'Calculating machines comprise … fulfilling this condition.'.
  19. The image was created by the fark.com user Troels Eklund Andersen ('lukket') in September 2004, and is preserved at http://www.fark.com/comments/1115586/Photoshop-this-mock-up-of-a-submarines-maneuvering-Room.
  20. 'Software agent targets chatroom paedophiles', New Scientist, 20 March 2004, 23.
  21. John Leyden, 'Software hunts for Net paedos', The Register, 18 March 2004, online at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/18/software_hunts_for_net_paedos/; Michael Williams, "Unbelievable ChatNannies", 18 March 2004, online at http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2004/03/unbelievable-chatnannies.php; Cameron Marlow, "My chat with a Nanniebot", 22 March 2004, online at http://overstated.net/2004/03/22/my-chat-with-a-nanniebot; Andy Baio, 'Nanniebots: hoax, fraud or delusion?', 23 March 2004, online at http://waxy.org/2004/03/nanniebots_hoax/; Ben Goldacre, '"Nanniebots" to catch paedophiles', Guardian, 25 March 2004, online at http://www.badscience.net/2004/03/nanniebots-to-catch-paedophiles/; John Leyden, 'Paedo-stalking ChatNannies: fact or fiction?', The Register, 25 March 2004, online at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/25/paedostalking_chatnanniesfact_or_fiction/; Museum of Hoaxes, 'ChatNannies last all summer long', 25 March 2004, online at http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/chatnannies/; 'Chatnannies' AI credentials still on hold', New Scientist, 16 June 2004, 23.
  22. Marshall, John, 'The Sense of Place, Past Society and the Oral Historian', Oral History, 3:1 (1975), pp.19-25, on 21.
  23. Quoted in Farrar, Wilfred Vernon, 'Andrew Ure, FRS, and the Philosophy of Manufactures', Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 27 (1973), pp.299-324, on 305.
  24. Brewster, David, Memoirs of the Life… of Sir Isaac Newton, (1855), ii: 162.
  25. Grier, David Alan, When Computers Were Human, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
  26. For instance: Harman, Peter, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Schaffer, Simon, 'Newtonianism', in Olby, Robert et al, (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science, (London: Routledge, 1990) pp.610- 626; Condrau, Flurin and Worboys, Michael, 'Epidemics and Infections in Nineteenth-century Britain', Social History of Medicine 20:1 (2007), pp.147-158; Cunningham, Andrew, 'Getting the Game Right: some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988), pp.365-389; Yeo, Richard, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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