the value of scientific education essay

Why philosophy is so important in science education

The Cassini mission was a direct consequence of Einstein’s thought experiments. Photo JPL/NASA

by Subrena E Smith   + BIO

Each semester, I teach courses on the philosophy of science to undergraduates at the University of New Hampshire. Most of the students take my courses to satisfy general education requirements, and most of them have never taken a philosophy class before.

On the first day of the semester, I try to give them an impression of what the philosophy of science is about. I begin by explaining to them that philosophy addresses issues that can’t be settled by facts alone, and that the philosophy of science is the application of this approach to the domain of science. After this, I explain some concepts that will be central to the course: induction, evidence, and method in scientific enquiry. I tell them that science proceeds by induction, the practices of drawing on past observations to make general claims about what has not yet been observed, but that philosophers see induction as inadequately justified, and therefore problematic for science. I then touch on the difficulty of deciding which evidence fits which hypothesis uniquely, and why getting this right is vital for any scientific research. I let them know that ‘the scientific method’ is not singular and straightforward, and that there are basic disputes about what scientific methodology should look like. Lastly, I stress that although these issues are ‘philosophical’, they nevertheless have real consequences for how science is done.

At this point, I’m often asked questions such as: ‘What are your qualifications?’ ‘Which school did you attend?’ and ‘Are you a scientist?’

Perhaps they ask these questions because, as a female philosopher of Jamaican extraction, I embody an unfamiliar cluster of identities, and they are curious about me. I’m sure that’s partly right, but I think that there’s more to it, because I’ve observed a similar pattern in a philosophy of science course taught by a more stereotypical professor. As a graduate student at Cornell University in New York, I served as a teaching assistant for a course on human nature and evolution. The professor who taught it made a very different physical impression than I do. He was white, male, bearded and in his 60s – the very image of academic authority. But students were skeptical of his views about science, because, as some said, disapprovingly: ‘He isn’t a scientist.’

I think that these responses have to do with concerns about the value of philosophy compared with that of science. It is no wonder that some of my students are doubtful that philosophers have anything useful to say about science. They are aware that prominent scientists have stated publicly that philosophy is irrelevant to science, if not utterly worthless and anachronistic. They know that STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education is accorded vastly greater importance than anything that the humanities have to offer.

Many of the young people who attend my classes think that philosophy is a fuzzy discipline that’s concerned only with matters of opinion, whereas science is in the business of discovering facts, delivering proofs, and disseminating objective truths. Furthermore, many of them believe that scientists can answer philosophical questions, but philosophers have no business weighing in on scientific ones.

W hy do college students so often treat philosophy as wholly distinct from and subordinate to science? In my experience, four reasons stand out.

One has to do with a lack of historical awareness. College students tend to think that departmental divisions mirror sharp divisions in the world, and so they cannot appreciate that philosophy and science, as well as the purported divide between them, are dynamic human creations. Some of the subjects that are now labelled ‘science’ once fell under different headings. Physics, the most secure of the sciences, was once the purview of ‘natural philosophy’. And music was once at home in the faculty of mathematics. The scope of science has both narrowed and broadened, depending on the time and place and cultural contexts where it was practised.

Another reason has to do with concrete results. Science solves real-world problems. It gives us technology: things that we can touch, see and use. It gives us vaccines, GMO crops, and painkillers. Philosophy doesn’t seem, to the students, to have any tangibles to show. But, to the contrary, philosophical tangibles are many: Albert Einstein’s philosophical thought experiments made Cassini possible. Aristotle’s logic is the basis for computer science, which gave us laptops and smartphones. And philosophers’ work on the mind-body problem set the stage for the emergence of neuropsychology and therefore brain-imagining technology. Philosophy has always been quietly at work in the background of science.

A third reason has to do with concerns about truth, objectivity and bias. Science, students insist, is purely objective, and anyone who challenges that view must be misguided. A person is not deemed to be objective if she approaches her research with a set of background assumptions. Instead, she’s ‘ideological’. But all of us are ‘biased’ and our biases fuel the creative work of science. This issue can be difficult to address, because a naive conception of objectivity is so ingrained in the popular image of what science is. To approach it, I invite students to look at something nearby without any presuppositions . I then ask them to tell me what they see. They pause… and then recognise that they can’t interpret their experiences without drawing on prior ideas. Once they notice this, the idea that it can be appropriate to ask questions about objectivity in science ceases to be so strange.

The fourth source of students’ discomfort comes from what they take science education to be. One gets the impression that they think of science as mainly itemising the things that exist – ‘the facts’ – and of science education as teaching them what these facts are. I don’t conform to these expectations. But as a philosopher, I am mainly concerned with how these facts get selected and interpreted, why some are regarded as more significant than others, the ways in which facts are infused with presuppositions, and so on.

S tudents often respond to these concerns by stating impatiently that facts are facts . But to say that a thing is identical to itself is not to say anything interesting about it. What students mean to say by ‘facts are facts’ is that once we have ‘the facts’ there is no room for interpretation or disagreement.

Why do they think this way? It’s not because this is the way that science is practised but rather, because this is how science is normally taught. There are a daunting number of facts and procedures that students must master if they are to become scientifically literate, and they have only a limited amount of time in which to learn them. Scientists must design their courses to keep up with rapidly expanding empirical knowledge, and they do not have the leisure of devoting hours of class-time to questions that they probably are not trained to address. The unintended consequence is that students often come away from their classes without being aware that philosophical questions are relevant to scientific theory and practice.

But things don’t have to be this way. If the right educational platform is laid, philosophers like me will not have to work against the wind to convince our students that we have something important to say about science. For this we need assistance from our scientist colleagues, whom students see as the only legitimate purveyors of scientific knowledge. I propose an explicit division of labour. Our scientist colleagues should continue to teach the fundamentals of science, but they can help by making clear to their students that science brims with important conceptual, interpretative, methodological and ethical issues that philosophers are uniquely situated to address, and that far from being irrelevant to science, philosophical matters lie at its heart.

Computing and artificial intelligence

Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past

Catherine Stinson

Gentle medicine could radically transform medical practice

Jacob Stegenga

Childhood and adolescence

For a child, being carefree is intrinsic to a well-lived life

Luara Ferracioli

Meaning and the good life

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?

Warren Ward

Philosophy of mind

Think of mental disorders as the mind’s ‘sticky tendencies’

Kristopher Nielsen

Philosophy cannot resolve the question ‘How should we live?’

David Ellis

• Project Gutenberg
• 74,152 free eBooks
• 56 by Thomas Henry Huxley

Science & Education: Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley

Read now or download (free!)

Similar Books

About this ebook.

• Privacy policy
• About Project Gutenberg
• Terms of Use
• Contact Information

Advertisement

Science and Values in Undergraduate Education

• Open access
• Published: 10 December 2019
• Volume 29 , pages 123–143, ( 2020 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Edwin Koster 1 &
• Henk W. de Regt   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0580-0755 2  

6287 Accesses

12 Citations

9 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

While a conception of science as value free has been dominant since Max Weber defended it in the nineteenth century, recent years have witnessed an emerging consensus that science is not – and cannot be – completely free of values. Which values may legitimately influence science, and in which ways, is currently a topic of heated debate in philosophy of science. These discussions have immediate relevance for science teaching: if the value-free ideal of science is misguided, science students should abandon it too and learn to reflect on the relation between science and values – only then can they become responsible academics and citizens. Since science students will plausibly become scientists, scientific practitioners, or academic professionals, and their values will influence their future professional activities, it is essential that they are aware of these values and are able to critically reflect upon their role. In this paper, we investigate ways in which reflection on science and values can be incorporated in undergraduate science education. In particular, we discuss how recent philosophical insights about science and values can be used in courses for students in the life sciences, and we present a specific learning model – the so-called the Dilemma-Oriented Learning Model (DOLM) – that allows students to articulate their own values and to reflect upon them.

Similar content being viewed by others

Philosophical Dimensions of Social and Ethical Issues in School Science Education: Values in Science and in Science Classrooms

Exploring Values of Science Through Classroom Practice

Science Education Practices: Analysing Values and Knowledge

Explore related subjects.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Medical Ethics

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Science is about the facts and nothing but the facts. This view is quite common among scientists and laypeople alike and accordingly also among (aspiring) science students (Corrigan et al. 2007 : 1-2; Fisher and Moody 2002 ; Kincaid et al. 2007 : 13-14; King and Kitchener 2004 ). It entails that (good) science is “value free”: scientific research and its results should not be contaminated with values of any sort, whether political, religious, moral, social, or economic values. The conception of science as a value-free enterprise has been widely accepted and very influential at least since Max Weber defended it in the nineteenth century. In recent decades, however, a growing number of philosophers of science has cast doubt on it, and a consensus is emerging that science is not – and cannot be – completely free of values. Which values may legitimately influence science, and in which ways, is currently a topic of heated debate in philosophy of science. These discussions have immediate relevance for science teaching: if the value-free ideal of science is misguided, science students should abandon it and learn to reflect on the relation between science and values – only then can they become responsible academics and citizens.

Diagram of the Dilemma-Oriented Learning Model

In this article, we investigate ways in which reflection on science and values can be incorporated in undergraduate science education. While we think this holds across a wide variety of scientific disciplines, we focus on the life sciences. In particular, we discuss how recent philosophical insights about science and values can be used in courses for science students, and we present a specific learning model that allows students to articulate their own values and to reflect upon them. Footnote 1 We hope and expect that university lecturers can benefit from this article and can apply our model in their own teaching (cf. Koster and Boschhuizen 2018 ).

The outline of the article is as follows. Section 2 reviews the current debate about science and values in philosophy of science. The notion of value-free science is analyzed in detail, and different types of values that may affect science are identified. An especially relevant distinction is that between epistemic and non-epistemic values, the most challenging discussions are about the (legitimate or illegitimate) roles of non-epistemic values at the heart of scientific practice. In Section 3 , we substantiate our claim that these philosophical discussions are highly relevant for undergraduate science education: students need to critically think about the relation between science and values. The question of how this can be achieved is discussed with reference to a Bachelor course that one of us (EK) teaches to students in the Biomedical Sciences. In this course, students (who have no rich background in philosophy of science and have little experience in actual scientific research) are stimulated to develop a critical approach to science via systematic presentation of examples of the interaction between scientific research, on the one hand, and epistemic and non-epistemic values, on the other. Section 4 explicates the “Dilemma-Oriented Learning Model“ (DOLM), used in the abovementioned course. This model helps students to reflect upon their “own” values: values that are typically related to their background and personal convictions. Because these students will plausibly become scientists, scientific practitioners, or academic professionals and because their values will influence their future professional activities, it is essential that they are aware of these values and are able to critically reflect upon their role. Section 5 concludes the article by discussing some wider implications.

2 Science and Values: Lessons from Philosophy

The value-free ideal has dominated our conception of science for a very long time (Carrier 2008 : 1-7; Kincaid et al. 2007 : 5-6; Stenmark 2006 : 49-53). In its strongest version, it expresses the view that the sole aim of science is to disclose facts about the world, and that facts can and should be sharply distinguished from values. Building on an empiricist tradition going back to Locke and Hume, logical positivist philosophers of science argued that science should be based on logic and sensory experience alone, so that it would yield objective factual knowledge of the world – independently of the subjective perspectives or opinions of individual scientists. Science can only tell us how the world is, not how it should be – and, conversely, scientific research is not affected by our ideas about how the world should be, by our value judgments. For logical positivists, scientific knowledge should be verifiable through observation or experiment, and the truth of value judgments like “torturing animals is wrong” can never be verified in this way (they regarded value judgments as expressions of emotions). Hence, they excluded value judgments from the domain of science.

At this point, we need to say a bit more about the nature of values. Above, we mentioned political, religious, moral, social, and economic values, and one might add, for example, aesthetic and personal values. So there appear to be many kinds of values, but is there a general definition or characterization of the notion of value? There is no easy answer to this question. McMullin ( 2000 : 550) suggests the following: “to value something is to ascribe worth to it, […] to regard it as desirable,” and a value is “the characteristic that leads something to be so regarded.” Footnote 2 Reasons for valuing something can range from purely subjective preferences of the person who values it to features that are objectively required for that something to function properly. For example, when someone buys a specific raincoat because it is waterproof and attractively designed, both properties are valued (by that person), but the former valuation is less subjective than the latter. Notwithstanding such variation, the standard conception of values (endorsed by the logical positivists) entails that values always involve some subjectivity, because something can only be a value when it can be valued by a human agent . (This also applies to the raincoat, whose being waterproof is a value only because people are interested in using the raincoat to protect themselves from the rain.) There can be many different sources of values: ideologies (e.g., political, economic), religious or metaphysical beliefs, interests (e.g., personal, financial), and so on. For example, a gambler who has a financial interest in Zenith winning tomorrow’s horse race will value Zenith’s healthy condition. Of course, a healthy condition is generally valued in any race horse, but note that this gambler would value an inferior physical condition in Zenith’s competitors. While particular interests, or commitments to a particular ideology or religion, can thus inspire or even compel one to adopt certain values, such commitments and interests are not in themselves values.

Back to science. The strong value-free ideal sketched above has been challenged in many ways and is generally rejected nowadays. A fundamental – albeit controversial – criticism focuses on the fact-value distinction itself, arguing that in many cases this distinction cannot be drawn (see, e.g., Dupré 2007 ). A less radical, and more generally accepted, critique proceeds from the observation that there are some values that are obviously central to, if not constitutive of, science – where the prime example is truth. So, the question does not seem to be whether values are involved in science, but rather which values are (legitimately) involved and where and how they are involved. These questions have been hotly debated by philosophers of science since Thomas Kuhn’s seminal 1977 paper “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice” and a great variety of arguments and perspectives can be found in the literature. Footnote 3 While there is consensus that science is not – and cannot be – value free in the strong sense sketched above, there remain (sometimes deep) disagreements about the legitimate place and role of values in science. As we will see below, some philosophers claim that a weaker version of the value-free ideal can still be maintained, whereas others abandon the ideal altogether.

In order to structure the debate, let us start by raising three different but equally important questions (adapted from Kincaid et al. 2007 : 10):

Which kinds of values (are allowed to) play a role in science?

Where do these values play a role?

What effect does their involvement have?

Answers to question (A) often invoke a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values. Epistemic values are those values that are conducive to an important aim of science: knowledge production (McMullin 1983 : 18). Footnote 4 Kuhn ( 1977 ) listed a number of epistemic values that apply to scientific theories: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Footnote 5 Other examples would be explanatory power and unifying power. Epistemic values that apply to scientists may include skepticism, disinterestedness, and openness to counter-evidence. Non-epistemic values, on the other hand, would include, for example, cultural, moral, economic, and political values and also more personal values based on religious commitments, interests, or loyalty to colleagues and sponsors.

While there is debate about which values count as epistemic, no one would contest that epistemic values play a legitimate role in science. Footnote 6 A more important, and more fundamental, question is whether also non-epistemic values are involved in scientific research and, if so, whether their involvement is inevitable or only possible and whether it is always detrimental. Those who want to exclude non-epistemic values from science, maintaining that only epistemic values are allowed to play a role, can be regarded as defending a weak version of the value-free ideal (Kuhn 1977 , McMullin 1983 , and Dorato 2004 are examples). Their opponents typically argue that non-epistemic values cannot be eliminated from scientific research (either in practice or in principle) but that this does not imply that science is hopelessly subjective: there are ways to retain the objectivity of science other than cleansing it from non-epistemic values (examples are Longino 1990 , 2004 , and Douglas 2009 ). Incidentally, some authors reject the (possibility of making a) distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values altogether (e.g., Rooney 1992 , Douglas 2009 ). For the purposes of the present paper, we will ignore this debate and assume that the distinction can be made (cf. Pournari 2008 ).

So far, we have discussed the role of values in science in a quite general way. But science is a complex enterprise, and it is important to carefully differentiate the various stages of scientific practice in which values may or may not be involved. This brings us to question (B): Where do (epistemic or non-epistemic) values play a role? Here it is useful to distinguish between three stages of scientific practice:

First stage: choice of research topic and methods

Second stage: carrying out the research

Third stage: application of research results

In the first stage, before the actual research starts, all kinds of values may play a part. Most importantly, the choice of research topics cannot be made in a value-free manner. Footnote 7 Epistemic values may come into play in this stage, for instance, when competing research proposals are evaluated with help of criteria such as expected explanatory success and breadth of scope. Non-epistemic values are involved as well. When governments, politicians, or business executives decide which types of research will be financed, the values of political parties and private corporations influence the direction of scientific research. And even if scientists (e.g., within a university setting) are free to choose their own topic of research, their personal interests, political ideas, or religious beliefs may affect which issues they want to investigate. The choice of research methods is also value-laden. Epistemic values are clearly relevant here, but in some cases, non-epistemic values can come into play as well: think of financial considerations or ethical restrictions (e.g., research on animals or human subjects). In Section 3.2 , we will discuss the role of values in this stage in more detail.

The second stage might be called the “heart” of science: this is where the actual scientific research is carried out. It is this stage in particular that has been the focus of the debate about the value freedom of science since Max Weber and the logical positivists. While their strong value-free ideal has generally been rejected, today’s proponents of the weak value-free ideal claim that in this stage, only epistemic values are allowed to play a part. Among such epistemic values are the ones that govern hypothesis or theory construction and selection (see Kuhn’s list, cited above). In addition, epistemic values can determine which kind of evidence is to be considered as proof for the hypothesis under scrutiny or govern the way in which evidence is obtained. Whether or not non-epistemic values should also be allowed to play a part in this stage is a matter of debate, however. Advocates of the weak value-free ideal deny this, but other philosophers of science have argued that there is an ineliminable role for non-epistemic values in the second stage as well, because epistemic considerations alone do not suffice to determine theory choice (Longino 2004 ). Footnote 8 However, allowing non-epistemic values (based, e.g., on ideological commitments, religious beliefs, or interests) to play a role in the construction, acceptance or rejection of scientific claims leaves us with the difficult task of specifying how precisely such value influences are to be managed, for they can easily lead to unwanted bias that corrupts the time-honored objectivity of science. Finally, it should be noted that ethical considerations about issues of appropriate conduct in scientific research (e.g., sloppy science, fraud) and, again, about experiments on animals or humans are also relevant in this stage. In Section 3.3 , we will discuss the role of values in the second stage in more detail and present some examples.

Finally, in the third stage, results of scientific research are applied in real-world situations. It is quite obvious that this stage involves all kinds of values, also – and perhaps most of all – non-epistemic ones. For after a scientific research project is completed, its results can play a role, for example, in political decision-making or in commercial activities of private companies. In such cases, the application of scientific research is always accompanied by, first, implicit or explicit ideas about the good life and a just society and, second, certain economic interests. Science and non-epistemic values can thus be thoroughly intertwined in this stage. In Section 3.2 ., we provide some examples.

It can be concluded, first, that nobody denies a role for both epistemic and non-epistemic values in the first and third stage, where scientists and policymakers decide about the selection of research topics and methods and about the application of the results of scientific research. There will probably be disagreement and debate about the choice of values involved in these processes. A second conclusion from our short analysis is that in the second stage, epistemic values cannot be dismissed. Decisions about the acceptance of a hypothesis in favor of a rival one, or judgments which theory is preferable to guide on-going scientific research, cannot be made without an appeal to epistemic values. Doing science without epistemic values is simply impossible –the strong value-free ideal is untenable and should be regarded as a false ideal.

In light of these reflections, question (C) about the effect of values on science can be confined to the possible impact of non-epistemic values on the acquisition of scientific knowledge (cf. Elliott 2011 : 304). What effect does the involvement of, for instance, political ideologies and interests of commercial companies have on activities at the heart of science? This question leads to a number of problems. Suppose that non-epistemic values influence the process of acquiring scientific knowledge, do we then have to conclude that science is biased? Is the possible presence of non-epistemic values in this stage of science a hindrance to speak about objectivity, or do such values perhaps play a vital role in scientific practice, for example, in the construction of scientific theories? How can we prevent that the impact of non-epistemic values on science corrupts academic culture and harms the reliability and validity of scientific results (Radder 2010 )? And if it is inevitable that non-epistemic values play a role in the acceptance of scientific knowledge, do we then need to construct an alternative conception of science, a “value-directed view of science,” as Stenmark ( 2006 ) calls it?

This last question has been answered in the affirmative by Helen Longino and Heather Douglas, who offer analyses of science that acknowledge the role of non-epistemic values and include normative frameworks for diminishing their negative role while allowing for their positive role. Longino ( 1990 : 76-81) submits that the solution of the problem can be found in the social character of science: scientific knowledge is always shared in a community of researchers. It is the communication and interaction between the members of a research community that can render scientific results objective and uncontaminated by prejudices and idiosyncrasies of individual scientists. Such objectivity is guaranteed if the scientific community allows for (1) recognized avenues for criticism (such as journals and conferences); (2) shared standards (the epistemic values mentioned above); (3) community response (criticism is taken seriously); and (4) equality of intellectual authority (of members of the community). Douglas ( 2009 ) approaches the problem in a different way. She distinguishes between direct and indirect roles for (non-epistemic) values, where values play a direct role when they “act as reasons in themselves to accept a claim, providing direct motivation for the adoption of a theory,” while they play an indirect role when they “act to weigh the importance of uncertainty about the claim, helping to decide what should count as sufficient evidence for the claim” (Douglas 2009 : 96). Douglas argues that non-epistemic values are allowable in scientific practice as long as they play an indirect role only.

In sum, the strong value-free ideal of science is untenable. Science cannot be practiced without epistemic values, and nobody will deny the role of non-epistemic values in the stages in which scientific research is selected and applied. The controversial issue is whether non-epistemic values are inevitable in processes of the evaluation and justification of scientific claims. If the influence of these values is indeed inevitable, then one can raise questions about (i) the impact of these values on the results of scientific research, (ii) the possibility to make them transparent, and (iii) the ways in which their impact may be diminished, if so desired. Since most science students are inclined to adopt the value-free ideal of science, it appears advisable to reflect on the role of values in science education. Why this is a good idea, and how this can be achieved, is the focus of the next sections.

3 Introducing “Science and Values” in Undergraduate Education

In the previous section, we have concluded that science is not value free. However, students often automatically start reasoning from a value-free point of view (Aalberts, Koster and Boschhuizen 2012 ; Koster and Boschhuizen 2018 ; Fisher and Moody 2002 ; King and Kitchener 2004 ). Usually students suppose that science is about the facts and only about the facts. They think that values play no role – or ought not to play a role – in the development of science. Here are some typical examples of statements by students about their own views before and after taking a reflective course (Koster and Boschhuizen 2018 : 50):

Before: “I was convinced that scientists are people who are completely objective.”

Before: “I regarded science simply as the truth.”

After: “Now I know that social and cultural factors influence what we regard as knowledge.”

After: “Now I know that full objectivity is unattainable. And that you are influenced, unconsciously, by your cultural, political or social background.”

Since students are initially unaware of the interaction between science and values, they need to reflect upon (A) the difference between epistemic and non-epistemic values; (B) the role of these values in the selection, execution, and application of scientific research (stages 1, 2, and 3); and (C) the effects of values on science (the distinctions made in Section 2 ). In this section, we first substantiate our claim that undergraduate education should include reflection upon the role of values in science ( 3.1 ). Next, we demonstrate how students can be made aware of the interaction of science and (epistemic and non-epistemic) values in the first and the third stage ( 3.2 ) and in the second stage ( 3.3 ). Special attention is given to the consequences of the impact of values on science.

3.1 The Need for Education in “Science and Values”

The recent philosophical insights about the role of values in science, sketched in Section 2 , resulted from a naturalistic turn in philosophy of science that involved a shift from abstract, analytic accounts of science to approaches based on a study of scientific practice. The observation that in actual practice science is not and cannot be value free has led to the abandonment of the value-free conception of science. As Kelly and Licona ( 2018 ) argue, science education may profit from making a similar naturalistic turn, in which attention for actual epistemic practices takes center stage. We fully agree and accordingly we submit that science students should develop an awareness of, and an ability to reflect upon, possible interactions between science and values. To be sure, our proposal to include reflection on science and values in undergraduate science education is not completely novel, nor is it a very radical proposal: in the literature in science, education pleas for paying attention to values have been made before (e.g., Poole 1995 ; Corrigan et al., 2007 ; Corrigan and Smith 2015 ). However, we think that the insights that have emerged from the contemporary philosophical debates on science and values offer new resources for teaching undergraduate students and for developing concrete learning models that address the interaction between science and values.

There are at least three reasons why undergraduate students ought to reflect on the role of values in science: (i) to acquire an adequate and realistic conception of science, (ii) to prevent them from unconsciously adopting a false conception of science that may have misleading and dangerous consequences, and (iii) to prepare them for academic citizenship. We will discuss each of these reasons in turn.

First, students need to be informed about and critically reflect on the nature of science. Since they will practice, use, and/or evaluate scientific research themselves, it is important for them to think critically about the process of achieving scientific knowledge. They should acquire a realistic view of science, rather than the idealized picture that often dominates public debates. In particular, they should be aware of the influence of (hidden) assumptions on scientific methods, obtain realistic ideas about the reliability and limitations of scientific research, of the practice of scientific experiments, and of the nature of scientific laws and theories. To prevent misconceptions of science, it is also necessary for them to learn more about the interaction of science and values. Footnote 9

Second, because students will very often become scientists, scientific practitioners, or academic professionals and since values will influence their future professional practices, it is important for them to reflect upon the role values may play in (i) the selection, (ii) the construction and evaluation, and (iii) the application of scientific knowledge. Since values can influence scientific practices, the presentation of science as entirely value free is deceptive and can have pernicious consequences. In the words of Kincaid et al. ( 2007 : 4): “If scientific results concerning IQ and race, free markets and growth, or environmental emissions and planetary weather make value assumptions, treating them as entirely neutral is misleading at best.” To prevent that value assumptions play a decisive role while hidden behind a cloak of neutrality, students need to become aware of the interaction of science and values at all levels (stages 1–3).

The view of science as being value free is also dangerous because it may hide the influence of certain values secretly supported by scientists themselves. Hans Radder ( 2010 : 7-8), for instance, makes plausible that economic values are present in science by way of a variety of formal and informal personal ties. Individual scientists are increasingly running their own business, and some of them are holding externally sponsored professorships and chairs. Under the guise of neutrality, scientists can serve their own interests and – as is well documented in the case of pharmaceutical industries – sometimes even manipulate their evidence (Healy 1998 , 2002 ). On the level of academic culture, it is sometimes claimed that science is structurally “colonized” by economic vocabularies and metaphors. With reference to colonization, Daniel Lee Kleinman speaks about “direct and indirect effects of industry on academic science” and sums up a number of mechanisms by which these effects are realized: the pressure to undertake research with obvious economic development potential, the shaping of efficacy standards by industry, and courses to teach scientists how to write a business plan or how to develop and implement financial plans (Kleinman 2010 : 31-39). The commodification of academic research is thus realized on individual and institutional levels. One of the strategies often mentioned to minimize the influence of economic values is the training and mentoring in research ethics (e.g., Resnik 2010 : 86). An obvious prerequisite for such education is the critical reflection on the relation between science and values.

A third reason why students need to reflect on the interaction of science and values has to do with the ideal of “education for (academic) citizenship” (cf. Fuller 2000 : 62-74). Academic citizenship is the ability of scientists, scientific practitioners, and academic professionals to reach beyond their own discipline and thus to reflect critically on the influence of, for instance, culture, belief, and commerce in their future professional practice. In today’s pluralistic society, which features a multiplicity of approaches, points of view, values, and interests, this ability is of great importance. Education in science and values prepares students to acquire such a critical attitude inside and outside the academy.

3.2 Values in the Selection and Application of Scientific Research

Students need to think critically about the role of values in science. A first step to reach this goal is to make students aware that values are indeed involved in scientific research. There are at least two strategies to make students reflect upon the ideal of value-free science. A systematic strategy consists of a theoretical exposure about science and values (along the lines of the second section of this article). To be successful, this approach needs students who are able to understand sophisticated, philosophical arguments. If a course on science and values is developed for the benefit of students in philosophy, then this strategy will probably do. But if the course is meant for Bachelor students who did not receive any training in logic or other philosophical skills, then this is what they need to learn in the first place. For these students, another strategy is preferred: teaching by way of demonstration. By giving examples of the role of values in (renowned) scientific research, students become aware of the relevance and importance of the subject and of the problematic character of the value-free view of science. Ordering these examples (i) by distinguishing between the stages before actual research starts, in which research is conducted, and after it has finished, (ii) by making the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values, and (iii) by discussing the effects of values on science will stimulate students to reflect on the theme of science and values in a more structured and systematic way. Below we will indicate how this is done in an actual, second-year course for Bachelor students in one of the life sciences at the VU University of Amsterdam. In this course, entitled “Philosophy and Science,” several examples are given to make students aware of the presence of values in science. These examples are also meant to stimulate critical reflection on the question whether or not these values play a legitimate role in science (Sections 3.2 and 3.3 ). Next, students are stimulated to reflect upon the values that influence their own scientific practices (Section 4 ).

An example of the interaction between science and values during the selection of research concerns the way in which a choice between biomedical approaches and clinical trials is made. Assuming that there is money available for only one type of research project, what are the reasons a funding organization can have for choosing between a proposal that focuses on the underlying mechanisms of a bodily disorder (biomedical approach) and a trial to determine the effect of a medicine to recover the patients suffering from the same disorder (clinical trial)? Students easily understand that values – epistemic values such as explanatory success, applicability, reliability, and scope on the one hand and social relevance and financial feasibility as examples of non-epistemic values on the other – are relevant for making a choice between these two research proposals. A more difficult, and more interesting, question is why certain values prevail over others.

The same holds for the influence of values on science in the application of scientific research. If medical research regarding a potentially dangerous influenza virus results in the development of an effective therapy, the answer to the questions of whether and, if so, how this therapy can be applied depends on the values involved. Epistemic values such as generality (the expected scope of the therapy) and non-epistemic values like safety (the degree of the health risks), individual freedom (should the therapy be prescribed compulsory?), and financial conditions determine the answer to these questions. It is clear that these answers, among others, depend on the political views (and ideological sources) of the government.

Students may be very apt to discuss these questions, and these discussions could indeed be helpful to better understand the interaction of science and values. However, for the aim of the course “Philosophy and Science,” it is even more important and interesting to reflect on the influence of values in the second stage of scientific practices.

3.3 Values at the Heart of Scientific Research

In Section 2 , we have seen that (i) epistemic values interact with processes of construction and evaluation of scientific knowledge and (ii) the most challenging question is whether non-epistemic values are legitimately involved in these processes. Here we present two examples that are discussed in the course “Philosophy of Science.” These examples show, first, that epistemic values play an indispensable role in science and, second, that non-epistemic values are plausibly also part of scientific practice, at least in the examples discussed.

A classic analysis of the interaction of science and epistemic values is provided by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn stressed the fact that “every individual choice between competing theories depends on a mixture of objective and subjective factors, or of shared and individual criteria” (Kuhn 1977 : 325). The objective criteria include accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. These criteria play a vital role when a scientist has to choose between competing theories. However, as Kuhn showed by discussing some examples from the history of science, these criteria do not determine theory choice. He lists two sorts of difficulties: “individually the criteria are imprecise,” and “when deployed together, they repeatedly prove to conflict with one another” (1977: 322). For both cases Kuhn presents convincing instances. Regarding the first difficulty, Kuhn shows that the criterion of “accuracy” cannot always discriminate between competing theories. One of his examples is the choice between heliocentric and geocentric systems: Copernicus’ system was not more accurate than that of Ptolemy (until drastically revised by Kepler). Adding criteria such as consistency and simplicity does not eliminate the problem: both astronomical theories were internally consistent but inconsistent with certain existing scientific explanations, and the criterion of simplicity could as well be interpreted in favor of Ptolemy as in favor of Copernicus (Kuhn 1977 : 322-325). Kuhn concludes that a choice between these theories cannot be made on the basis of the five objective criteria only. This is why he writes that these “objective criteria do not function as unambiguous rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it” (1977: 331). The criteria of choice must thus be supplemented by “subjective considerations” which are not the same as “bias and personal likes or dislikes” (Kuhn 1977 : 337). Regarding the example of the two competing astronomical theories, the choice is regulated by scholarly backgrounds, individual experiences as a scientist, and values (Kuhn 1977 : 325). Because the evidence plus a fixed set of epistemic values do not determine which theory must be preferred, the choice between competing scientific theories must be based on supplementary (and possibly non-epistemic) values.

Since a huge number of post-Kuhnian studies show in detail how values interact with science, many examples regarding the influence of values on the construction and evaluation of scientific claims could be given. Here we confine ourselves to the influence of values on the formulation of hypotheses regarding human evolution. In the 1950s and 1960s, Sherwood Washburn developed his theory of human evolution, centered on the concept of “man-the-hunter.” According to Washburn and others, man evolved into a bipedal toolmaker with relatively large brains due to the organized hunting by males working as a team, which was seen as the crucial cause. “The biology, psychology, and customs that separate us from the apes – all these we owe to the hunters of the past” (Washburn and Lancaster 1975 : 303). This theory suggests that the activity of men drove evolution forward, while women, gathering food and giving birth, were not important for the coming into existence of Homo sapiens (Haraway 1989 : 186-230). During the 1970s, two alternative theories, assigning a major role to the changing behavior of females, were developed. The first one – proposed by Sally Slocum and later further developed by Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman – was called the “woman-the-gatherer hypothesis.” This theory states that the major cause for the high level of the development of tools was the need of women to gather scarce vegetable food (Haraway 1989 : 127, 228 f., 331-348). The second was famously formulated by Sarah Hrdy. Her story of the origin of (wo)mankind makes use of sociobiological theories applying evolutionary theory to the development of behavior. The key word in her theory is “strategy.” Female apes invest in reproductive strategies that enlarge the probability of survival of their offspring: by mating with dominant and aggressive males, they diminish the chance that other males will kill their descendants. According to Hrdy, these kinds of evolutionary strategies are crucial factors in the explanation of the origin of modern man: “the central organizing principle of primate social life is competition between females and especially female lineages” (Haraway 1989 : 349; cf. 349-367). The differences between these theories, especially between the ones proposed by Washburn and Hrdy, can partly be explained by the different field studies of primates and by the emergence of sociobiology. However, since the available evidence underdetermines their theories, it is highly plausible that the different perspectives on the role of men and women in society function as hidden background assumptions. From the point of view of Washburn, it was self-evident that human beings were men and that public life was centered on their activities. From the feminist perspective of Hrdy, much lost ground had to be made up by women. This example shows that the formulation of scientific theories is unconsciously (and perhaps sometimes consciously) influenced by non-epistemic values (Theunissen 2004 : 129-146; cf. Longino 1990 : 103-132).

The presentation of these examples is carried out during the lectures. In meetings of the group tutorials (approximately 20 students), there is room to evaluate these examples, to critically discuss them, and to ask more fundamental questions about, for instance, the (il)legitimate role of non-epistemic values in science and whether the presence of these values in science automatically entails that science is biased. This is done via a number of assignments.

One of the assignments is explicitly meant to discuss Longino’s view on science as a social enterprise. The assignment is constructed around two examples of recent research in the life sciences and is related to the absence or presence of (i) a diversity of scientific approaches and (ii) proper functioning feedback mechanisms. The first example is about the competition between adherents of the “out-of-Africa-thesis” and the “multiregional hypothesis.” On the basis of archeological data (the fossil record), it could not be decided which of the two models was preferable. Until the late 1980s, the two theories were underdetermined by the available evidence. A choice between the two models had to be based on non-epistemic values – a conclusion the students have to find out by themselves. New evidence suggested (among others from the fields of genetics and linguistics) that the “out-of-Africa-thesis” was the most reliable (Lewin and Foley 2004 : 331-421). In this case, new evidence coming from other scientific fields allowed for a choice between the two competing models. The students have to argue whether this choice was indeed solely based on epistemic values. This is not indisputable, because “evidence” can be influenced by, for instance, ideologies and interests and is sometimes even consciously manipulated (cf. Radder 2010 ).

The second example in the assignment – concerning research on the effectiveness of medicines – illustrates how a diversity of scientific approaches is valuable for the practice of science. Because the development and testing of medicines are very expensive, usually only one type of organization is involved in this process: the pharmaceutical industry. The monopoly of these companies in combination with their financial interests undermines the effectiveness of feedback mechanisms such as double-blind experiments, peer review, and statistical tests (Radder 2010 ). Accordingly, drug research could benefit from a diversity of scientific perspectives and from independent institutional controls and testing methods: the current risk of bias and manipulation due to the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly could then be diminished or even eliminated. Students reflect on this claim with help of Longino’s thoughts on the way objectivity can be guaranteed by the scientific community. They try to find out what the effect on medical research would be if the four conditions mentioned by Longino would be fulfilled in this example.

3.4 Values: From Awareness to Self-Awareness

The examples given in Sections 3.2 and 3.3 all support the conclusion that science is value laden or, to put it more carefully, that the value-free view of science is far from self-evident. By presenting these kinds of examples, students become acquainted with the possibility that values play a role in scientific research. They learn that epistemic and non-epistemic values influence the processes of acquiring, formulating, and accepting scientific knowledge. Through the structured presentation of these case studies, students are challenged to think in a more systematic way about the interaction of science and values. Questions about the objectivity of science are also raised.

The course shows the complex relation between science and values in the scientific discipline of the students, but usually none of this is seen by them to apply directly to the role of values and convictions regarding their own scientific practices. Due to the way textbooks teach them to think about science, they still think of themselves as value-free agents of science (Aalberts, Koster and Boschhuizen 2012 ). During their studies, however, students become themselves more and more involved in the process of scientific research, and this process is thus (possibly unnoticed) influenced by epistemic and perhaps even non-epistemic values. Hence, the question arises in which way teachers can stimulate students to reflect upon the impact of values on their own scientific activities.

While students may learn a lot about the interaction between science and values via studying philosophical literature, examples, and case studies, this may not immediately lead to awareness of and reflection on how their own scientific practice is value-laden. This was already noticed by John Dewey. According to Dewey, one’s mental attitude is not necessarily changed by the teaching of science as subject matter and by engaging in, for instance, physical manipulations in a laboratory (Dewey 1910 /1995: 125). For Dewey, experience is the key to science education: experiences have the power to transform our concepts and deep-seated convictions about science (Dewey 1938/1997 ). Based on this idea, he defines education “as a continuing reconstruction of experience” (Dewey 1897/2008 : 107). Dewey argues that conducting scientific inquiry can provide students with the ability to make informed decisions through value judgments. It would be a challenge to connect scientific inquiry and values in science education by starting from Dewey’s approach (cf. Lee and Brown 2018 ), given recent criticisms on aspects of his work (e.g., Radder 2019 : 256-260; Roothaan 2014 : 220-221). In this paper, however, we will not pursue this idea but propose a different approach to relate scientific inquiry to values in science education. In the next section, we use this approach to develop a concrete learning model.

4 The Dilemma-Oriented Learning Model (DOLM)

Reflection on values in scientific research will be an important step in the development of a critical approach to science. By scrutinizing different case studies in the life sciences, students begin to understand that the value-free view of science is problematic and possibly false. Values matter in science. Because students will become scientists, scientific practitioners, or academic professionals themselves, they need to think critically about the way their own values interact with science. Because these values are so deeply embedded in their way of doing and thinking, it is a difficult task to, first, identify and, next, discuss them. It is relatively easy to see how values that are not our own are part of the research process in an implicit and unacknowledged way. But it is much harder to recognize that our own ways of observing and conceiving the world contain values which could be just as prominent. Reflection upon one’s own values is thus necessary.

Understanding the way scientific knowledge is acquired and reflecting upon the students’ own values are the goals of the Bachelor course “Philosophy and Science” for students of Biomedical Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In the first part of this course, students become acquainted with the role of epistemic and non-epistemic values in science (as discussed in the previous section), while during the second part, the emphasis is on the interaction of science and one’s own values. In this section, we will describe the second part of this course and explain how the “Dilemma-Oriented Learning Model” (DOLM) can help to reflect upon one’s own values. In Sections 4.1 and 4.2 , we explain DOLM, and in Section 4.3 , we show how DOLM is used in the course “Philosophy and Science.”

4.1 High-Potential Issues as Pedagogical Tools

DOLM can be applied to cases of complex issues in which scientific knowledge is involved – so-called “high-potential issues”. High-potential issues have two features: they cannot be defined with a high degree of completeness, and they cannot be solved with a high degree of certainty. As pedagogical tools, such issues have the potential (i) to teach students how to evaluate facts and theories, (ii) to make them aware of underlying (sources of) values, and (iii) to clarify, structure, and weigh their arguments regarding their choice in the dilemma so they can take positions and make choices based on considered judgments (Boschhuizen, Aalberts, and Koster 2007 ). This is why high-potential issues are helpful for reflecting on the relation between science and values.

An example of a high-potential issue is the choice between conventional medicine and homeopathy. In a systematic evaluation based on the evidence-based method by Aijing Shang and colleagues in The Lancet (Editorial 2005 ), the conclusion was drawn that homeopathy is out of date and defeated. The editorial address summarized the article with the following telling statement: “The end of homeopathy.” Shang et al. write that homeopathy fares poorly when compared with conventional medicine. Although many people use homeopathic remedies, the reported positive results seem to be consequences of the placebo effect. Shang et al. ( 2005 , 726) suggest that positive findings of trials of homeopathy can be explained by referring to bias.

However, this did not entail the end of homeopathy. In the Netherlands, representatives of the Dutch Royal Association for Homeopathy rejected the conclusions of The Lancet (Koster 2014 ). One of their main criticisms concerned the use of the evidence-based method. They claimed that this method cannot be applied in the case of homeopathy. Homeopathic remedies are fine-tuned: they are developed for individual patients, and the same remedy cannot be given to a random group of individuals. Instead of evidence-based medicine, they argue in favor of observational methods such as cohort studies. Therefore, the approach of Shang et al. can also be accused of bias, in this case regarding the method (Boschhuizen, Aalberts, and Koster 2008 ).

This discussion suggests that such questions, and other complex issues in the life sciences, cannot be answered simply by referring to “the facts.” Reflection on methodology and evaluation of, for instance, claims about possible biases are also necessary. Next to this, underlying assumptions related to (sources of) epistemic and non-epistemic values play an important but usually hidden role in the assessment of the claims under discussion. The former values may concern the nature of reality, the essential characteristics of explanatory mechanisms, and the question of what can be considered as evidence, while the latter may relate to, for example, the reputation of journals, financial interests of scientists and pharmaceutical industries, and ideological views on science. What is needed is a judgment in which implicit values are made explicit and in which the arguments are considered and evaluated. This is why the debate about conventional medicine and homeopathy can be seen as an example of a “high-potential issue.”

Confronting students with this kind of issues makes them aware of the complexity of the evaluation of scientific research and helps them to acquire critical abilities in general and to develop “broad-mindedness” and “responsibility” in particular. Broad-mindedness can be characterized by receptiveness to new and different ideas or the opinions of others. Developing broad-mindedness is a process that is sometimes called “transformative learning” (Mezirow et al., 1990 , xvi), because it results in the reformulation of one’s frame of reference – in which underlying values are central – to allow a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrative understanding of one’s experience. In the context of the choice between conventional medicine and homeopathy, the aim is to critically evaluate and broaden students’ views on, for instance, evidence-based practices. Responsibility is seen here as students’ willingness and ability to account for their choices and actions and to make clear how they relate to their own (underlying) values. The development of students’ critical abilities such as broad-mindedness and responsibility corresponds with the learning goals of the course under scrutiny.

The use of high-potential issues in education can be compared to the application of socio-scientific issues as pedagogical tools. It is argued, for instance, that such tools are helpful to develop argumentation skills in students (Christenson et al. 2014 ) and to make them aware of the role of knowledge, values, and experiences in their argumentation (Rundgren et al. 2016 ). While some studies are thus positive about the use of these tools, others are more critical. Lee ( 2007 ), for instance, found that students need a lot of guidance to develop the ability to make informed decisions on socio-scientific issues (176): “The results of the trials show that teachers need to take students through a critical examination of scientific evidence and engage them in logical argumentation to put their views in perspective and avoid bias.” Tal and Kedmi ( 2006 ) argue that the use of socio-scientific issues in education enlarges students’ argumentation skills but that traditional content-based textbooks written from a value-free perspective keep students away from a critical thinking culture. Furthermore, it has been shown that students use non-epistemic values (such as personal, social, and cultural values) in thinking about socio-scientific issues, without relying on inquiry-based learning or by selectively using scientific evidence (Lee and Brown 2018 : 66-68).

In the next section, we introduce another pedagogical tool: DOLM. DOLM has been developed to help students reflect upon, to broaden, and to give an account of one’s underlying (sources of) values or, in Mezirow’s terminology, one’s frame of reference (Boschhuizen, Poortinga and Aalberts 2006 , Koster, Aalberts and Boschhuizen 2009 ; Mezirow et al. 1990 ). The tool of DOLM allows students to become aware of the role that (non-epistemic) values play in their decision-making, and it teaches them to explicitly reflect on the way they use scientific knowledge.

4.2 Introduction of DOLM

DOLM is a four-phase model, which starts with a case study involving a high-potential issue – a “dilemma” in terms of DOLM. Students make distinct choices by reflecting on the significance of their choices: reflection on intuitive ideas (Phase A), reflection on the relevant scientific knowledge (Phase B), and philosophical reflection (Phase C). Reflection on (sources of) values cuts across phases A, B, and C. In a more retrospective assignment (phase D), students look back on their choices and arguments (see Fig. 1 ). This is meant to raise their awareness of how they gauge the value and evaluate knowledge, how their values influence this process, and how they appreciate and apply the different kinds of reflection as an act of critical self-reflections.

During each of the phases A, B, and C, students take three steps: (1) they clarify their commitment to certain theories, methods, and (sources of) values; (2) they weigh the importance and significance of these theories, methods, and (sources of) values; and (3) they make a reasoned choice. A special point of interest is the use of dialogue as a means of communication about students’ choices and arguments. Students are encouraged to reflect together with their peers and tutor. This dialogue confronts them with their own values and with the values of other students. In addition, it teaches them to take seriously each other’s underlying sources of epistemic and non-epistemic values and to enter into an open-minded discussion about each other’s views. After each phase, students record their experiences in a report. The report after phase D gives a summary of the learning process (Aalberts, Koster and Boschhuizen 2012 ).

4.3 DOLM in the Life Sciences

DOLM has been integrated into the course “Philosophy and Science.” In this course, students study texts, attend lectures and classes, hand in “reflection tasks,” read and comment each other’s assignments, and discuss topics like the relation between science and values, the role of epistemic and non-epistemic values in the formulation and acceptance of scientific knowledge, and the influence of their own point of view on the practice of science. In the course, the dilemma between conventional medicine and homeopathy is used to reflect on the question: “What is science?”. Students are given an assignment in which they are asked to take on the role of a policy advisor at the “Foundation for Drug Development,” responsible for financing scientific research into new medicines, to the amount of EUR 500,000. Two requests have been submitted. The first concerns clinical research for a new, conventional cancer medicine specially developed to eliminate side effects. The second concerns a cohort study for a new homeopathic treatment to eliminate the side effects of cancer medicines. Only one of the requests can be granted. Which one is the question for the policy advisor.

In Phase A, students opt for one of the two clinical studies based on their own experiences and values, intuitive ideas about conventional medicine and homeopathic remedies, and relevant scientific knowledge achieved in other courses. In this phase, students defend their choices quite straightforwardly, sometimes without further arguments: “We have chosen for conventional medicine based on our own experiences. Our education has strengthened our choice” (Boschhuizen, Aalberts, and Koster 2008 ). In the next step (Phase B), they critically think about the claims of evidence-based medicine and the characteristics of homeopathic remedies, and they learn to consider the dilemma from distinct perspectives. This can result in a more balanced view: “I’ve taken the side of homeopathy two times now, and am developing some understanding for its opponents. Their arguments, however, were not convincing” (Koster, Aalberts and Boschhuizen 2009 ). In particular, they are confronted with points of view in which homeopathy is severely criticized because of its implausible principles and its lack of explanatory power, and with positions that are in favor of homeopathy because of positive experiences and of research concluding that homeopathic medicines do have significant effects. They are also introduced to efforts that try to explain these significant effects. This new information sometimes results in a different point of view: “I have altered my position because, after careful consideration of my original viewpoint, I was ultimately convinced by the opposing points of view” (Koster, Aalberts and Boschhuizen 2009 ). Because of the introduction of these different points of view, students again realize that (sources of) values influence scientific research. In this phase, the students begin to attach importance to the question whether homeopathic medicine can be considered a scientific approach or not. To answer this question, philosophical reflection upon the question “What is science?” is needed (Phase C). In this part of the course, students examine and critically reflect upon different perspectives on science such as the empirical cycle of the logical positivists, Karl Popper’s idea of falsification, Thomas Kuhn’s concept of scientific paradigms, Harry Collins’ reading of the sociology of scientific knowledge, and some positions in social epistemology. This can result in a more reflective perspective on their choice between conventional medicine and homeopathy: “…and our own paradigm has also played a role in our decision-making. By executing tasks, we realized this point more and more... However, if we had had a completely different paradigm, we would probably have made another choice” (Boschhuizen, Aalberts, and Koster 2007 ). Central to the lectures about these different perspectives is the way they conceptualize, evaluate, or simply discard the relation between science and values.

One of the aims of the course is that students learn to think about (the sources of) their values, (if necessary) reformulate their perspectives on science, and make choices concerning the dilemma based on considered judgments. For that constructive process, dialogue is an essential ingredient. Of course, the aim will sometimes also be reached during the lectures or when students study the texts related to subjects from Phase B and C. It is quite natural that some students will then reframe their system of underlying values. But, as Paul Feyerabend ( 1975 , 31) wrote, “prejudices are found by contrast, not by analysis.” Applying this thought to the context of the course, it follows that a direct analysis of the role of our own values in our perspective on science normally will not work. By analyzing them, they will hardly become apparent. We need the confrontations with other views, with opposing stances, to become aware of (the sources of) our own values and presuppositions (cf. Pera 1994 ; Weigand and Dascal, 2001 ). In short, we need dialogue.

How can this dialogue be stimulated? During the group tutorials, students present their positions regarding the dilemma. These positions are typically not only different in the choice for or against conventional medicine or homeopathy, the grounds that one student puts forward may also differ from the grounds of another student. By confronting each other with these various claims, grounds, and reasons and by discussing them – with respect for each other’s stances – it is possible to become aware of the values involved in the argument. The dialogue makes it possible to reflect explicitly on the various aspects of the student’s judgment: relevant scientific knowledge, the social aspects of the issue, the normative-ethical aspects of possible choices, one’s own values, world view and (non)religious beliefs, and the interrelations between all these. In this way, students have the possibility to become aware of their own and each other’s (sources of) values and to think critically about them. This aim of the course is not easily reached: first, students need a lot of practice in recognizing underlying values and in using their imagination to redefine issues from different perspectives. Second, teachers need to learn how they can facilitate the analysis of (sources of) values and dialogue. To facilitate the dialogue, it is important that a safe environment is created in which students act respectfully, are open-minded, and show interest in each other’s views and in which everyone accepts the agreements about the dialogical method in the classroom. As mentioned, it is not easy to create these conditions and to achieve the aim of the course. But if it is successful, then one of the main goals of the course – awareness of the relation between science and values – is reached. Elsewhere one of us and two colleagues from VU University Amsterdam have shown that this approach is actually quite successful (Aalberts, Koster and Boschhuizen 2012 ). Footnote 10

In the retrospective assignment (phase D), students look back on their choices and arguments. In particular, they reflect on the way epistemic and non-epistemic values influenced their choice and in which way they now think about the possible involvement of non-epistemic values: could this involvement have been avoided or eliminated? Or did they find ways to handle these values in the way suggested by, for instance, Longino?

5 Conclusion

In this article, we have shown that the strong value-free ideal of science is untenable. Epistemic and non-epistemic values are present in scientific practices, in particular in the stages in which scientific research is selected and applied. We have seen that epistemic values play an indispensable role in what might be called “the heart of science”: they necessarily influence the evidential standards needed for justifying a claim. Whether non-epistemic values are inevitably involved in the assessment of scientific claims is a more controversial issue. However, when these values are involved in processes of evaluation and justification, the question is whether this implies that science is hopelessly biased. Some philosophers of science defend that even if this is the case, it is still possible to retain the objectivity of science.

We have argued that students need to be aware of these interactions between science and values. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to this subject during undergraduate education. This is best done by way of presenting instances of value-laden research. In this way, students become acquainted with the influence of epistemic and non-epistemic values on the formulation and acceptation of scientific knowledge. They thus learn that the value-free view of science is inadequate. Furthermore, they are stimulated to critically think about the possible effects of the involvement of values on science. The next step consists in reflecting upon students’ own frame of reference: in which way do values influence their own approach of science? By way of high-potential issues, incorporated in DOLM, students are stimulated to rethink the influence of their own values on scientific practices. We thus aim for what may be called “Effective Reflective Education” (Koster and Boschhuizen 2018 ).

According to Helen Longino, the objectivity of science can be guaranteed by the social character of science – as long as the scientific community fulfils the four conditions of a genuine dialogue (cf. Section 2 ). In other words, critical discussion among scientists who work from different perspectives, assumptions, or worldviews and/or use different methodologies and approaches will enhance the reliability of the resulting scientific claims. We have seen that dialogue is also important as a means to reflect on one’s own values in science education. Students need the confrontation with other views to become aware of their own (sources of) values. Accordingly, we conclude that diversity may be productive not only for the development of science but also for the reflection on scientific practices in undergraduate education.

Allchin ( 1999 ) contains a comparable plea for paying attention to the interaction between science and values in science teaching. Our paper presents a more developed proposal for doing so, based upon recent insights from philosophy of science and science education.

A similar analysis is given by Lacey ( 1999 : 27): “When an agent (X) holds a value (v), the fundamental expression is ‘X values that ø be characterized by v’,” where the nature of ø determines the kind of value (e.g., if ø is a work of art, v is an aesthetic value; if ø is a society, v is a social value, etc.).

See, e.g., McMullin 1983 , Laudan 1984 , Longino 1990 , Lacey 1999 , Machamer and Wolters 2004 , Kincaid et al., 2007 , Carrier et al., 2008 , and Douglas 2009 ; see Douglas 2016 and Elliott 2017 for recent overviews.

Of course, this is not the only aim of science, but the philosophical debate on science and values focuses on knowledge production. Other aims of science can, for instance, be related to the material realization of science and to the practice of science.

Kuhn did not use the term “epistemic”: he simply called these values “scientific.” Others have used different adjectives for the same notion; thus, Longino ( 1990 ) speaks of “constitutive” values and Lacey ( 1999 ) of “cognitive” values.

After Kuhn ( 1977 ), various lists have been presented, e.g., by McMullin ( 1983 ), Longino ( 1990 ), and Lacey ( 1999 ). The most radical proposal is by Longino ( 1995 ), who presents a list of alternative feminist epistemic values that complements the more traditional list of Kuhn. Note that reference to epistemic values is usually confined to the problem of theory choice and to the assessment of hypotheses.

One might object that a value-free choice is possible when the topic is chosen at random, e.g., by tossing a coin. But even then, one first has to compile a list of alternatives to choose from, and this will inevitably involve value-laden decisions.

See Intemann 2005 for a critical discussion of this “underdetermination argument.”

The focus on “knowledge production” in discussions on science and values could produce other misconceptions about science. Science is not just about knowledge production (cf. note 5). This need to be made clear in education on science as well.

A description and analyses of empirical research to the effects of DOLM courses, learning outcomes, and measures for improving courses can be found in Aalberts, Koster and Boschhuizen ( 2012 : 446-453).

Aalberts, J., Koster, E., & Boschhuizen, R. (2012). From prejudice to reasonable judgement: integrating (moral) value discussions in university courses, Journal of Moral Education , 41 , 437–455.

Allchin, D. (1999). Values in science: an educational perspective. Science & Education, 8 , 1–12.

Article   Google Scholar  

Boschhuizen, R., Poortinga, J. & Aalberts, J. (2006). Reflective judgment learning at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Dilemma driven learning. A teacher guide. Amsterdam: Centre for Educational Training, Assessment and Research (CETAR), VU University.

Boschhuizen, R., Aalberts, J.M.C., & Koster, E. (2007). Preparing Dutch undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility. Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Conference of the Association for Moral Education . New York, NY, USA, November 15–17.

Boschhuizen, R., Aalberts, J.M.C., & Koster, E. (2008). Challenging students’ ‘broad-mindedness’ at VU university Amsterdam . Paper presented at the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Moral Education, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, November 13–16.

Carrier, M. (2008). Introduction (pp. 1–13). Howard & Kourany: Science and the social. In Carrier.

Google Scholar  

Carrier, M., Howard, D., & Kourany, J. (Eds.). (2008). The challenge of the social and the pressure of practice: science and values revisited . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Christenson, N., Rundgren, S.-N. C., & Zeidler, D. L. (2014). The relationship of discipline background to upper secondary students’ argumentation on socioscientific issues. Research in Science Education, 44 , 581–601.

Corrigan, D., Dillon, J., & Gunstone, R. (Eds.). (2007). The re-emergence of values in science education . Rotterdam: Sense.

Corrigan, D., & Smith, K. (2015). The role of values in teaching and learning science. In J. Deppeler, T. Loreman, R. Smith, & L. Florian (Eds.), Inclusive pedagogy across the curriculum (pp. 99–117). Emerald Publishing.

Dewey, J. (1897/2008). My pedagogic creed. Reprinted in T.W. Johnson and R.F. Reed (eds.). Philosophical documents in education . Boston: Pearson, 103-110. (First published in The School Journal LIV ( 3 ), 77–80 (January 16, 1897).)

Dewey, J. (1910). Science as subject-matter and method. Science, 31 (787), 121-127. (Reprinted in Science & Education 4 (1995) pp. 391-398).

Dewey, J. (1938/1997). Experience and education . New York: Touchstone.

Dorato, M. (2004). Epistemic and nonepistemic values in science, in: Machamer & Wolters (2004), 52-77.

Douglas, H. (2009). Science, policy, and the value-free ideal . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Douglas, H. (2016). Values in science. In P. Humphreys (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of science (pp. 609–630). New York: Oxford University Press.

Dupré, J. (2007). Fact and value. In H. Kincaid, J. Dupré, & A. Wylie (Eds.), Value-free science: ideal or illusion? (pp. 27–41). New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Editorial (2005). The Lancet 366 , 690.

Elliott, K. C. (2011). Direct and indirect roles for values in science. Philosophy of Science, 78 , 303–324.

Elliott, K. C. (2017). A tapestry of values: an introduction to values in science . New York: Oxford University Press.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1975). Against method . London: Verso.

Fisher, K. M., & Moody, D. E. (2002). Student misconceptions. In K. M. Fisher, J. H. Wandersee, & D. E. Moody (Eds.), Mapping biology knowledge (pp. 55–57). New York: Kluwer.

Fuller, S. (2000). The governance of science: ideology and the future of the open society . Buckingham: Open University Press.

Haraway, D. (1989). Primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science . London: Routledge.

Healy, D. (1998). The Antidepressant Era . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Healy, D. (2002). The Creation of psychopharmacology . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Intemann, K. (2005). Feminism, underdetermination, and values in science. Philosophy of Science, 72 , 1001–1012.

Kelly, G. J., & Licona, P. (2018). Epistemic practices and science education. In M. Matthews (Ed.), History, Philosophy and Science Teaching (pp. 139–166). Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62616-1_5 .

Kincaid, H., Dupré, J., & Wylie, A. (2007). Introduction. In H. Kincaid, J. Dupré, & A. Wylie (Eds.), Value-Free Science? Ideals and Illusions (pp. 3–23). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (2004). Reflective judgment: theory and research on the development of epistemic assumptions through adulthood. Educational Psychologist, 39 , 5–18.

Kleinman, D. L. (2010). The commercialization of academic culture and the future of the university. In H. Radder (Ed.), The Commodification of Academic Research. Science and the Modern University (pp. 24–43). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Koster, E. (2014). Reguliere en alternatieve geneeskunde. In E. Koster (Ed.), Wat is wetenschap? Een filosofische inleiding voor levenswetenschappers en medici (pp.85–102). Amsterdam: VU University Press.

Koster, E., & Boschhuizen, R. (2018). Glazen slijpen. Onderliggende denkramen in academisch onderwijs . Eindhoven: Damon.

Koster, E., Aalberts, J.M.C., & Boschhuizen, R. (2009). Philosophy as a turning-point in academic judgement learning ? Paper presented at the 4th Conference of the Asia Pacific Network for Moral Education, Seoul, Korea, May 22–24.

Kuhn, T. S. (1977). Objectivity, value judgment, and theory choice. In The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (pp. 320–339). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lacey, H. (1999). Is Science value free? Values and scientific understanding . London: Routledge.

Laudan, L. (1984). Science and Values. The aims of science and their role in scientific debate . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lee, Y. C. (2007). Developing decision-making skills for socio-scientific issues. Journal of Biological Education, 41 , 170–177.

Lee, E. A., & Brown, M. J. (2018). Connecting inquiry and values in science education: An approach based on John Dewey’s philosophy. Science & Education, 27 , 63–79.

Lewin, R., & Foley, R. A. (2004). Principles of human evolution . Oxford: Blackwell.

Longino, H. E. (1990). Science as social knowledge. Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry . Princeton University Press: Princeton.

Longino, H. E. (1995). Gender, politics and the theoretical virtues. Synthese, 104 , 383–397.

Longino, H.E. (2004). How values can be good for science. In: Machamer & Wolters (2004), 127-142.

Machamer, P., & Wolters, G. (Eds.). (2004). Science, values, and objectivity . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

McMullin, E. (1983). Values in science. In P. D. Asquith & T. Nickles (Eds.), PSA 1982 Vol.2 (pp. 3–28). East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association.

McMullin, E. (2000). Values in science. In W. H. Newton-Smith (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Science (pp. 550–560). London: Blackwell.

Mezirow, J., et al. (1990). Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pera, M. (1994). The discourses of science . Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Poole, M. (1995). Beliefs and values in science education . Buckingham: Open University Press.

Pournari, M. (2008). The distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values in the natural sciences. Science & Education, 17 , 669–676.

Radder, H. (Ed.). (2010). The commodification of academic research. Science and the Modern University . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Radder, H. (2019). From commodification to the common good: reconstructing science, technology, and society . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press.

Resnik, D.B. (2010). Financial interests and the norms of academic science. In H. Radder (Ed.), The Commodification of Academic Research. Science and the Modern University (pp.65-89). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Rooney, P. (1992). On values in science: Is the epistemic/non-epistemic distinction useful? In D. Hull, M. Forbes, & K. Okruhlik (Eds.), PSA 1992: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol.2 (pp. 13–22). East Lansing.

Roothaan, A. (2014). Decommodification of learning: John Dewey and Ivan Illich in search of an education for the future. In H. W. de Regt & C. L. Kwa (Eds.), Building bridges: connecting science, technology and philosophy (pp. 217–228). Amsterdam : VU University Press .

Rundgren, C. J., Eriksson, M., & Rundgren, S.-N. C. (2016). Investigating the intertwinement of knowledge, value and experience of upper secondary students’ argumentation concerning socioscientific issues. Science & Education, 25 , 1049–1071.

Shang, A., et al. (2005). Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and allopathy. The Lancet, 366 , 726–732.

Stenmark, M. (2006). Rationality and different conceptions of science. In F. LeRon Shults (Ed.), The Evolution of Rationality (pp. 47–72). Eerdmans: Michigan.

Tal, T., & Kedmi, Y. (2006). Teaching socioscientific issues: classroom culture and students’ performances. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 1 , 615–644.

Theunissen, B. (2004). Diesels droom en Donders’ bril. Hoe wetenschap werkt . Nieuwezijds.

Washburn S.L & Lancaster, C.S. (1975). The evolution of hunting. In: R.B. Lee and I. Devore (ed.), Man the Hunter , Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 293-303.

Weigand, E., & Dascal, M. (Eds.). (2001). Negotiation and power in dialectic interaction . Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Download references

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions; Rob Boschhuizen and Hans Radder for their support and advice; and the members of the research group Philosophy of Science and Technology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, for fruitful discussion of earlier versions of this work. This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the Varieties of Understanding Project at Fordham University and the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of TempletonWorld Charity Foundation.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Edwin Koster

Institute for Science in Society, Faculty of Science, Radboud University, P.O. Box 9010, 6500 GL, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Henk W. de Regt

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Henk W. de Regt .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Koster, E., de Regt, H.W. Science and Values in Undergraduate Education. Sci & Educ 29 , 123–143 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-019-00093-7

Download citation

Published : 10 December 2019

Issue Date : February 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-019-00093-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Undergraduate education
• Value-freedom of science
• Epistemic and non-epistemic values
• Dilemma-oriented learning model
• Objectivity
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

Essay on Science: Sample for Students in 100,200 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 28, 2023

Science, the relentless pursuit of knowledge and understanding, has ignited the flames of human progress for centuries. It’s a beacon guiding us through the uncharted realms of the universe, unlocking secrets that shape our world. In this blog, we embark on an exhilarating journey through the wonders of science. We’ll explore the essence of science and its profound impact on our lives. With this we will also provide you with sample essay on science in 100 and 200 words.

Must Read: Essay On Internet   

What Is Science?

Science is a systematic pursuit of knowledge about the natural world through observation, experimentation, and analysis. It aims to understand the underlying principles governing the universe, from the smallest particles to the vast cosmos. Science plays a crucial role in advancing technology, improving our understanding of life and the environment, and driving innovation for a better future.

Branches Of Science

The major branches of science can be categorized into the following:

• Physical Science: This includes physics and chemistry, which study the fundamental properties of matter and energy.
• Biological Science : Also known as life sciences, it encompasses biology, genetics, and ecology, focusing on living organisms and their interactions.
• Earth Science: Geology, meteorology, and oceanography fall under this category, investigating the Earth’s processes, climate, and natural resources.
• Astronomy : The study of celestial objects, space, and the universe, including astrophysics and cosmology.
• Environmental Science : Concentrating on environmental issues, it combines aspects of biology, chemistry, and Earth science to address concerns like climate change and conservation. 
• Social Sciences : This diverse field covers anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics, examining human behavior, society, and culture.  
• Computer Science : Focused on algorithms, data structures, and computing technology, it drives advancements in information technology. 
• Mathematics : A foundational discipline, it underpins all sciences, providing the language and tools for scientific analysis and modeling.  

Wonders Of Science

Science has numerous applications that profoundly impact our lives and society: Major applications of science are stated below:

• Medicine: Scientific research leads to the development of vaccines, medicines, and medical technologies, improving healthcare and saving lives.
• Technology: Science drives technological innovations, from smartphones to space exploration.
• Energy: Advances in physics and chemistry enable the development of renewable energy sources, reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
• Agriculture: Biology and genetics improve crop yields, while chemistry produces fertilizers and pesticides.
• Environmental Conservation : Scientific understanding informs efforts to protect ecosystems and combat climate change.
• Transportation : Physics and engineering create efficient and sustainable transportation systems.
• Communication : Physics and computer science underpin global communication networks.
• Space Exploration : Astronomy and physics facilitate space missions, expanding our understanding of the cosmos.

Must Read: Essay On Scientific Discoveries  

Sample Essay On Science in 100 words

Science, the bedrock of human progress, unveils the mysteries of our universe through empirical investigation and reason. Its profound impact permeates every facet of modern life. In medicine, it saves countless lives with breakthroughs in treatments and vaccines. Technology, a child of science, empowers communication and innovation. Agriculture evolves with scientific methods, ensuring food security. Environmental science guides conservation efforts, preserving our planet. Space exploration fuels dreams of interstellar travel.

Yet, science requires responsibility, as unchecked advancement can harm nature and society. Ethical dilemmas arise, necessitating careful consideration. Science, a double-edged sword, holds the potential for both salvation and destruction, making it imperative to harness its power wisely for the betterment of humanity.

Sample Essay On Science in 250 words

Science, often regarded as humanity’s greatest intellectual endeavor, plays an indispensable role in shaping our world and advancing our civilization.

At its core, science is a methodical pursuit of knowledge about the natural world. Through systematic observation, experimentation, and analysis, it seeks to uncover the underlying principles that govern our universe. This process has yielded profound insights into the workings of the cosmos, from the subatomic realm to the vastness of space.

One of the most remarkable contributions of science is to the field of medicine. Through relentless research and experimentation, scientists have discovered vaccines, antibiotics, and groundbreaking treatments for diseases that once claimed countless lives. 

Furthermore, science has driven technological advancements that have reshaped society. The rapid progress in computing, for instance, has revolutionized communication, industry, and research. From the ubiquitous smartphones in our pockets to the complex algorithms that power our digital lives, science, and technology are inseparable partners in progress.

Environmental conservation is another critical arena where science is a guiding light. Climate change, a global challenge, is addressed through rigorous scientific study and the development of sustainable practices. Science empowers us to understand the impact of human activities on our planet and to make informed decisions to protect it.

In conclusion, science is not just a field of study; it is a driving force behind human progress. As we continue to explore the frontiers of knowledge, science will remain the beacon guiding us toward a brighter future.

Science is a boon due to innovations, medical advancements, and a deeper understanding of nature, improving human lives exponentially.

Galileo Galilei is known as the Father of Science.

Science can’t address questions about personal beliefs, emotions, ethics, or matters of subjective experience beyond empirical observation and measurement.

We hope this blog gave you an idea about how to write and present an essay on science that puts forth your opinions. The skill of writing an essay comes in handy when appearing for standardized language tests. Thinking of taking one soon? Leverage Edu provides the best online test prep for the same via Leverage Live . Register today to know more!

Amisha Khushara

Hey there! I'm a content writer who turns complex ideas into clear, engaging stories. Think of me as your translator, taking expert knowledge and making it interesting and relatable for everyone.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

• University Home
• Campus Life

Clemson News

Transforming plant science education

STEM-it Up 2 is an example of the power and value of transdisciplinary, place-based, experiential learning. Kristin Gehsmann, dean of the Clemson University College of Education

In a world where STEM education is increasingly vital, the STEM-it Up 2 program is set to transform the teaching of plant science, inspiring the next generation of green industry professionals.

STEM-it Up 2 is a 3-year professional development program for United States agriscience teachers, taught by a multi-institutional team of educators and graduate students.

Led by Catherine DiBenedetto , an agricultural education associate professor at Clemson University, this initiative offers virtual and hands-on professional development for 16 agriscience teachers selected nationwide. STEM-it Up 2 equips teachers with the knowledge to develop innovative learning modules aiming to strengthen agricultural literacy, STEM skills, and a focus on career exploration in plant science, horticulture and floriculture.

“STEM-it Up 2 is an immersive program exploring each stage of the fresh-cut flower industry,” DiBenedetto said. “During this program, teachers encounter all aspects of the floral distribution channel and immerse themselves in the world of floriculture.”

Connie Lujan, an agriscience teacher at Mesa Vista Middle High School in Ojocaliente, New Mexico, is one SIU 2 participant who is eager to prepare her students for careers in floriculture.

“Agriculture is mostly a hobby in our area,” Lujan said. “Our students have very little knowledge about farming. I would like to take what I’ve learned here back to my students to introduce them to floriculture as a possible career option.”

Lujan, who has been teaching for 40 years, was the first female agriscience teacher in New Mexico. She teaches high school classes in floriculture, food science, leadership, and welding.

“STEM-it Up 2 is a great way for me to get the knowledge I need to educate my students,” she said.

The program is funded by a $500,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. It is an extension of DiBenedetto’s STEM-it Up program, supported by the American Floral Endowment.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It is an educational initiative designed to provide students with critical thinking skills to make them creative problem solvers and ultimately more marketable in the workforce.

In addition to DiBenedetto, other team members include Natalie Ferand of Virginia Tech, Brian Myers of the University of Florida, Richie Roberts of Louisiana State University, and Aaron McKim of Michigan State University.

Graduate students include Rustie Robison, a Clemson University doctoral student and Kyleigh Hilburn, a University of Florida doctoral student.

STEM-it Up 2 program benefits

Each teacher received a technology package that included an iPad Mini to use in their lessons.

“I don’t have anything like this to work with,” said Lauren Graham, a teacher at Limestone County Career Technical Center in Athens, Alabama. “I’m excited to have this iPad Mini that I can use with my lessons so that my students will benefit.”

In addition to using iPads, the teachers learned how to work with other technology.

The teachers also visited Clemson University agriscience laboratories where they engaged in laboratory research with James Faust, professor of floriculture physiology. They also learned how to isolate Botrytis fungus. And they visited Clemson greenhouses where they learned about cut flower harvesting and processing.

In addition, the program included industry tours to highlight all aspects of the floral distribution channel. The teachers toured FloraLife Inc. in Walterboro, South Carolina; Costa Farms and Soroa Orchids in Homestead, Florida; and Jet Fresh Flowers in Miami, Florida. They also visited River Bend Blooms in Scottsville, Kentucky.

The teachers will receive continued support while they develop curricula and implement what they learned in their agriscience programs.

Kristin Gehsmann, dean of the Clemson University College of Education , praised the program for equipping teachers to introduce students to the floriculture industry.

“STEM-it Up 2 is an example of the power and value of transdisciplinary, place-based, experiential learning,” Gehsmann said. “When learning is engaging, relevant, and tied to real-world applications, it helps students answer the question, ‘Why am I learning this?’ and prepares them to become leaders and innovators.”

STEM-it Up 2 image gallery

Stem-it Up² agriscience teachers open their technology packages. (Clemson University photo)

Each teacher participating in the program received an iPad Mini to use in their classrooms. (Clemson University photo)

Lori Ballard, agriscience teacher from Florida, uses her iPad Mini to shoot photos and videos during FloraLife’s presentation in Walterboro, South Carolina. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Emily Dent, an agriscience teacher from Alabama, enjoys all the fun creatures at the South Carolina Botanical Garden. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Paul Young and John Clark, agriscience teachers from North Carolina, soak up the beauty of the South Carolina Botanical Garden. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Stem-it Up² teachers visit Clemson University greenhouses. (Clemson University photo)

The teachers tour Jet Fresh Flowers in Miami, Florida. (Photo: Joel Serrano/Jet Fresh Flowers)

Stem-it Up² agriscience teachers use technology to capture photos and videos of a hydrangea showcased by Fernando Ortega, Jet Fresh Flower Distributors general manager in Miami, Florida. (Clemson University photo)

Steven DuBose, an Anderson Institute of Technology instructor, shoots photos at Jet Fresh Flower Distributors in Miami, Florida. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Nora Melley, Pennsylvania agriscience teacher, and Lauren Graham, Alabama agriscience teacher, take notes at Jet Fresh Flower Distributors in Miami, Florida. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Natalie Ferand, Virginia Tech assistant professor, explains Costa Farm’s greenhouse science to Danielle Smith, an agriscience teacher from Tennessee. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Agriscience teachers Lauren Graham from Alabama and John Clark from North Carolina, harvest sunflowers at River Bend Blooms in Scottsville, Kentucky. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

A group of Stem-it Up² agriscience teachers work with Michelle Wheeler at River Bend Blooms in Scottsville, Kentucky. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

The teachers pay a visit to FloraLife in Walterboro, South Carolina. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Danielle Smith, Lauren Graham, Brooke Hall, Adriane Watts, Connie Lujan and Carol Travis show off the American Floral Endowment logo. The American Floral Endowment helped fund this immersive travel experience. (Photo: Kyleigh C. Hilburn/University of Florida)

Clemson agricultural education associate professor Catherine DiBenedetto combined her 15 years of experience in the floriculture industry with her background as an agriscience teacher and educator to design this unique professional development program. (Clemson University photo)

Steven DuBose, an Anderson Institute of Technology instructor and Clemson graduate, shows the teachers how to collect environmental data using HOBO environmental sensor pendants that were included in their technology packets. (Clemson University photo)

Get in touch and we will connect you with the author or another expert.

Or email us at [email protected]

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• Published: 24 August 2024

Effect of nutrition education on the nutritional status of pregnant women in Robe and Goba Towns, Southeast Ethiopia, using a cluster randomized controlled trial

• Girma Beressa 1 , 2 ,
• Susan J. Whiting 3 &
• Tefera Belachew 2  

Scientific Reports volume  14 , Article number:  19706 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

• Health care
• Risk factors
• Signs and symptoms

Maternal malnutrition is pervasive throughout the world, notably in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), including Ethiopia. This study aimed to assess the effect of nutrition education on the nutritional status of pregnant women in urban settings in Southeast Ethiopia. A community-based two-arm parallel cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted among 447 randomly selected pregnant women attending antenatal care (224 intervention and 223 control). We used a multistage cluster sampling technique followed by systematic sampling to select the pregnant women. Pregnant women who participated in the intervention arm received six nutrition education sessions. Women in the control group received standard care. A nonstretchable mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) tape was used to measure the MUAC. A linear mixed effects model (LMM) was used to evaluate the effect of the intervention on MUAC, accounting for the clustering. The net mean ± standard error of MUAC between the intervention and control groups was 0.59 ± 0.05 (P < 0.0001) . The multivariable LMM indicated that having received nutrition education interventions (β = 0.85, 95% CI 0.60, 1.12, P < 0.0001) improved the MUAC measurement of pregnant women. Thus, nutrition education during pregnancy will combat undernutrition among pregnant women.

Trial Registration : Clinicaltrials.gov (PACTR202201731802989), retrospectively registered on 24/01/2022.

Similar content being viewed by others

A comprehensive intervention package improves the linear growth of children under 2-years-old in rural Bangladesh: a community-based cluster randomized controlled trial

Inadequate dietary diversity practices and associated factors among pregnant adolescents in the West Arsi Zone, Central Ethiopia: a community-based cross-sectional study

Effect of nutrition counseling on nutritional status and gestational weight gain of pregnant adolescents in West Arsi, Central Ethiopia: a cluster randomized controlled trial

Introduction.

Maternal nutrition during pregnancy influences fetal growth, development, and intrauterine programming 1 , 2 . It impacts child survival, chronic illness risk, and future human capital development 3 . Poor maternal nutrition prior to and throughout pregnancy is also significantly connected to an increased risk of maternal anemia, mortality, and unfavorable birth outcomes such as low birth weight and preterm birth, although the mechanism for this link is complex 4 . Despite substantial achievements and hints of progress over the last decade, maternal under nutrition continues to be a major public health concern in Ethiopia 5 , 6 . Maternal and child mortality rates in Ethiopia remain high, being in the order of 412 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and 67 child deaths per 1000 live births 5 . This could be associated with the high prevalence of under nutrition among pregnant women in Ethiopia, ranging from 14.4 to 47.9% 7 , 8 . Maternal undernutrition contributes significantly to maternal mortality and morbidity, unfavourable birth outcomes, and intergenerational transmission of undernutrition 9 . In Ethiopia, maternal undernutrition accounts for more than half of newborn and child fatalities 10 .

Fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption is recommended as part of a nutrient-dense diet; however, intakes are frequently lower than recommended levels, including during pregnancy globally 11 . Furthermore, the most common public health issues in Ethiopia are macronutrient and micronutrient deficiencies in pregnant women, and FV is a food group that is often low. The consumption of vitamin-A-rich FV among women in the Oromia region and Addis Ababa was only 3.9% and 2.8%, respectively. However, the consumption of other FVs among women in the Oromia region and Addis Ababa was 8.4% and 10.4%, respectively 12 .

Nutrition education and counselling are often utilized strategies to enhance women's nutritional status during pregnancy 13 . Nutrition education is critical in nutrition behavior change attempts because it improves participants' nutrition and food literacy. Food literacy encompasses both nutrition literacy and the capacity to apply that knowledge to make sound decisions, whereas nutritional literacy is the set of skills required to comprehend and analyze information about food and its nutrients 14 . In addition, nutrition education interventions that enhance maternal nutritional status are among the most successful mother and child health promotion techniques 15 .

The first step in promoting nutrition education to produce favorable effects is to choose an acceptable model for counselling pregnant women. The Health Belief Model (HBM) includes themes such as perceived vulnerability, severity, advantages, obstacles to behaviour, signals to action, and self-efficacy that influence people's motivation to prevent sickness 16 . The theory of planned behavior (TPB) considers intention to be the primary factor determining behaviour. Intention is influenced by a person's attitude towards a behaviour, social influences from influential persons, and perceived control over the behavior 17 . Nutrition education based on an integrated HBM and the TPB increases women’s diet knowledge during pregnancy, dietary diversity, nutritional status, and pregnancy outcomes 18 . The study found that guided counselling using the HBM and TPB was effective in improving the nutritional status of pregnant women. It is a low-cost intervention that can improve knowledge, dietary practices, and nutritional status 19 . As a result, the HBM and TPB were employed in this study during the nutrition education intervention. The HBM comprises a number of key principles that predict why people take precautionary measures to avoid sickness. The TPB considers intention to be a direct driver of behavior. In turn, a person's attitude towards a given behavior, an individual's perception of social pressures caused by important people in practicing or not practicing a specific behavior, and perceived behavioral control all influence intention 16 . There is a variation in Ethiopian pregnant women's socio-cultural, economic, educational status, and geographic, which affects Ethiopian pregnant women 20 , 21 , 22 .

Previous observational studies on maternal nutritional status have been undertaken in Ethiopia, and nutrition interventions are advocated 20 , 23 , such as counselling on the consumption of nutrient-rich, locally available foods, food and nutrient supplementation (for example, iron-folic acid (IFA), calcium, and multiple micronutrients), as well as on weight to ensure a healthy weight gain 24 . However, evidence on the effect of theory-based nutrition education on the undernutrition of pregnant women is lacking in the context of low-income countries. Therefore, we aimed to assess the effect of nutrition education on the nutritional status (measured by the mid-upper arm circumference, MUAC) of pregnant women in urban settings in Southeast Ethiopia.

Study design, setting, and participants

A community-based, two-arm, parallel cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted among pregnant women receiving prenatal care at health facilities in Robe and Goba towns, Bale Zone, Southeast Ethiopia, from February to December 2021. Details of this study have been published 25 . In brief, cluster randomization was used over individual-level randomization to decrease information contamination and for pragmatic reasons, as urban health extension workers (UHEWs) operate in clusters 26 . Robe and Goba towns, located 430 and 444 km from Addis Ababa city, respectively, were the chosen sites. In the municipalities of Goba and Robe, there were 1832 and 2048 pregnant women, respectively. The source population was all pregnant women attending antenatal care (ANC) in the Robe and Goba towns. The study population included all first- and early-second-trimester (the time between 12 and 16 weeks of gestation) pregnant women attending ANC in the Robe and Goba Towns. First- and early-second-trimester (the time between 12 and 16 weeks of gestation) pregnant women who were permanently residents of the study area were included in the study. Pregnant women with gestational diabetes mellitus or pregnancy –induced hypertension were not included in the study.

Sample size estimation and techniques

Using G-Power software version 3.1, the sample size was calculated by making the following assumptions: an effect size of 0.25, a 95% confidence level (CI), a precision of 0.05, and a power (1 − β) of 80% 27 . The calculated sample size was 120. The ultimate sample size was 264 after taking the largest sample size into account, along with a design effect of 2 and a 10% non-response rate. Nonetheless, 454 were drawn (intervention group = 227, control group = 227) since the computed sample size for one of the broader study's other objectives was higher 25 . Data on births compiled by UHEWs were used to estimate the number of pregnant women in each cluster. Robe and Goba towns have 36 and 24 clusters, respectively. Using a probability proportional to size allocation, the sample size was assigned to each cluster. The systematic sampling technique was used to select pregnant women. In the event that a woman missed her interview due to being out of home, the next eligible pregnant woman in the serial number was contacted. The pregnant woman who had been absent from the interview was contacted the next day (Supplementary Fig.  1 ).

Randomization, intervention allocation, and blinding

The gestational age was calculated by asking about the beginning day of the last menstrual period, and the pregnancy was confirmed using a urine human chorionic gonadotropin test. Robe and Goba towns were chosen at random. Clusters were randomly allocated to the intervention and control groups. Pregnant women residing in Robe Town received the intervention, whereas those residing in Goba Town did not receive the nutrition education interventions. After pregnant women were evaluated for eligibility, the primary author randomly assigned clusters to the intervention and control groups in a 1:1 ratio to make a balance of clusters. The allocation sequence was produced using simple randomization techniques, including coin tossing.

Nutrition education interventions

Nutrition education was delivered in Afan Oromo and Amharic. An organized work schedule, counselling cards, and nutrition education were provided to the intervention group. The core messages for the lessons were generated utilizing the health belief model (HBM) and theory of planned behavior (TPB) theoretical principles 16 , 28 . These messages were taken from those recommended by the Ministry of Health (MOH), Ethiopia 29 .

Following the gathering of baseline data, pregnant participants in the intervention group received nutrition education for six sessions. Not all women received all 6 sessions; however, nearly 96 out of 100 received 5 of 6. Recruitment was done during the period when animal-source foods were allowed (i.e., during the non-fasting period). Following recruitment at their homes in each cluster, respondents received nutrition education for 30–45 min per session. Six nurses with Bachelor of Science (BSc) degrees delivered nutrition education, while two Master of Public Health (MPH) specialists supervised the nutrition education sessions. The core contents of the session were: increasing knowledge about iron-rich food sources, IFA, iodized salt, meal frequency, and portion size with increasing gestational age; food groups; taking day rest; reducing heavy workloads; enhancers and inhibitors of iron absorption; increasing utilization of health services; and interrupting the intergenerational life cycle of malnutrition; increasing pregnant women’s perceptions of under nutrition and factors leading to it; poor eating practices causing inadequate dietary intake and disease; a diet adjustment; a food-based strategy; diversifying, enriching, and standardizing knowledge regarding FV intake; identifying obstacles and finding solutions to them. By engaging pregnant women in the assessment and analysis of their own FV difficulties using participatory approaches, learning by doing encourages pregnant women to devise their own solutions. Customize the strategy to address barriers such as cost, accessibility, preparation, time, and taste preferences. For example, consider inexpensive FV choices; lowering the perceived obstacles to creating an FV; motivating participants to find solutions to the obstacles; specific food taboos (meat and eggs); enhancing participants' perceptions of control and intention; enhancing participants' hand washing proficiency; and enhancing participants' knowledge and attitudes on the capacity of pregnant women to adjust feeding patterns (Supplementary Table 1 ).

Nutrition education sessions included presentations, discussions, demonstrations, and picture-based exercises. Key messages, realistic activities, and the GALIDRAA (greet, ask, listen, identify, discuss, recommend, agree, and make follow-up appointments) processes were all identified by the trainers as crucial counselling abilities. However, no concealment was adopted in the trial due to the distinctive features of the cluster RCT and the nature of the intervention being studied. Because the two towns were so far apart, the study was not blinded. Pregnant women were made aware of the intervention yet were blinded to the research hypothesis. After the pregnant women were enrolled, reasonable attempts were made to encourage their retention and full follow-up for the duration of the trial by providing them with incentives to reduce missing data. Periodic conversations about compliance with the intervention during routine meetings and home visits by trainers served to retain interest in the study. After two weeks of nutrition education sessions, post-intervention measurements were assessed at 36–38 weeks. Moreover, home visits were planned to lessen the strain of follow-up visits among pregnant women.

No set schedule was given to the control groups. They did, however, receive standard health care. At the end of the trial, a brief intervention was given to the control group to ensure fairness and achieve a high level of postrecruitment satisfaction. Family health (family planning, nutrition, and vaccination services), disease prevention and control (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, malaria, and first aid care), hygiene and sanitation, waste disposal management, water supply, food hygiene and safety, control of insects and rodents, personal hygiene, and health education are among the 16 components of Ethiopia's routine health extension programme packages 30 .

Data collection

An interviewer-administered, structured questionnaire was used to collect data. The data collection was paper-based. The data collection instruments were modified from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) and previous studies 5 , 31 , 32 , 33 . For the two groups, baseline and final assessments were performed. Prior to the intervention, information on sociodemographic, economic, substance abuse (alcohol, smoking, tea, or coffee), and reproductive history was gathered. Before and after the intervention, data on nutritional issues, intimate partner violence, physical exercise, healthcare delivery systems, knowledge, practice, HBM, and TPB tools were gathered.

The dietary diversity score (DDS) was computed using a qualitative 24-h dietary recall, as previously described 25 . The DDS score was determined using nine food categories to reflect the sufficiency of the diet’s micronutrients. All food and beverages consumed the previous day, both inside and outside of participants' houses, were asked to be recalled. Food groups that were consumed during the reference period were given a score of "1", and those that were not consumed were given a score of "0" for the nine groups: (1) starchy foods; (2) dark green leafy vegetables; (3) vitamin-A-rich fruits and vegetables; (4) other fruits and vegetables; (5) beans, nuts, and seeds; (6) meat and fish; (7) fats and oils; (8) milk and milk products; and (9) eggs. The food groups ingested during the reference period were added together and ranked into tertiles, with the highest tertile denoting a high DDS and the two lower tertiles denoting a low DDS 34 .

Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to generate a wealth index. Twenty-one variables entered into PCA included the availability of a water source, a latrine, a bank account, different types of living houses, livestock, agricultural ownership, and items of household property 5 , 35 . Details are published elsewhere 25 .

Twenty-seven previously approved questions were used to assess the state of food security. Families with fewer than the first two, two to ten, eleven to seventeen, and more than seventeen food insecurity indicators, respectively, were classified as food secure, mildly, moderately, and severely food insecure, respectively 36 , 37 .

Perceived susceptibility (3 questions), perceived severity and perceived benefits (4 items each), perceived barriers (5 items), cues to action and self-efficacy (4 items each) were individually evaluated using the sums of a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree) 28 and TPB constructs: attitude and subjective norms (3 items each), perceived behavioral control (2 items), and behavioral intention (7 items) 18 . The factor scores were summed and divided into tertiles. Perceived susceptibility, severity, benefit, barriers, cues to action, self-efficacy, positive attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and behavioral intention were all labelled "yes" in the highest tertile but "no" in the two lower tertiles.

The importance of fruits and vegetables was also assessed using a ten-item knowledge test 38 . A respondent received a 1 if they responded correctly; otherwise, they received a 0. The scores were then calculated and ordered in tertile order. Last, a high degree of nutrition knowledge was assigned to the top tertile, while a low level of nutrition knowledge was assigned to the two lower tertiles. After the data collectors were trained, they measured the MUAC of pregnant women. After 36 weeks and up to the time of birth, end-line data were obtained.

Outcome assessment

Mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) was measured in this study to estimate the nutritional status of the women 39 , 40 . Because MUAC changes minimally during pregnancy, it is considered a better indicator of pregnant women's nutritional status than body mass index (BMI), because pregnancy-related weight gain affects the reliability of using BMI to assess pregnant women's nutritional status. MUAC measurements were taken on the left arm of subjects to the nearest 0.1 cm using flexible and nonstretchable measuring tape, using standard procedures 40 . Pregnant women with MUAC ≥ 23 cm were considered well-nourished, while those with MUAC < 23 cm were classified as undernourished 40 , 41 . Details have been described (Supplementary Table 2 ).

Data quality control

The questionnaire was initially created in English, translated into the local languages, "Afan Oromo" and "Amharic," and then back-translated into English by language specialists to guarantee the consistency of the results. The questionnaire was pretested on 5% of the total sample size of study participants, and the questionnaire's face and content validity were examined by an epidemiologist and a biostatistician 25 . Eight BSc data collectors and two MPH professionals each received training on the study's goals, data collection tools, and ethical considerations to minimize interviewer bias. Supervisors rigorously monitored the data collectors every day to ensure that the questionnaire was successfully completed, and they promptly intervened if it was not. To increase the response rate, the study participants were questioned at their residences.

Data processing and analysis

The data were checked for completeness, consistency, and accuracy and entered into, cleaned, and analyzed using SPSS for Windows version 20 and STATA version 14. Descriptive statistics, including frequencies, percentages, means, standard deviations, and standard errors, were generated for the selected predictors and covariates. Details of model assumptions have been described (Supplementary Table 3 ). The baseline characteristics of the intervention and control groups were assessed using the chi-square test. The independent sample t test and paired t test were used to compare MUAC between and within the intervention and control groups, respectively. The difference in difference (DID) estimated the difference in the change in the mean value of the end-line and baseline of MUAC 42 .

We employed a linear mixed effect model (LMM) to evaluate the intervention effect on MUAC, accounting for the clustering effect. The identification of clusters and respondents was analyzed as a random effect in the analytic model. The intervention's effectiveness was evaluated using time and intervention interaction.

Four models were fitted. The null model (model without predictors), model I (MUAC + group), model II (MUAC + group, time, group × time), and model III (MUAC + groups + predictors and covariates) were all fitted. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for MUAC in the null model was 0.795, indicating the variability of the conditions attributed to the clustering effect. The Deviance (− 2 LL), Akaike’s information criterion (AIC), and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) values were used for model comparison. The deviance value for Model III was the lowest, indicating that the full model for MUAC was a best-fit model. As a result, Model III was used to make interpretations. The effect size was expressed as an estimate (β), along with the SE and 95% CI. Sensitivity analysis using per protocol analysis was conducted. However, there was no difference in the effect size. Initially, randomly assigned pregnant women were examined in the groups to which they were assigned (intention-to-treat analysis principle). Pregnant women who discontinued due to adherence failure or relocation were included in the intention to treat analysis. The statistical significance of the association was declared at a p value of less than 0.05, and tests were two-sided.

Ethical approval

The current study was ethically approved by Jimma University's Institutional Review Board before it began (Protocol #: IRB000296/2012). The health offices provided an authorization letter. All methods were carried out in according with the relevant tenets of Helsinki Declaration and good clinical practice 43 . Each respondent provided informed written consent. The respondents' privacy and confidentiality were ensured throughout the data collection and administration procedures. The trial for the study was retrospectively registered on Pan African Clinical Trials.gov with a registration number of PACTR202201731802989 on 24/01/2022. The study was reported following the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) 2010 statement 44 (Related manuscript Table 1 ).

Sociodemographic and economic factors of the participants

A total of 224 (98.7%) and 223 (98.2%) pregnant women were successfully interviewed and had MUAC measured in the intervention and control groups, respectively (Fig.  1 ). This was due to the inability to provide end-line data as the study subjects changed locations. The mean (± SD) age of the respondents was 25.93 (± 5.52) years for the intervention group and 24.24 (± 4.24) years for the control group. There was no substantial difference in baseline characteristics between the intervention and control groups (P value > 0.05) (Table 1 ).

Flow diagram of study subjects.

Health belief model and the theory of planned behavior scores

There was a significant improvement in the score of the HBM and TPB constructs except for perceived benefit and cues to actions among the intervention group before and after the intervention (P-value < 0.0001). Furthermore, with the exception of perceived severity and cues to action, there was a significant difference in the dimensions of the HBM and TPB in the end-line data (Table 2 ). Moreover, the HBM and TPB constructs revealed a strong correlation with MUAC (Supplementary Table 4 ).

Mid-upper arm circumference

There was no difference between the control and intervention groups at baseline in terms of MUAC (P-value < 0.056). The end-line results did, nevertheless, reveal a significant difference between the control group and intervention group (P < 0.0001). The net mean MUAC difference (difference in differences) between the intervention and control groups was 0.59 ± 0.05 cm, which was statistically significant (P < 0.0001) (Table 3 ).

The variance of the residual errors at the individual level of the average MUAC was determined to be 0.41. This difference was statistically significant (P < 0.0001). The intraindividual correlation coefficient was 0.795, revealing the relevance of accounting when fitting four-level models. The multivariable linear mixed model revealed that having received nutrition education intervention was positively associated with MUAC (β = 0.85, 95% CI 0.60, 1.12, P < 0.0001) (Table 4 ).

We aimed to assess the effect of nutrition education interventions on nutritional status among pregnant women in Robe and Goba Towns, Southeast Ethiopia. The study’s findings revealed that nutrition education interventions were positively associated with MUAC among pregnant women. The net mean MUAC difference between the intervention and control groups was 0.59 cm. The MUAC of the pregnant women in the intervention group significantly improved compared to that of control group. This study’s findings supported those of other studies conducted in rural Ethiopia 19 , 45 . The possible explanation might be that nutrition education leads to favorable attitudes and, thus, changes in nutrition behavior.

Nutritional education interventions increased MUAC by 0.85 cm in urban pregnant women. The results agreed with those of studies conducted in rural Ethiopia 19 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 and Rwanda 49 , in which there was a substantial improvement in MUAC among pregnant women after the intervention. This might be because nutrition education provided by public health specialists was effective in improving the MUAC of pregnant women. Our study's findings would add to a body of knowledge as it was conducted in urban settings.

This study used nutrition education strategies. Nutrition educators employed education guides, the health belief model (HBM), and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), and trimester-based education. In contrast, the healthcare system's current education does not include counselling guides, a health behavior model, or a theory. Similarly, this study’s finding agreed with a study conducted in Iran 50 . This could be because nutrition education interventions increase the awareness of nutrition intake of pregnant women.

Nutrition education interventions in our study were based on the HBM and TPB, two of the most commonly used health behavior models and theories 16 . Nutrition interventions based on an integrated HBM and the TPB increase pregnant women's diet knowledge, dietary diversity, and nutritional status 18 .

A previous study found a significant favorable effect of using HBM and TPB constructs during prenatal counselling to encourage healthy eating behavior 51 . This could be because women who attend nutrition education using the HBM believe that the repercussions of malnutrition are severe, and they also believe that they are perceived to suffer the consequences of malnutrition. In addition, the pregnant women perceived that the benefits of consuming enough and diverse food outweighed the hurdles to obtaining it. Their perspective can then influence their attitude and actions. These components also have an important role in raising women's intentions to eat a balanced diet, which directly contributes to increasing MUAC among pregnant women 19 .

Nutrition education can increase nutrition knowledge, but its effectiveness in changing actual eating behaviors and practices is often limited. This highlights the complex nature of nutrition interventions and the need for multifaceted approaches 52 . Education alone may be ineffectual if the environment does not encourage healthy behaviours. Nutrition education attempts frequently result in only modest or short-term improvements, with long-term behaviour change being more difficult to achieve with education alone. While education can help with knowledge and some behaviours, it may not be as effective as direct supplementation in treating critical nutrients deficits. Seasonality, distance to markets, family poverty, gender inequities, and cultural or religious traditions that influence food consumption can all have an impact on nutrition education's efficacy 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 . It's worth noting that a mix of education and supplementing strategies may be most effective in treating complicated nutritional concerns 58 . Furthermore, building an enabling atmosphere in which individuals can apply what they've learned is critical to the success of nutrition education programmes 52 .

Interventions to combat undernutrition during pregnancy can improve the mother’s and child’s health, as optimal nutrition decreases short-term impacts on mothers (adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, anemia, and adverse birth outcomes, such as low birth weight, preterm birth, and stillbirth) and long-term impacts (stunting, micronutrient deficiencies, and chronic diseases) later in life 59 .

The findings have significant practical ramifications. The results indicated that tailoring current nutrition policies, strategies, and initiatives is justified to integrate the health behavior model and theory into nutrition education within Ethiopia's current health system. Moreover, enhancing maternal dietary diversity in Ethiopia urgently needs interdisciplinary cooperation and a comprehensive strategy.

The main advantage of our study was that it was a community-based, cluster-randomized, controlled trial in which encouraging the consumption of fruits and vegetables was integrated with the HBM and TPB, both of which are applicable to relevant and conventional ANC. Cluster randomized controlled trials need to have both internal and external validity to be generalizable 60 . The cluster character of the study was taken into consideration during both the selection of the sample size and the data analysis. Evaluation of program execution and adoption, or the degree to which the setting is representative of the general population, could similarly be used to measure external validity 60 . However, recall bias and social desirability bias could have influenced the findings of our study. Despite this, efforts were made to probe pregnant women numerous times over the course of 24 h to improve dietary recall. Self-reporting, on the other hand, is frequently used in nutrition assessments and has been shown to have more predictive ability than objective assessments 61 . The nutrition education intervention was trimester-based, promoting improved dietary diversity, including increased fruit and vegetable intake during pregnancy.

The results showed that nutrition education interventions substantially improved mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) among pregnant women. Integrating health belief model (HBM) and theory of planned behavior (TPB) are effective in improving MUAC among pregnant women. Moreover, it could be an important nutrition education intervention initiative in urban settings.

Data availability

All relevant data for this work are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.

Tahir, M. J. et al. Higher maternal diet quality during pregnancy and lactation is associated with lower infant weight-for-length, body fat percent, and fat mass in early postnatal life. Nutrients https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11030632 (2019).

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Chia, A. R. et al. Maternal dietary patterns and birth outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Adv. Nutr. 10 , 685–695. https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmy123 (2019).

Martorell, R. Improved nutrition in the first 1000 days and adult human capital and health. Am. J. Hum. Biol. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.22952 (2017).

World Health Organization. Double-duty actions for nutrition: Policy brief (World Health Organization, 2017).

Google Scholar  

Central Statistical Agency, I. Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Central Statistical Agency, Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The DHS Program ICF Rockville, Maryland, USA, 2017 (2016).

Gebre, B., Biadgilign, S., Taddese, Z., Legesse, T. & Letebo, M. Determinants of malnutrition among pregnant and lactating women under humanitarian setting in Ethiopia. BMC Nutr. 4 , 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40795-018-0222-2 (2018).

Dadi, A. F. & Desyibelew, H. D. Undernutrition and its associated factors among pregnant mothers in Gondar town, Northwest Ethiopia. PLoS One 14 , e0215305. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215305 (2019).

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Fite, M. B., Tura, A. K., Yadeta, T. A., Oljira, L. & Roba, K. T. Factors associated with undernutrition among pregnant women in Haramaya district, Eastern Ethiopia: A community-based study. PLoS One 18 , e0282641. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282641 (2023).

Zewude, S. B., Beshah, M. H., Ahunie, M. A., Arega, D. T. & Addisu, D. Undernutrition and associated factors among pregnant women in Ethiopia. A systematic review and meta-analysis. Front. Nutr. 11 , 1347851. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2024.1347851 (2024).

Workicho, A. et al. Burden and determinants of undernutrition among young pregnant women in Ethiopia. Matern Child Nutr. 15 , e12751. https://doi.org/10.1111/mcn.12751 (2019).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Fowler, J. K., Evers, S. E. & Campbell, M. K. Inadequate dietary intakes among pregnant women. Can. J. Diet Pract. Res. 73 , 72–77. https://doi.org/10.3148/73.2.2012.72 (2012).

EPHI. Ethiopian Public Health Institute Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Ethiopia National Food Consumption Survey (2013).

World Health Organization. Nutrition counselling during pregnancy. https://www.who.int/tools/elena/interventions/nutrition-counselling-pregnancy (2023).

Spronk, I., Kullen, C., Burdon, C. & O’Connor, H. Relationship between nutrition knowledge and dietary intake. Br. J. Nutr. 111 , 1713–1726. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007114514000087 (2014).

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Hambidge, K. M. & Krebs, N. F. Strategies for optimizing maternal nutrition to promote infant development. Reprod. Health 15 , 87. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12978-018-0534-3 (2018).

Glanz, K., Rimer, B. K. & Viswanath, K. Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research, and Practice (Wiley, 2008).

Ajzen, I. The theory of planned behavior. Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 50 , 179–211 (1991).

Article   Google Scholar  

Chitsaz, A., Javadi, M., Lin, C.-Y. & Pakpour, A. The predictors of healthy eating behavior among pregnant women: An application of the theory of planned behavior. Int. J. Pediatr. 5 , 5897–5905 (2017).

Demilew, Y. M., Alene, G. D. & Belachew, T. Effect of guided counseling on nutritional status of pregnant women in West Gojjam zone, Ethiopia: A cluster-randomized controlled trial. Nutr. J. 19 , 38. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-020-00536-w (2020).

Getaneh, T. et al. Predictors of malnutrition among pregnant women in Ethiopia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Hum. Nutr. Metab. 26 , 200131 (2021).

Wakwoya, E. B., Belachew, T. & Girma, T. Determinants of nutritional status among pregnant women in East Shoa zone, Central Ethiopia. Front. Nutr. 9 , 958591. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.958591 (2022).

Gelebo, D. G., Gebremichael, M. A., Asale, G. A. & Berbada, D. A. Prevalence of undernutrition and its associated factors among pregnant women in Konso district, southern Ethiopia: A community-based cross-sectional study. BMC Nutr. 7 , 32. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40795-021-00437-z (2021).

Diddana, T. Z. Factors associated with dietary practice and nutritional status of pregnant women in Dessie town, northeastern Ethiopia: A community-based cross-sectional study. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth 19 , 517. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2649-0 (2019).

Organization, W. H. WHO recommendations on antenatal care for a positive pregnancy experience . (World Health Organization, 2016).

Beressa, G., Whiting, S. J. & Belachew, T. Effect of nutrition education integrating the health belief model and theory of planned behavior on dietary diversity of pregnant women in Southeast Ethiopia: A cluster randomized controlled trial. Nutr. J. 23 , 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-023-00907-z (2024).

Kimani-Murage, E. W. et al. Effectiveness of home-based nutritional counselling and support on exclusive breastfeeding in urban poor settings in Nairobi: A cluster randomized controlled trial. Glob. Health 13 , 90. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-017-0314-9 (2017).

Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A. G. & Buchner, A. G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behav. Res. Methods 39 , 175–191. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03193146 (2007).

Marías, Y. & Glasauer, P. Guidelines for Assessing Nutrition-Related Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices . (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 2014).

Ministry of Health. Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Training of trainers manual for counseling on maternal, infant and young child nutrition (2011).

Assefa, Y., Gelaw, Y. A., Hill, P. S., Taye, B. W. & Van Damme, W. Community health extension program of Ethiopia, 2003–2018: Successes and challenges toward universal coverage for primary healthcare services. Glob. Health 15 , 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-019-0470-1 (2019).

Zerfu, T. A., Umeta, M. & Baye, K. Dietary diversity during pregnancy is associated with reduced risk of maternal anemia, preterm delivery, and low birth weight in a prospective cohort study in rural Ethiopia. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 103 , 1482–1488 (2016).

Yeneabat, T. et al. Maternal dietary diversity and micronutrient adequacy during pregnancy and related factors in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia, 2016. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth 19 , 173. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2299-2 (2019).

Alamneh, A. A., Endris, B. S. & Gebreyesus, S. H. Caffeine, alcohol, khat, and tobacco use during pregnancy in Butajira, South Central Ethiopia. PLoS One 15 , e0232712. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232712 (2020).

Belachew, T. et al. Food insecurity, food based coping strategies and suboptimal dietary practices of adolescents in Jimma zone Southwest Ethiopia. PloS one 8 , e57643 (2013).

Article   ADS   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Rutstein, S. O. Steps to constructing the new DHS Wealth Index. Rockville, MD: ICF International (2015).

Coates, J., Swindale, A. & Bilinsky, P. Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) for measurement of food access: Indicator guide: version 3. (2007).

Gebreyesus, S. H., Lunde, T., Mariam, D. H., Woldehanna, T. & Lindtjørn, B. Is the adapted Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) developed internationally to measure food insecurity valid in urban and rural households of Ethiopia?. BMC Nutr. 1 , 1–10 (2015).

Zelalem, T., Mikyas, A. & Erdaw, T. Nutritional knowledge, attitude and practices among pregnant women who attend antenatal care at public hospitals of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Int. J. Nursing Midwifery 10 , 81–89 (2018).

Fakier, A., Petro, G. & Fawcus, S. Mid-upper arm circumference: A surrogate for body mass index in pregnant women. S. Afr. Med. J. 107 , 606–610. https://doi.org/10.7196/SAMJ.2017.v107i7.12255 (2017).

Tang, A. et al. Determining a global mid-upper arm circumference cutoff to assess malnutrition in pregnant women. Washington, DC: FHI 360. Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA) (2016).

Ghosh, S. et al. Nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive factors associated with mid-upper arm circumference as a measure of nutritional status in pregnant Ethiopian women: Implications for programming in the first 1000 days. PLoS One 14 , e0214358. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214358 (2019).

Wing, C., Simon, K. & Bello-Gomez, R. A. Designing difference in difference studies: best practices for public health policy research. Annu. Rev. Public Health 39 , 453–469. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040617-013507 (2018).

World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. JAMA . 310 , 2191–2194. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2013.281053 (2013).

Schulz, K. F., Altman, D. G. & Moher, D. CONSORT 2010 statement: Updated guidelines for reporting parallel group randomised trials. BMJ 340 , c332. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c332 (2010).

Tsegaye, D., Tamiru, D. & Belachew, T. Theory-based nutrition education intervention through male involvement improves the dietary diversity practice and nutritional status of pregnant women in rural Illu Aba Bor Zone, Southwest Ethiopia: A quasi-experimental study. Matern Child Nutr. 18 , e13350. https://doi.org/10.1111/mcn.13350 (2022).

Wakwoya, E. B., Lema, T. B. & Nigatu, T. G. Effect of intensive nutrition education and counseling on nutritional status of pregnant women in East Shoa Zone, Ethiopia. Front. Nutr. 10 , 1144709 (2023).

Kuma, M. N., Tamiru, D. & Belachew, T. Effects of nutrition education and home gardening interventions on feto-maternal outcomes among pregnant women in Jimma Zone, Southwest Ethiopia: A cluster randomized controlled trial. PLoS One 18 , e0288150. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288150 (2023).

Gebremichael, M. A. & Belachew Lema, T. The effect of nutrition and health behavior change communication through community-level actors on the nutritional status of pregnant women in the Ambo district, Ethiopia: A randomized controlled trial. Food Sci. Nutr. 11 , 7172–7187. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsn3.3643 (2023).

Habtu, M., Agena, A. G., Umugwaneza, M., Mochama, M. & Munyanshongore, C. Effect of integrated nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific intervention package on maternal malnutrition among pregnant women in Rwanda. Matern Child Nutr. 18 , e13367. https://doi.org/10.1111/mcn.13367 (2022).

Sharifirad, G. R. et al. The effectiveness of nutrition education program based on health belief model compared with traditional training. J. Educ. Health Promot. 2 , 15. https://doi.org/10.4103/2277-9531.112684 (2013).

Khoramabadi, M. et al. Effects of education based on health belief model on dietary behaviors of Iranian pregnant women. Glob. J. Health Sci. 8 , 230–239. https://doi.org/10.5539/gjhs.v8n2p230 (2015).

Adeoya, A. A., Akinwusi, A. T. & Nagatomi, R. Effectiveness of nutrition education in enhancing knowledge and attitude of pupils on choice of school mid-day meal in Ibadan, Nigeria. Food Sci. Nutr. 11 , 3758–3766. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsn3.3359 (2023).

Hirvonen, K., Taffesse, A. S. & Hassen, I. W. Seasonality and household diets in Ethiopia. Public Health Nutr. 19 , 1723–1730 (2016).

Abay, K. & Hirvonen, K. Does market access mitigate the impact of seasonality on child growth? Panel data evidence from northern Ethiopia. J. Develop. Studies 53 , 1414–1429 (2017).

D’Haene, E., Desiere, S., D’Haese, M., Verbeke, W. & Schoors, K. Religion, food choices, and demand seasonality: Evidence from the Ethiopian milk market. Foods 8 , 167 (2019).

Bai, Y., Naumova, E. N. & Masters, W. A. Seasonality of diet costs reveals food system performance in East Africa. Sci. Adv. 6 , eabc2162 (2020).

Handa, S. & Mlay, G. Food consumption patterns, seasonality and market access in Mozambique. Develop. Southern Africa 23 , 541–560 (2006).

Hicks-Roof, K. Nutrition education for providers is limited: It is time for increased education to boost interprofessional collaboration!. Educ. Health (Abingdon) 35 , 105–108. https://doi.org/10.4103/efh.EfH_72_20 (2022).

Harvard T. H. Chan. School of Public Health. Maternal and child health research program in Ethiopia makes strides. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/maternal-and-child-health-research-program-in-ethiopia-makes-strides/ .

Eldridge, S., Ashby, D., Bennett, C., Wakelin, M. & Feder, G. Internal and external validity of cluster randomised trials: Systematic review of recent trials. BMJ 336 , 876–880. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39517.495764.25 (2008).

FAO, F. Minimum dietary diversity for women: A guide for measurement. Rome: FAO 82 (2016).

Download references

Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to Jimma University and local administrative officials for their support. Our thanks also go to the supervisors, data collectors, and pregnant women for their participation.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Public Health, School of Health Sciences, Madda Walabu University, Goba, Ethiopia

Girma Beressa

Nutrition and Dietetics Department, Faculty of Public Health, Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia

Girma Beressa & Tefera Belachew

College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

Susan J. Whiting

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

GB participated in the conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, resource acquisition, software, supervision, validation, writing the original draft, writing a review, and substantial editing. SJW and TB participated in the conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, resource acquisition, software, supervision, validation, substantial review, and editing. All the authors have read and approved the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Girma Beressa .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Supplementary figure 1., supplementary table 1., supplementary table 2., supplementary table 3., supplementary table 4., rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Beressa, G., Whiting, S.J. & Belachew, T. Effect of nutrition education on the nutritional status of pregnant women in Robe and Goba Towns, Southeast Ethiopia, using a cluster randomized controlled trial. Sci Rep 14 , 19706 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-70861-1

Download citation

Received : 03 January 2024

Accepted : 21 August 2024

Published : 24 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-70861-1

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Nutrition education
• Nutritional status
• Pregnant women

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines . If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Value of Education Essay

500 words essay on value of education.

Education is a weapon for the people by which they can live a high-quality life. Furthermore, education makes people easy to govern but at the same time it makes them impossible to be enslaved. Let us take a look at the incredible importance of education with this value of education essay.

                                                                                                                        Value Of Education Essay

Importance of Education

Education makes people independent. Furthermore, it increases knowledge, strengthens the mind, and forms character. Moreover, education enables people to put their potentials to optimum use.

Education is also a type of reform for the human mind. Without education, the training of the human mind would always remain incomplete.

Education makes a person an efficient decision-maker and a right thinker. Moreover, this is possible only with the help of education. This is because education acquaints an individual with knowledge of the world around him and beyond, besides teaching the individual to be a better judge of the present.

A person that receives education shall have more avenues for the life of his choice. Moreover, an educated person will be able to make decisions in the best possible manner. This is why there is such a high demand for educated people over uneducated people for the purpose of employment .

Negative Impact of Lack of Education

Without education, a person would feel trapped. One can understand this by the example of a man who is confined to a closed room, completely shut from the outside world, with no way to exit it. Most noteworthy, an uneducated person can be compared to this confined man.

Education enables a person to access the open world. Furthermore, a person without education is unable to read and write. Consequently, a person without education would remain closed to all the knowledge and wisdom an educated person can gain from books and other mediums.

The literacy rate of India stands at around 60% in comparison to more than 80% literacy rate of the rest of the world. Moreover, the female literacy rate is 54.16% in accordance with the 2001 population census. These figures certainly highlight the massive problem of lack of education in India.

To promote education, the government of India takes it as a national policy. The intention of the government is to target the very cause of illiteracy. As such, the government endeavours to eradicate illiteracy, which in turn would lead to the eradication of poverty .

The government is running various literacy programmes like the free-education programme, weekend and part-time study programme, continuing education programme, mid-day meal programme, adult literacy programme, etc. With the consistent success rate of these programmes, hopefully, things will better.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of Value of Education Essay

Education is one of the most effective ways to make people better and more productive. It is a tool that can make people easy to lead but at the same time difficult to drive. Education removes naivety and ignorance from the people, leaving them aware, informed, and enlightened.

FAQs For Value of Education Essay

Question 1: What is the importance of education in our lives?

Answer 1: Having an education in a particular area helps people think, feel, and behave in a way that contributes to their success, and improves not only their personal satisfaction but also enhances their community. In addition, education develops the human personality and prepares people for life experiences.

Question 2: Explain the meaning of true education?

Answer 2: True education means going beyond earning degrees and bookish knowledge when it comes to learning. Furthermore, true education means inculcating a helping attitude, optimistic thinking, and moral values in students with the aim of bringing positive changes in society.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics

Education is at the heart of this country’s many divisions..

Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004 .

John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a much different path to the White House, losing non-college-educated whites by a two-to-one margin while securing 60 percent of the college-educated vote. The latest New York Times /Siena poll of the 2022 midterms showed this pattern holding firm, with Democrats winning 55 percent of voters with bachelor’s degrees but only 39 percent of those without.

A more educated Democratic coalition is, naturally, a more affluent one. In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution were more Republican than those in the bottom 95 percent. Now, the opposite is true: Among America’s white majority, the rich voted to the left of the middle class and the poor in 2016 and 2020, while the poor voted to the right of the middle class and the rich.

In political-science parlance, the collapse of the New Deal–era alignment — in which voters’ income levels strongly predicted their partisan preference — is often referred to as “class dealignment.” The increasing tendency for politics to divide voters along educational lines, meanwhile, is known as “education polarization.”

There are worse things for a political coalition to be than affluent or educated. Professionals vote and donate at higher rates than blue-collar workers. But college graduates also comprise a minority of the electorate — and an underrepresented minority at that. America’s electoral institutions all give disproportionate influence to parts of the country with low levels of educational attainment. And this is especially true of the Senate . Therefore, if the coalitional trends of the past half-century continue unabated — and Democrats keep gaining college-educated votes at the expense of working-class ones — the party will find itself locked out of federal power. Put differently, such a development would put an increasingly authoritarian GOP on the glide path to political dominance.

And unless education polarization is substantially reversed , progressives are likely to continue seeing their reform ambitions pared back sharply by Congress’s upper chamber, even when Democrats manage to control it.

These realities have generated a lively intra-Democratic debate over the causes and implications of class dealignment. To some pundits , consultants, and data journalists , the phenomenon’s fundamental cause is the cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class. In their telling, college graduates in general — and Democratic college graduates in particular — tend to have different social values, cultural sensibilities, and issue priorities than the median non-college-educated voter. As the New York Times ’s Nate Cohn puts the point, college graduates tend to be more cosmopolitan and culturally liberal, report higher levels of social trust, and are more likely to “attribute racial inequality, crime, and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems” rather than “individualist and parochial explanations.”

What’s more, since blue America’s journalists, politicians, and activists are overwhelmingly college graduates, highly educated liberals exert disproportionate influence over their party’s actions and identity. Therefore, as the Democrats’ well-credentialed wing has swelled, the party’s image and ideological positioning have grown more reflective of the professional class’s distinct tastes — and thus less appealing to the electorate’s working-class majority.

This theory does not sit well with all Democratic journalists, politicians, and activists. Some deny the existence of a diploma divide on cultural values, while others insist on its limited political salience. Many progressives attribute class dealignment to America’s pathological racial politics and/or the Democrats’ failures of economic governance . In this account, the New Deal coalition was unmade by a combination of a backlash to Black Americans’ growing prominence in Democratic politics and the Democratic Party’s failures to prevent its former working-class base from suffering decades of stagnant living standards and declining life expectancy .

An appreciation of these developments is surely indispensable for understanding class dealignment in the United States. But they don’t tell the whole story. Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon; it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every western democracy . It is therefore unlikely that our nation’s white-supremacist history can fully explain the development. And though center-left parties throughout the West have shared some common failings, these inadequacies cannot tell us why many working-class voters have not merely dropped out of politics but rather begun voting for parties even more indifferent to their material interests.

In my view, education polarization cannot be understood without a recognition of the values divide between educated professionals and working people in the aggregate. That divide is rooted in each class’s disparate ways of life, economic imperatives, socialization experiences, and levels of material security. By itself, the emergence of this gap might not have been sufficient to trigger class dealignment, but its adverse political implications have been greatly exacerbated by the past half-century of inequitable growth, civic decline, and media fragmentation.

The college-educated population has distinct ideological tendencies and psychological sensibilities.

Educated professionals tend to be more socially liberal than the general public. In fact, the correlation between high levels of educational attainment and social liberalism is among the most robust in political science. As early as the 1950s, researchers documented the tendency of college graduates to espouse more progressive views than the general public on civil liberties and gender roles. In the decades since, as the political scientist Elizabeth Simon writes , this correlation has held up with “remarkable geographical and temporal consistency.” Across national boundaries and generations, voters with college degrees have been more likely than those without to support legal abortion, LGBTQ+ causes, the rights of racial minorities, and expansive immigration. They are also more likely to hold “post-material” policy priorities — which is to say, to prioritize issues concerning individual autonomy, cultural values, and big-picture social goals above those concerning one’s immediate material and physical security. This penchant is perhaps best illustrated by the highly educated’s distinctively strong support for environmental causes, even in cases when ecological preservation comes at a cost to economic growth.

Underlying these disparate policy preferences are distinct psychological profiles. The college educated are more likely to espouse moral values and attitudes associated with the personality trait “ openness to experience .” High “openness” individuals are attracted to novelty, skeptical of traditional authority, and prize personal freedom and cultural diversity. “Closed” individuals, by contrast, have an aversion to the unfamiliar and are therefore attracted to moral principles that promote certainty, order, and security. Virtually all human beings fall somewhere between these two ideal types. But the college educated as a whole are closer to the “open” end of the continuum than the general public is.

All of these distinctions between more- and less-educated voters are probabilistic, not absolute. There are Catholic theocrats with Harvard Ph.D.’s and anarchists who dropped out of high school. A nation the size of the U.S. is surely home to many millions of working-class social liberals and well-educated reactionaries. Political attitudes do not proceed automatically from any demographic characteristic, class position, or psychological trait. At the individual level, ideology is shaped by myriad historical inheritances and social experiences.

And yet, if people can come by socially liberal, “high openness” politics from any walk of life, they are much more likely to do so if that walk cuts across a college campus. (And, of course, they are even more likely to harbor this distinct psychological and ideological profile if they graduate from college and then choose to become professionally involved in Democratic politics.)

The path to the professional class veers left.

There are a few theoretical explanations for this. One holds that spending your late adolescence on a college campus tends to socialize you into cultural liberalism: Through some combination of increased exposure to people from a variety of geographic backgrounds, or the iconoclastic ethos of a liberal-arts education, or the predominantly left-of-center university faculty , or the substantive content of curricula, people tend to leave college with a more cosmopolitan and “open” worldview than they had upon entering.

Proving this theory is difficult since doing so requires controlling for selection effects. Who goes to college is not determined by random chance. The subset of young people who have the interests, aptitudes, and opportunities necessary for pursuing higher education have distinct characteristics long before they show up on campus. Some social scientists contend that such “selection effects” entirely explain the distinct political tendencies of college graduates. After all, the “high openness” personality trait is associated with higher IQs and more interest in academics. So perhaps attending college doesn’t lead people to develop culturally liberal sensibilities so much as developing culturally liberal sensibilities leads people to go to college.

Some research has tried to account for this possibility. Political scientists in the United Kingdom have managed to control for the preadult views and backgrounds of college graduates by exploiting surveys that tracked the same respondents through adolescence and into adulthood. Two recent analyses of such data have found that the college experience does seem to directly increase a person’s likelihood of becoming more socially liberal in their 20s than they were in their teens.

A separate study from the U.S. sought to control for the effects of familial background and childhood experiences by examining the disparate “sociopolitical” attitudes of sibling pairs in which one went to college while the other did not. It found that attending college was associated with greater “support for civil liberties and egalitarian gender-role beliefs.”

Other recent research , however, suggests that even these study designs may fail to control for all of the background factors that bias college attendees toward liberal views before they arrive on campus. So we have some good evidence that attending college directly makes people more culturally liberal, but that evidence is not entirely conclusive.

Yet if one posits that higher education does not produce social liberals but merely attracts them, a big theoretical problem remains: Why has the population of social liberals increased in tandem with that of college graduates?

The proportion of millennials who endorse left-wing views on issues of race, gender, immigration , and the environment is higher than the proportion of boomers who do so. And such views are more prevalent within the baby-boom generation than they were among the Silent Generation. This cannot be explained merely as a consequence of America’s burgeoning racial diversity, since similar generational patterns have been observed in European nations with lower rates of ethnic change. But the trend is consistent with another component of demographic drift: Each successive generation has had a higher proportion of college graduates than its predecessor. Between 1950 and 2019, the percentage of U.S. adults with bachelor’s degrees increased from 4 percent to 33 percent.  

Perhaps rising college attendance did not directly cause the “high-openness,” post-material, culturally progressive proportion of the population to swell. But then, what did?

One possibility is that, even if mass college attendance does not directly promote the development of “high openness” values, the mass white-collar economy does. If socially liberal values are well suited to the demands and lifeways inherent to professional employment in a globally integrated economy, then, as such employment expands, we would expect a larger share of the population to adopt socially liberal values. And there is indeed reason to think the professional vocation lends itself to social liberalism.

Entering the professional class often requires not only a four-year degree, but also, a stint in graduate school or a protracted period of overwork and undercompensation at the lowest ranks of one’s field. This gives the class’s aspirants a greater incentive to postpone procreation until later in life than the median worker. That in turn may give them a heightened incentive to favor abortion rights and liberal sexual mores.

The demands of the professional career may influence value formation in other ways. As a team of political scientists from Harvard and the University of Bonn argued in a 2020 paper , underlying the ideological divide between social liberals and conservatives may be a divergence in degrees of “moral universalism,” i.e., “the extent to which people’s altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases.” Conservatives tend to feel stronger obligations than liberals to their own kin and neighbors and their religious, ethnic, and racial groups. Liberals, by contrast, tend to spread their altruism and trust thinner across a wider sphere of humanity; they are less compelled by the particularist obligations of inherited group loyalties and more apt to espouse a universalist ethos in which all individuals are of equal moral concern, irrespective of their group attachments.

Given that pursuing a professional career often requires leaving one’s native community and entering meritocratic institutions that are ideologically and legally committed to the principle that group identities matter less than individual aptitudes, the professional vocation may favor the development of a morally universalistic outlook — and thus more progressive views on questions of anti-discrimination and weaker identification with inherited group identities.

Further, in a globalized era, white-collar workers will often need to work with colleagues on other continents and contemplate social and economic developments in far-flung places. This may encourage both existing and aspiring professionals to develop more cosmopolitan outlooks.

Critically, parents who are themselves professionals — or who aspire for their children to secure a place in the educated, white-collar labor force — may seek to inculcate these values in their kids from a young age. For example, my own parents sent me to a magnet elementary school where students were taught Japanese starting in kindergarten. This curriculum was designed to appeal to parents concerned with their children’s capacity to thrive in the increasingly interconnected (and, in the early 1990s American imagination, increasingly Japanese-dominated) economy of tomorrow.

In this way, the expansion of the white-collar sector may increase the prevalence of “high-openness” cosmopolitan traits and values among rising generations long before they arrive on campus.

More material security, more social liberalism.

Ronald Inglehart’s theory of “ cultural evolution ” provides a third, complementary explanation for both the growing prevalence of social liberalism over the past half-century and for that ideology’s disproportionate popularity among the college educated.

In Inglehart’s account, people who experience material security in youth tend to develop distinctive values and preferences from those who do not: If childhood teaches you to take your basic material needs for granted, you’re more likely to develop culturally progressive values and post-material policy priorities.

Inglehart first formulated this theory in 1971 to explain the emerging cultural gap between the baby boomers and their parents. He noted that among western generations born before World War II, very large percentages had known hunger at some point in their formative years. The Silent Generation, for its part, had come of age in an era of economic depression and world wars. Inglehart argued that such pervasive material and physical insecurity was unfavorable soil for social liberalism: Under conditions of scarcity, human beings have a strong inclination to defer to established authority and tradition, to distrust out-groups, and to prize order and material security above self-expression and individual autonomy.

But westerners born into the postwar boom encountered a very different world from the Depression-wracked, war-torn one of their parents, let alone the cruel and unforgiving one encountered by common agriculturalists since time immemorial. Their world was one of rapid and widespread income growth. And these unprecedentedly prosperous conditions engendered a shift in the postwar generation’s values: When the boomers reached maturity, an exceptionally large share of the cohort evinced post-material priorities and espoused tolerance for out-groups, support for gender equality, concern for the environment, and antipathy for social hierarchies.

Since this transformation in values wasn’t rooted merely in the passage of time — but rather in the experience of abundance — it did not impact all social classes equally. Educated professionals are disproportionately likely to have had stable, middle-class childhoods. Thus, across the West, the post-material minority was disproportionately composed of college graduates in general and elite ones in particular. As Inglehart reported in 1981 , “among those less than 35 years old with jobs that lead to top management and top civil-service posts, Post-Materialists outnumber Materialists decisively: their numerical preponderance here is even greater than it is among students.”  

As with most big-picture models of political development, Inglehart’s theory is reductive and vulnerable to myriad objections. But his core premise — that, all else being equal, material abundance favors social liberalism while scarcity favors the opposite — has much to recommend it. As the World Values Survey has demonstrated, a nation’s degree of social liberalism (a.k.a. “self-expression values”) tightly correlates with its per-capita income. Meanwhile, as nations become wealthier, each successive generation tends to become more socially liberal than the previous one.

Critically, the World Values Survey data does not show an ineluctable movement toward ever-greater levels of social liberalism. Rather, when nations backslide economically, their populations’ progressivism declines. In the West, recessions have tended to reduce the prevalence of post-material values and increase support for xenophobic parties. But the relationship between material security and cultural liberalism is demonstrated most starkly by the experience of ex-communist states, many of which suffered a devastating collapse in living standards following the Soviet Union’s fall. In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, popular support for culturally progressive values plummeted around 1990 and has remained depressed ever since.

Inglehart’s theory offers real insights. As an account of education polarization, however, it presents a bit of a puzzle: If material security is the key driver of social liberalism, why have culture wars bifurcated electorates along lines of education instead of income? Put differently: Despite the material security provided by a high salary, when one controls for educational attainment, having a high income remains strongly associated with voting for conservatives.

One way to resolve this tension is to stipulate that the first two theories of education polarization we examined are also right: While material security is conducive to social liberalism, the college experience and demands of professional-class vocations are perhaps even more so. Thus, high-income voters who did not go to college will tend to be less socially liberal than those who did.

Separately, earning a high income is strongly associated with holding conservative views on fiscal policy. Therefore, even if the experience of material security biases high-income voters toward left-of-center views on cultural issues, their interest in low taxes may nevertheless compel them to vote for right-wing parties.

Voters with high levels of education but low incomes, meanwhile, are very often children of the middle class who made dumb career choices like, say, going into journalism. Such voters’ class backgrounds would theoretically bias them toward a socially liberal orientation, while their meager earnings would give them little reason to value conservative fiscal policy. Perhaps for this reason, “ high-education low-income voters ” are among the most reliably left-wing throughout the western world.

In any case, whatever qualifications and revisions we would wish to make to Inglehart’s theory, one can’t deny its prescience. In 1971, Inglehart forecast that intergenerational value change would redraw the lines of political conflict throughout the West. In his telling, the emergence of a novel value orientation that was disproportionately popular with influential elites would naturally shift the terrain of political conflict. And it would do so in a manner that undermined materialist, class-based voting: If conventional debates over income distribution pulled at the affluent right and the working-class left, the emerging cultural disputes pulled each in the opposite direction.

This proved to be, in the words of Gabriel Almond, “one of the few examples of successful prediction in political science.”

When the culture wars moved to the center of politics, the college educated moved left.

Whether we attribute the social liberalism of college graduates to their experiences on campus, their class’s incentive structures, their relative material security, or a combination of all three, a common set of predictions about western political development follows.

First, we would expect to see the political salience of cultural conflicts start to increase in the 1960s and ’70s as educated professionals became a mass force in western politics. Second, relatedly, we would expect that the historic correlation between having a college degree and voting for the right would start gradually eroding around the same time, owing to the heightened prominence of social issues.

Finally, we would expect education polarization to be most pronounced in countries where (1) economic development is most advanced (and thus the professional sector is most expansive) and (2) left-wing and right-wing parties are most sharply divided on cultural questions.

In their paper “Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty confirm all of these expectations.

The paper analyzes nearly every manifesto (a.k.a. “platform”) put forward by left-wing and right-wing parties in the past 300 elections. As anticipated by Inglehart, the researchers found that right-wing and left-wing parties began to develop distinct positions on “sociocultural” issues in the 1970s and that these distinctions grew steadily more profound over the ensuing 50 years. Thus, the salience of cultural issues did indeed increase just as college graduates became an electorally significant demographic.

As cultural conflict became more prominent, educated professionals became more left-wing. Controlling for other variables, in the mid-20th century, having a college diploma made one more likely to vote for parties of the right. By 2020, in virtually all of the western democracies, this relationship had inverted.

Some popular narratives attribute this realignment to discrete historical events, such as the Cold War’s end, China’s entry into the WTO, or the 2008 crash. But the data show no sudden reversal in education’s political significance. Instead, the authors write, the West saw “a very progressive, continuous reversal of educational divides, which unfolded decades before any of these events took place and has carried on uninterruptedly until today.” This finding is consistent with the notion that class dealignment is driven by gradual changes in western societies’ demographic and economic characteristics, such as the steady expansion of the professional class.

The paper provides further support for the notion that education polarization is a by-product of economic development: The three democracies where college-educated voters have not moved sharply to the left in recent decades — Ireland, Portugal, and Spain — are all relative latecomers to industrialization.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the authors established a strong correlation between “sociocultural polarization” — the degree to which right-wing and left-wing parties emphasize sharply divergent cultural positions — and education polarization. In other words: Countries where parties are highly polarized on social issues tend to have electorates that are highly polarized along educational lines.

It seems reasonable then to conclude (1) that there really is a cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class in the aggregate and (2) that this gap has been a key driver of class dealignment. Indeed, if we accept the reality of the diploma divide, then an increase of education-based voting over the past 50 years would seem almost inevitable: If you have two social groups with distinct cultural values and one group goes from being 4 percent of the electorate to 35 percent of it, debates about those values will probably become more politically prominent.

And of course, mass higher education wasn’t the only force increasing the salience of social conflict in the West over the past half-century. If economic development increased the popularity of “post-material” values, it also made it easier for marginalized groups to contest traditional hierarchies. As job opportunities for women expanded, they became less dependent on the patriarchal family for material security and thus were more liable to challenge it. As racial minorities secured a foothold in the middle class, they had more resources with which to fight discrimination.

And yet, if an increase in sociocultural polarization — and thus in education polarization — is a foregone conclusion, the magnitude of these shifts can’t be attributed to the existence of cultural divides alone.

Rather, transformations in the economic, civic, and media landscapes of western society since the 1970s have increased the salience and severity of the diploma divide.

When the postwar bargain collapsed, the center-left failed to secure workers a new deal.

To polarize an electorate around cultural conflicts rooted in education, you don’t just need to increase the salience of social issues. You also need to reduce the salience of material disputes rooted in class. Alas, the economic developments of the past 50 years managed to do both.

The class-based alignment that defined western politics in the mid-20th century emerged from a particular set of economic conditions. In the early stages of industrialization, various factors had heightened the class consciousness of wage laborers. Such workers frequently lived in densely settled, class-segregated neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of large labor-intensive plants. This close proximity cultivated solidarity, as divisions between the laborer’s working and social worlds were few. And the vast scale of industrial enterprises abetted organizing drives, as trade unions could rapidly gain scale by winning over a single shop.

By encouraging their members to view politics through the lens of class and forcing political elites to reckon with workers’ demands, strong trade unions helped to keep questions of income distribution and workers’ rights at the center of political debate and the forefront of voters’ minds. In so doing, they also helped to win western workers in general — and white male ones in particular — unprecedented shares of national income.

But this bargain between business and labor had always been contingent on robust growth. In the postwar era of rising productivity, it was possible for profits and wages to increase in tandem. But in the 1970s, western economies came under stress. Rising energy costs and global competition thinned profit margins, rendering business owners more hostile to labor’s demands both within the shop and in politics. Stagflation — the simultaneous appearance of high unemployment and high inflation — gave an opening to right-wing critics of the postwar order, who argued that the welfare state and pro-labor macroeconomic policies had sapped productivity.

Meanwhile, various long-term economic trends began undermining industrial unionism. Automation inevitably reduced the labor intensity of factories in the West. The advent of the shipping container eased the logistical burdens of globalizing production, while the industrialization of low-wage developing countries increased the incentives for doing so. Separately, as western consumers grew more affluent, they began spending less of their income on durable goods and more on services like health care (one needs only so many toasters, but the human desire for greater longevity and physical well-being is nigh-insatiable). These developments reduced both the economic leverage and the political weight of industrial workers. And since western service sectors had lower rates of unionization, deindustrialization weakened organized labor.

All this presented center-left parties with a difficult challenge. In the face of deindustrialization, an increasingly anti-labor corporate sector, an increasingly conservative economic discourse, an embattled union movement, and a globalizing economy, such parties needed to formulate new models for achieving shared prosperity. And they had to do so while managing rising cultural tensions within their coalitions.

They largely failed.

Countering the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality would have required radical reforms. Absent policies promoting the unionization of the service sector, deindustrialization inevitably weakened labor. Absent drastic changes in the allocation of posttax income, automation and globalization redistributed economic gains away from “low skill” workers and toward the most productive — or well-situated — professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs.

The United States had more power than any western nation to standardize such reforms and establish a relatively egalitarian postindustrial model. Yet the Democratic Party could muster neither the political will nor the imagination to do so. Instead, under Jimmy Carter, it acquiesced to various policies that reinforced the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality, while outsourcing key questions of economic management to financial markets and the Federal Reserve. The Reagan administration took this inegalitarian and depoliticized model of economic governance to new extremes. And to highly varying degrees, its inequitable and market-fundamentalist creed influenced the policies of future U.S. administrations and other western governments.

As a result, the past five decades witnessed a great divergence in the economic fortunes of workers with and without college diplomas, while the western working class (a.k.a. the “lower middle class”) became the primary “losers” of globalization .

The center-left parties’ failures to avert a decline in the economic security and status of ordinary workers discredited them with much of their traditional base. And their failure to reinvigorate organized labor undermined the primary institutions that politicize workers into a progressive worldview. These shortcomings, combined with the market’s increasingly dominant role in economic management, reduced the political salience of left-right divides on economic policy. This in turn gave socially conservative working-class voters fewer reasons to vote for center-left parties and gave affluent social liberals fewer reasons to oppose them. In western nations where organized labor remains relatively strong (such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland), education polarization has been relatively mild, while in those countries where it is exceptionally weak (such as the United States), the phenomenon has been especially pronounced.

Finally, the divergent economic fortunes of workers and professionals might have abetted education polarization in one other way: Given that experiencing abundance encourages social liberalism — while experiencing scarcity discourages it — the past half-century of inequitable growth might have deepened cultural divisions between workers with degrees and those without.

The professionalization of civil society estranged the left from its working-class base.

While the evolution of western economies increased the class distance between college graduates and other workers, the evolution of western civil societies increased the social distance between each group.

Back in the mid-20th century, the college educated still constituted a tiny minority of western populations, while mass-membership institutions — from trade unions to fraternal organizations to political parties — still dominated civic life. In that context, an educated professional who wished to exercise political influence often needed to join a local chapter of a cross-class civic association or political party and win election to a leadership position within that organization by securing the confidence of its membership.

That changed once educated professionals became a mass constituency in their own right. As the college-educated population ballooned and concentrated itself within urban centers, it became easier for interest groups to swing elections and pressure lawmakers without securing working-class support. At the same time, the proliferation of “knowledge workers” set off an arms race between interest and advocacy groups looking to influence national legislation and election outcomes. Job opportunities for civic-minded professionals in think tanks, nonprofits, and foundations proliferated. And thanks to growing pools of philanthropic money and the advent of direct-mail fundraising, these organizations could sustain themselves without recruiting an active mass membership.

Thus, the professional’s path to political influence dramatically changed. Instead of working one’s way up through close-knit local groups — and bending them toward one’s political goals through persuasion — professionals could join (or donate to) nationally oriented advocacy groups already aligned with their preferences, which could then advance their policy aims by providing legislators with expert guidance and influencing public opinion through media debates.

As the political scientist Theda Skocpol demonstrates in her book Diminished Democracy , college graduates began defecting from mass-membership civic organizations in the 1970s, in an exodus that helped precipitate their broader decline.

Combined with the descent of organized labor, the collapse of mass participation in civic groups and political parties untethered the broad left from working-class constituencies. As foundation-funded NGOs displaced trade unions in the progressive firmament, left-wing parties became less directly accountable to their less-educated supporters. This made such parties more liable to embrace the preferences and priorities of educated professionals over those of the median working-class voter.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a thriving civic culture, voters became increasingly reliant on the mass media for their political information.

Today’s media landscape is fertile terrain for right-wing populism.

The dominant media technology of the mid-20th century — broadcast television — favored oligopoly. Given the exorbitant costs of mounting a national television network in that era, the medium was dominated by a small number of networks, each with an incentive to appeal to a broad audience. This discouraged news networks from cultivating cultural controversy while empowering them to establish a broadly shared information environment.

Cable and the internet have molded a radically different media landscape. Today, news outlets compete in a hypersaturated attentional market that encourages both audience specialization and sensationalism. In a world where consumers have abundant infotainment options, voters who read at a graduate-school level and those who read at an eighth-grade level are unlikely to favor the same content. And the same is true of voters with liberal and conservative sensibilities — especially since the collapse of a common media ecosystem leads ideologues to occupy disparate factual universes. The extraordinary nature of today’s media ecology is well illustrated by this chart from Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of the Public :

This information explosion abets education polarization for straightforward reasons: Since the college educated and non-college educated have distinct tastes in media, in a highly competitive attentional market, they will patronize different outlets and accept divergent facts.

Further, in the specific economic and social context we’ve been examining, the modern media environment is fertile terrain for reactionary entrepreneurs who wish to cultivate grievance against the professional elite. After all, as we’ve seen, that elite (1) subscribes to some values that most working-class people reject, (2) commandeers a wildly disproportionate share of national income and economic status, and (3) dominates the leadership of major political parties and civic groups to an unprecedented degree.

The political efficacy of such right-wing “populist” programming has been repeatedly demonstrated. Studies have found that exposure to Fox News increases Republican vote share and that the expansion of broadband internet into rural areas leads to higher levels of partisan hostility and lower levels of ticket splitting (i.e., more ideologically consistent voting) as culturally conservative voters gain access to more ideologically oriented national news reporting, commentary, and forums.

What is to be done?

The idea that education polarization arises from deep structural tendencies in western society may inspire a sense of powerlessness. And the notion that it emerges in part from a cultural divide between professionals and working people may invite ideological discomfort, at least among well-educated liberals.

But the fact that some center-left parties have managed to retain more working-class support than others suggests that the Democrats have the capacity to broaden (or narrow) their coalition. Separately, the fact that college-educated liberals have distinct social values does not require us to forfeit them.

The commentators most keen to acknowledge the class dimensions of the culture wars typically aim to discredit the left by doing so. Right-wing polemicists often suggest that progressives’ supposedly compassionate social preferences are mere alibis for advancing the professional class’s material interests. But such arguments are almost invariably weak. Progressive social views may be consonant with professional-class interests, but they typically represent attempts to universalize widely held ideals of freedom and equality. The college educated’s cosmopolitan inclinations are also adaptive for a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected and interdependent and in which population asymmetries between the rich and developing worlds create opportunities for mutual gain through migration , if only xenophobia can be overcome. And of course, in an era of climate change, the professional class’s strong concern for the environment is more than justified.

Nevertheless, professional-class progressives must recognize that our social values are not entirely unrelated to our class position. They are not an automatic by-product of affluence and erudition, nor the exclusive property of the privileged. But humans living in rich, industrialized nations are considerably more likely to harbor these values than those in poor, agrarian ones. And Americans who had the privilege of spending their late adolescence at institutions of higher learning are more likely to embrace social liberalism than those who did not.

The practical implications of this insight are debatable. It is plausible that Democrats may be able to gain working-class vote share by moderating on some social issues. But the precise electoral payoff of any single concession to popular opinion is deeply uncertain. Voters’ conceptions of each party’s ideological positioning are often informed less by policy details than by partisan stereotypes. And the substantive costs of moderation — both for the welfare of vulnerable constituencies and the long-term health of the progressive project — can be profound. At various points in the past half-century, it might have been tactically wise for Democrats to distance themselves from the demands of organized labor. But strategically, sacrificing the health of a key partisan institution to the exigencies of a single election cycle is deeply unwise. Meanwhile, in the U.S. context, the “mainstream” right has staked out some cultural positions that are profoundly unpopular with all social classes . In 2022, it is very much in the Democratic Party’s interest to increase the political salience of abortion rights.

In any case, exactly how Democrats should balance the necessity of keeping the GOP out of power with the imperative to advocate for progressive issue positions is something on which earnest liberals can disagree.

The case for progressives to be more cognizant of the diploma divide when formulating our messaging and policy priorities, however, seems clearer.

Education polarization can be self-reinforcing. As left-wing civic life has drifted away from mass-membership institutions and toward the ideologically self-selecting circles of academia, nonprofits, and the media, the left’s sensitivity to the imperatives of majoritarian politics has dulled. In some respects, the incentives for gaining status and esteem within left-wing subcultures are diametrically opposed to the requirements of coalition building. In the realm of social media, it can be advantageous to make one’s policy ideas sound more radical and/or threatening to popular values than they actually are. Thus, proposals for drastically reforming flawed yet popular institutions are marketed as plans for their “abolition,” while some advocates for reproductive rights insist that they are not merely “pro-choice” but “ pro-abortion ” (as though their objective were not to maximize bodily autonomy but rather the incidence of abortion itself, a cause that would seemingly require limiting access to contraception).

Meanwhile, the rhetoric necessary for cogently theorizing social problems within academia — and that fit for effectively selling policy reforms to a mass audience — is quite different. Political-science research indicates that theoretical abstractions tend to leave most voters cold. Even an abstraction as accessible as “inequality” resonates less with ordinary people than simply saying that the rich have too much money . Yet Democratic politicians have nevertheless taken to peppering their speeches with abstract academic terms such as structural racism .

Relatedly, in the world of nonprofits, policy wonks are often encouraged to foreground the racial implications of race-neutral redistributive policies that disproportionately benefit nonwhite constituencies. Although it is important for policy design to account for any latent racial biases in universal programs, there is reason to believe that, in a democracy with a 70 percent white electorate and widespread racial resentment, it is unwise for Democratic politicians to suggest that broadly beneficial programs primarily aid minority groups.

On the level of priority setting, it seems important for college-educated liberals to be conscious of the fact that “post-material” concerns resonate more with us than with the general public. This is especially relevant for climate strategy. Poll results and election outcomes both indicate that working-class voters are far more sensitive to the threat of rising energy prices than to that of climate change. Given that reality, the most politically viable approach to reducing emissions is likely to expedite the development and deployment of clean-energy technologies rather than deterring energy consumption through higher prices. In practice, this means prioritizing the build-out of green infrastructure over the obstruction of fossil-fuel extraction.

Of course, narrowing the social distance between college-educated liberals and working people would be even better than merely finessing it. The burgeoning unionization of white-collar professions and the growing prominence of downwardly mobile college graduates in working-class labor struggles are both encouraging developments on this front. Whatever Democrats can do to facilitate labor organizing and increase access to higher education will simultaneously advance social justice and improve the party’s long-term electoral prospects.

Finally, the correlation between material security and social liberalism underscores the urgency of progressive economic reform. Shared prosperity can be restored only by increasing the social wage of ordinary workers through some combination of unionization, sectoral bargaining, wage subsidies, and social-welfare expansion. To some extent, this represents a chicken-and-egg problem: Radical economic reforms may be a necessary precondition for the emergence of a broad progressive majority, yet a broad progressive majority is itself a precondition for radical reform.

Nevertheless, in wealthy, deep-blue states such as New York and California, Democrats have the majorities necessary for establishing a progressive economic model. At the moment, artificial constraints on the housing supply , clean-energy production, and other forms of development are sapping blue states’ economic potential . If such constraints could be overcome, the resulting economic gains would simultaneously increase working people’s living standards and render state-level social-welfare programs easier to finance. Perhaps the starting point for such a political revolution is for more-affluent social liberals to recognize that their affinity for exclusionary housing policies and aversion to taxation undermines their cultural values.

Our understanding of education polarization remains provisional. And all proposals for addressing it remain open to debate. The laws of political science are more conjectural than those of physics, and even perfect insight into political reality cannot settle disputes rooted in ideology.

But effective political engagement requires unblinkered vision. The Democratic Party’s declining support among working-class voters is a serious problem. If Democrats consider only ideologically convenient explanations for that problem, our intellectual comfort may come at the price of political power.

• political science
• higher education
• the democratic party
• the big picture

Most Viewed Stories

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Allegedly Had Affairs With 37 Women in 2001
• The Shame of Saint Ann’s
• The AI Guys Are Driving Themselves Mad
• Producing Chicago
• Kamala Harris and the New Politics of Joy

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Allegedly Had Affairs With 37 Women in 2001 By Dan Amira
• The Shame of Saint Ann’s By Caitlin Moscatello and James D. Walsh
• The AI Guys Are Driving Themselves Mad By John Herrman
• Producing Chicago By Andrew Rice
• Kamala Harris and the New Politics of Joy By Errol Louis

What is your email?

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.