About

Jonathan Osborne is an Emeritus Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education with a research focus that combines policy and pedagogy in the teaching and learning of science. His policy interests include exploring students' attitudes toward science and how school science can be made more worthwhile and engaging, especially for students who do not continue with science studies. In pedagogy, he emphasizes the importance of argumentation in science education as a means of fostering a dialogic approach to teaching and enhancing student understanding of scientific inquiry. Osborne has led several major projects on argumentation, including developing materials to support teacher professional learning and working on projects to build teachers' competency in argumentation pedagogy. He has also collaborated on developing and testing a learning progression for argumentation in science. Additionally, his interests extend to the teaching of reading and facilitating discussion in science education, having published a book on language and literacy in science and led a multi-year project on supporting reading comprehension through discussion and debate. His work also explores how young people learn outside the classroom and the potential contributions of informal learning environments to formal education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Mathematics education
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Law
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Negotiating Science‐in‐the‐Wild

  Journal of Research in Science Teaching · 2026-04-11

  articleSenior author

  ABSTRACT In this response to Tolbert's 2025 commentary, “Trust, Distrust, and the ‘Competent Outsider’: Rethinking Science Education's Responsibilities in the (Dis)Information Crisis,” we address the nature of disinformation in the untamed landscape of public media, what we call “science‐in‐the‐wild.” We contrast political perspectives about how to situate science in society with the epistemic need to share specialized knowledge in society and the corresponding educational role of science media literacy in discerning who speaks for the expert scientific consensus. Notably, we distinguish interpersonal trust (based on individual judgments about power and benevolence) with epistemic trust (based on principles of conveying reliable knowledge).

  PublisherDOI

• Learning to be wrong: using Socratic Challenge to foster critical thinking

  Thinking Skills and Creativity · 2025-11-14

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Misinformation in Science: The Response of Science Education

  Contributions from science education research · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• What Makes a Competent Outsider?

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Fifteen years ago, Noah Feinstein introduced the idea of the competent outsider to argue for a comprehensive re-thinking of the purposes of science education.The idea orients competence away from science disciplines, per se, and toward the goals that everyday people might frame for themselves for which science may be useful.Despite its increasing use as a goal, however, answers to the question of what sorts of knowledge and skill renders anyone a competent outsider remain elusive.As the concept of the competent outsider has been taken up in recent arguments for how to organize science education in a post-truth era, it is a good time to reconsider the idea and to interrogate both of its components: what renders one competent with respect to science and what is a competent outsider actually outside of?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Undermining Science: Doubt and Deception

  The Science Teacher · 2025-05-04 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction the Creation of Difference: Foundations, Challenges, Interventions

  2024-10-23

  book-chapterSenior author

  Imagine 25 rhetoricians gathered in a straight line across an expansive courtyard. As a group we ask them to take one step forward if they were raised with English as their first language. Three quarters take one step forward. We then ask them to take two steps forward if they had more than 50 books in their home growing up. All but four take two additional steps. Take two steps forward if the English spoken in your home was a prestigious dialect of English. All but two take two steps forward. Take one step forward if your parents read to you growing up. Three quarters of them take a step forward. Take two steps forward if you were asked to write something more than a five-paragraph essay in school. This time only one third takes two steps forward. And so on through a list of 20 questions until our colleagues are spread across the courtyard. Because our questions related to the language and literacy practices that these scholars had been raised with, we see a pattern emerge: some of our colleagues are noticeably several steps behind others of our colleagues, and some of our colleagu es are noticeably several steps ahead. If viewed from above, one might notice that groups of colleagues have begun to sort by race, socioeconomic background, and gender into a scatterplot indicative of their various kinds of privilege.

  PublisherDOI

• Transforming Science Education in an Age of Misinformation

  Journal of College Science Teaching · 2024-01-02 · 18 citations

  articleSenior author

  Misinformation and disinformation about science have reached alarming levels. Here, we summarize a recent expert report, Science Education in an Age of Misinformation, that outlines what science education can do to address this problem and, given the urgency, has to do. We highlight the significance of teaching how the social practices of science contribute to establishing a trustworthy consensus and how students should evaluate the credibility of second-hand claims reported in the media or on the internet. We focus on the concepts of epistemic dependence on experts, competent outsiders, credibility, expertise, consensus, deceptive tactics, and science media literacy.

  PublisherDOI

• Coordinating Assessments with a Learning Progression

  2024-06-24

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the development and validation of assessments based on a learning progression for a scientific practice—argumentation. Without valid and reliable assessments, science educators will not be able to measure students’ locations on a learning progression. The assessments are based on the learning progression in argumentation developed by Osborne et al. (2016) and a set of items developed using the BEAR Assessment System to elicit students’ performance indicative of the waypoints in the progression. The goal of this study was to investigate evidence for the validity of the argumentation assessments. Specifically, we applied exploratory factor analysis to examine the dimensionality of the assessments, and then applied item response modeling to examine whether the hypothesized order of waypoints of the argumentation learning progression was confirmed by the set of items used. We also developed software reports for teachers, to give teachers quick and clear feedback from the assessments. We conclude by noting three challenges to the use of learning progressions and summarize how the methods described in this chapter can be used to help address those challenges.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Science literacy in the twenty-first century: informed trust and the competent outsider

  International Journal of Science Education · 2024-04-09 · 91 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A primary justification of teaching science to all young people is to develop students to become "critical consumers" of science.This worthy goal, however, is hampered by a flawed premise that school science is sufficient to develop intellectual independence.In contrast, we start from the premise that we are all epistemically dependent on the expertise of others.Hence, any science education for all must develop the capabilities to become a "competent outsider" capable of making judgements not of the science itself, but whether the source is credible.Essential to developing such informed epistemic trust are: (1) a basic understanding of the social practices that enable the production of reliable knowledge; and (2) a familiarity with the major explanatory theories and styles of reasoning that guide the work of scientists.These elements provide a framework for the nonexpert necessary to interpret and understand the work of scientists and the claims they make.We show how such an education would address three of the four primary aims of science education outlined by Rudolph (2022).To achieve this goal a substantial reduction of existing standards to an essential, but fundamentally different, core is required, while returning significant autonomy to classroom professionals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Landmark Essays on Rhetorics of Difference

  2024-10-23 · 6 citations

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Researching The Efficacy Of The Science & Literacy Academy Model

  NSF · $1.5M · 2012–2017

• Collaborative Research: Applying Automated Analysis to a Learning Progression for Argumentation

  NSF · $344k · 2016–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Sibel Erduran

  University of Oxford

  25 shared

• Shirley Simon

  University College London

  21 shared

• Justin Dillon

  University College London

  15 shared

• Robin Millar

  University of York

  14 shared

• Jennifer DeWitt

  14 shared

• Louise Archer

  13 shared

• Mary Ratcliffe

  13 shared

• Billy Wong

  University of Reading

  13 shared

Labs

• Stanford Graduate School of EducationPI

Education

• PhD, Education

  King's College London

  1995

Awards & honors

• High praise