Explicating a Satisfying Definition of the Scientist

With global calls by governments and other actors to train more scientists, the science edu-cation community must pay closer attention to the role classroom teachers play in support-ing scientist formation. This requires for educators, however, an intuitive grasp of what a scientist must be. Whereas a definition of the scientist has frequently been left open in some science education perspectives, this paper sketches an explicit discussion of the concept of scientist that could be useful in a scientist pedagogy. Particularly, this article focuses on unraveling the implicit understandings of the scientist that consider ascribing the label as recognition under a single scientific enterprise, laying out the requirements for student-scientists to be seen as engaging in comparable scientific endeavors as career scientists and for students to begin seeing themselves as scientists. This paper lays out how scientists are definable by their scientific output (i.e., research), by their responsibility for the quality of these outputs (by judgment or recognition by other scientists), and by their synthesizing of beliefs to produce these outputs. Perspectives on how to prepare learners to be scientists are then laid out.

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