ABSTRACT
Just over a decade ago, I published an article entitled “Bringing in the outsiders: Reshaping the sciences of the future” (Brickhouse, 1994). In the article I argued that to “bring in the outsiders,” we needed to change the science curriculum as well as our pedagogies. Rather than locating the problem of nonparticipation as one internal to the learner, we needed to understand the problem as located inside the science curriculum. The change that I argued for is consistent with a shift in scientific literacy from Vision I to Vision II developed in this volume by Roberts (Chapter 2). This argument was speculative. The nature of the research on gender and science education done at that time could not provide support or challenge for such a claim. At that time, to study gender differences in science education, researchers primarily relied on data on achievement in science, attitudes toward science, enrollment in science courses and degree programs, and participation in the profession. The achievement and attitudinal data were typically used to predict or explain patterns of enrollment and participation in the profession. Research on cognitive style and ability were also at times used to explain differences in achievement. There were studies of the impact of programs designed to improve the retention of women and minorities in science. Generally speaking, these interventions were very modest attempts to provide more inclusive role models and to better connect science with the interests of girls and minorities. The results were as modest as the interventions. The focus of this early research on gender was on Vision I scientific literacy. At a time when women were entering the labor market in large numbers, the slow integration of women into the scientific workforce was a major concern. There was very little theorizing regarding the nature of the science curriculum and whether the unequal participation of both genders was related to the vision of scientific literacy embedded in the curriculum. In the 1994 paper, I argued that explaining nonparticipators as cognitively unable or as disinterested was unproductive. More generally, the problem should not be conceptualized as internal to the student. Instead we should focus on the science curriculum and the system of schooling and how it might change to make science more inviting to those currently marginalized. I believed that making the
science curriculum better connected to students’ ideas and focusing on developing their ideas toward more scientific understandings would be motivating for girls and members of minority groups. If we focused less on having students repeat the ideas of the experts and more on developing students’ ideas in ways that made sense to them, then we could make science more inviting to a broader range of students. In this regard, my early view might be regarded as similar to Vision I scientific literacy. However, I also argued in this paper that situating science in real world problems and developing science instruction so that it is oriented toward developing students’ abilities to act responsibly and intelligently to real problems of significance may be more appealing to girls and minorities than Vision I. Since 1994, there have been some remarkable continuities as well as significant changes with regards to women and minority participation in the scientific profession. With regard to inequities by race and social class in the United States, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 2005) scores suggest very modest improvements. Gender differences favoring boys on NAEP scores in science were small a decade ago and are still small. These small sex differences in achievement do not explain much larger differences in participation in professional science occupations. For example, in the United States in 2006, women represented only 17% of the freshmen engineering majors-a percentage that has actually declined from 20% in 1996 (Engineering Workforce Commission, 2007). The extent to which the sciences have successfully attracted a diverse group of scientists is highly variable by discipline. For example, women now earn more biology degrees than men, whereas in computer science and in engineering, little or no progress has been made in the past decade (National Science Foundation, 2007). The metaphor of a leaky pipeline has often been used to describe the loss of talent from science. Seymour and Hewitt (1997) found that when comparing university men and women at the same achievement level, women were more likely to leave the sciences than men. However, Xie and Shauman (2003) have challenged the pipeline metaphor by showing how women actually enter the pipeline at a variety of stages in their lives. They also challenge the claim that mathematics serves as a critical filter for girls and women in the sciences. This turns out not to be nearly as critical as has often been assumed. The way in which gender and science is researched has changed considerably in the past decade. While analyses of achievement and participation in scientific education and its professions continues to be an important strand of equity research in science education, there are also new theoretical understandings of identity that have influenced our understandings of how science is made accessible to some and not others. Sociocultural research also provides a powerful lens for examining how different visions of scientific literacy may or may not influence who engages in its practices because these studies frequently interrogate the nature of the science curriculum as well as the nature of student participation in it.
