Frontiers of Science (FoS) is designed to introduce students to different topics in four scientific disciplines and to instill skills – scientific habits of mind – most generally characteristic of scientific inquiry. The scientific topics presented in the course serve as a rich context for teaching students how to think scientifically, and in turn, the acquired scientific habits of mind will help students to understand how we know what we know and what some important open questions in science are.
Scientific habits of mind taught in FoS include basic statistics and probability, experimental design, sense of scale, calculating with units, back of the envelope calculations, feedbacks, and graph reading. All of these specific skills work in concert to help bolster each student’s quantitative reasoning, understanding of the process of scientific inquiry, and ability to analyze data and evidence. These are important skills for today’s active and engaged citizens, regardless of future career plans.