Science
Forward
An open educational resource for teaching scientific thinking skills. Use your senses.
What is Science Forward?
Science Forward is a new type of undergraduate science seminar, helping students to see science as a lens on the world, a way of approaching questions and challenges.
The course focuses on the critical thinking skills in use across the scientific disciplines, which we have summarized as the “science senses.” Starting with critical issues in the contemporary world, from climate change to the social and economic implications of artificial intelligence, the course encourages active learning and inquiry-based instruction.
We recently published a book chapter on our BioBlitz that also features the origin story of Science Forward. It is available in the open-access book Transforming Education for Sustainability: Discourses on Justice, Inclusion, and Authenticity (Maulucci et al. 2023), part of Springer’s Environmental Discourses in Science Education series. It can be accessed at this link: O’Donnell and Brundage 2023.
What are OER's?
They’re freely accessible resources to help in your teaching, learning, and assessment. Use, remix, and share them however you wish.
If you’re new here, we recommend starting with Science Senses – the foundation of Science Forward.
What are our faculty saying?
“Students feel a lot of uncertainty when they’re learning how to do scientific research. So I make my syllabus about developing the Science Senses. We take it step-by-step. And when students learn how to develop a research abstract that centers around a strong hypothesis, they feel confident. They fall in love with the data and the feeling of, ‘we can do this’.”
-Pablo Peixoto, Baruch College
“I want to give my students a broad understanding of science. I also want them to appreciate different areas of research, and the key questions in those areas today. Above all, I want them to change their self-definition of 'I am not a scientist' – that they can be scientists too, and that they can bring their appreciation of science into their own professional development.”
-Emily Rice, Macaulay Honors College
“Science Forward is about teaching students what is science, how you conduct science, as well as guiding them to do their own project. It gives them an understanding of the scientific process, from design to experiment or data gathering, analysis, and drawing conclusions. Science Forward is designed to be New York centered, but also general enough to be extrapolated elsewhere.”
-Charles Liu, College of Staten Island
Why this site?
We’re the Science Forward team at Macaulay Honors College.
We’ve assembled this site from resources shared by previous Science Forward faculty.
And we hope it will provide a model for teaching survey of science courses not just here at CUNY, but anywhere in the world.
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