Research in Science Education, 1998, 28(2), 243-257 The Effect of Teachers' Sociological Understanding of Science (SUS) on Curricular Innovation Christine M. Cunningham Cornell University Abstract Science education reform initiatives advocate incorporating more accurate portrayals of science in the high school classroom that attend to science in its larger social context. However, conveying such understandings will require teachers to possess new knowledge about how science is practised. This paper reports research that investigated the effect of teachers' sociological understanding of science (SUS) on their design and implementation of curriculum innovations. It concludes that teachers' SUS level strongly influences their ability to innovate; knowledge about science is necessary, but not sufficient, for sociologically informed curricula. Theoretical Framework Science reform initiatives call for school science to include more accurate portrayals of science that attend to science in its larger social context (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Research Council, 1996). They recommend that teachers develop and teach interdisciplinary, open-ended activities which are attentive to local needs. The initiatives clearly communicate that school science must teach more than scientific facts to prepare students to function in a world that depends increasingly on science and technology--school science should also engage students in the processes and practices of science, communicate understandings about the nature of science and scientific knowledge, better equip students to understand the strengths and limitations of science, and introduce students to the interactions between science and society. Clearly, innovations such as these ask teachers to go beyond teaching science content and will require educators to draw upon new types of knowledge--knowledge about science. Given the current focus of most science classrooms and science teacher education programs on science content (knowledge of science), the increased teacher knowledge base that will be needed for the initiatives could present one stumbling block for reform (Carlsen, Cunningham, & Lowmaster, 1995). Educational researchers working in the teacher-knowledge domain have described a variety of types of teacher knowledge, such as subject matter knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and knowledge of context, and have explored their effects on classroom practice (Grossman, 1990; Hashweh, 1987; Lee, 1995; Shulman, 1987; Wilson, Shulman, & Richert, 1987). The present study builds upon previous research about teacher knowledge to attend specifically to the new directions charted by science reform initiatives. Effectively translating the recommendations of the reform standards into classroom practices will require teachers to possess new types of knowledge about science. To describe these new understandings, a new form of teacher knowledge has been defined--sociological understanding of science (Cunningham, 1995). Sociological understanding of science includes aspects of both subject-matter and pedagogical-content knowledge. It describes teachers' understandings about the practice and construction of scientific knowledge and the interactions between science and society. Sociological understanding of science encompasses two types of understandings: macrosociological and microsociological. Macrosociological understandings consider the