It is a privilege and a pleasure for me to introduce this handbook, three years in the making, designed to facilitate major changes in the way that science is taught to students in U.S. colleges and universities. A resource of this type would have been much appreciated in 1966, when I began as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University. I had a typical "good teachers are born, not made" attitude about teaching then. My present, very different view is that teaching is a skilled profession, which can only be learned through much study and experience. This view took 20 years to acquire, and it derives partly through my extensive contacts with elementary school teachers in San Francisco. Also influential was my later involvement with the National Research Council's National Science Education Standards, whose 25-page Chapter 3 Teaching Standards should greatly benefit teachers at any level (available at www.nas.edu). Research has taught us a great deal about effective teaching and learning in recent years, and scientists should be no more willing to fly blind in their teaching than they are in scientific research, where no new investigation is begun without an extensive examination of what is already known.

What we do today in our classrooms is much more important than most faculty imagine. Those of us who teach undergraduate science must greatly expand our view of our mission. Our role cannot simply be to teach the basic facts and concepts of our discipline, so as to prepare students for the next science course that they may decide to take on their route to medical or graduate school. Our colleges and universities will graduate approximately two million students next year, only about 15% of whom will receive bachelor's degrees in science or engineering. All the rest will become the citizens who determine—by their understanding and appreciation for the nature and values of science—both the vitality of our nation and the future of our scientific enterprise. It would be fine if all Americans knew about plate tectonics, or the way that cells divide. But it is much more important that they understand what science is (and what it is not) and how its central values&#151honesty, generosity, and respect for the ideas of others—have made possible the rationalization of human experience that underlies all human progress.

These understandings are important for all Americans, but they are especially crucial for those students in our introductory science classes who will go on to become the next generation of teachers. It is unreasonable to expect our elementary, middle, and high school teachers to be effective in teaching science as an inquiry-based process, if they have never experienced inquiry themselves. Instead, we can all be expected to teach as we ourselves were taught, which explains why I only lectured at the students as a Princeton professor.

The cycle must end. This handbook is a valuable introductory tool that presents research-based thinking and the practice of teaching by scientists who are committed educators. But Science Teaching Reconsidered needs to be embedded in a much larger process that will change people, institutions and systems. We hope that this handbook will be incorporated into an action plan for reform of undergraduate education, to which the Academy will continue to contribute.

Bruce Alberts President, National Academy of Sciences