Science is more than a body of knowledge and a way of accumulating and validating that knowledge. It is also a social activity that incorporates certain human values. Holding curiosity, creativity, imagination, and beauty in high esteem is certainly not confined to science, mathematics, and engineering—any more than skepticism and a distaste for dogmatism are. However, they are all highly characteristic of the scientific endeavor. In learning science, students should encounter such values as part of their experience, not as empty claims. This suggests that teachers should strive to do the following:

Welcome Curiosity

Science, mathematics, and technology do not create curiosity. They accept it, foster it, incorporate it, reward it, and discipline it—and so does good science teaching. Thus, science teachers should encourage students to raise questions about the material being studied, help them learn to frame their questions clearly enough to begin to search for answers, suggest to them productive ways for finding answers, and reward those who raise and then pursue unusual but relevant questions. In the science classroom, wondering should be as highly valued as knowing.

Reward Creativity

Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers prize the creative use of imagination. The science classroom ought to be a place where creativity and invention—as qualities distinct from academic excellence—are recognized and encouraged. Indeed, teachers can express their own creativity by inventing activities in which students' creativity and imagination will pay off.

Encourage a Spirit of Healthy Questioning

Science, mathematics, and engineering prosper because of the institutionalized skepticism of their practitioners. Their central tenet is that one's evidence, logic, and claims will be questioned, and one's experiments will be subjected to replication. In science classrooms, it should be the normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is the evidence? What is the argument that interprets the evidence? Are there alternative explanations or other ways of solving the problem that could be better? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.

Avoid Dogmatism

Students should experience science as a process for extending understanding, not as unalterable truth. This means that teachers must take care not to convey the impression that they themselves or the textbooks are absolute authorities whose conclusions are always correct. By dealing with the credibility of scientific claims, the overturn of accepted scientific beliefs, and what to make out of disagreements among scientists, science teachers can help students to balance the necessity for accepting a great deal of science on faith against the importance of keeping an open mind.

Promote Aesthetic Responses

Many people regard science as cold and uninteresting. However, a scientific understanding of, say, the formation of stars, the blue of the sky, or the construction of the human heart need not displace the romantic and spiritual meanings of such phenomena. Moreover, scientific knowledge makes additional aesthetic responses possible—such as to the diffracted pattern of street lights seen through a curtain, the pulse of life in a microscopic organism, the cantilevered sweep of a bridge, the efficiency of combustion in living cells, the history in a rock or a tree, an elegant mathematical proof. Teachers of science, mathematics, and technology should establish a learning environment in which students are able to broaden and deepen their response to the beauty of ideas, methods, tools, structures, objects, and living organisms.