AQA SOCIOLOGY - Paper 2 - Science as A Belief System

This pack contains a 35-page PowerPoint presentation and an accompanying booklet that students can fill in as you teach. The pack also contains a sample answer and a seperate mock-question assessment task.

The PowerPoint covers:

• Starter Task - Students view on religion and science; similarities, differences, types of knowledge-claims made by each side
• Faith in Science
• Manufactured Risks
• Cognitive Power
• Karl Popper - Open Belief Systems
  • The Scientific Method
  • The Principle of Falsification
  • 10 min in-class summative writing task
• Robert Merton - CUDOS / Norms
  • Science as a tool for society
  • Explaination of how the Protestant Reformation led to the rise of scientific thinking
  • CUDOS - task - students create their own list of ethics
  • CUDOS - define and explore the ethical criteria
• Closed Belief Systems:
  • Define and expain
    • Case Study - Witchcraft Amongst Azande Peoples
• Michael Polanyi
  - Circularity
  - Subsidary Evidence
  - Denial of Legitimacy to Rivals
  - Paradigms - discussion of Velikovsky
  - Paradigm Shifts
  - Reading task - Paradigm shifts and Scientific Revolution

Interpretivist View of Science

• Students asked to justtify their ‘belief’ in several scientific concepts
• Karin Knorr-Cetina - Paradigms
• Steve Woolgar and LGM (LIttle Green Men}

Marxist and Feminist View of Science

• Definitions
• Short reading task
• Reflection and consolidation task

Post-Modernist View of Science

• Manufactured Risks
• Techno-science

Plenary -

• Consolidation activities
• Sample answer - read and annotate
• Planning and write a response to an exam question