Goals and objectives
The goals of COPUS are to:
- Develop a shared appreciation of science, its contributions to the quality of life, and its underlying role in advances in technology and engineering
- Inform and engage the public in and about science, its process and products — how it is done, how scientific issues can best be framed and communicated, what roles science and scientists play in society, the benefits of using the process of science to make informed decisions and address challenges
- Make science more accessible to everyone
To do this, COPUS will:
- Develop a network among all interested stakeholders, including the scientific, education, policy, media and business communities and the general public
- Create forums for sharing ideas, best practices, and resources
- Provide documents and materials that contain a consistent message about science and its value to society
- Sponsor, encourage, and broker events that showcase science and convey the coalition's common messages for use on regional to national levels
- Provide access to the Understanding Science website, which will provide friendly and engaging materials on how science works and its relevance to our lives
Participants in the COPUS Network agree to the following characterization of science as core to the COPUS mission:
- Science is a way of learning about what is in the natural world and how it works.
- Science involves a process for testing ideas
- Science proposes broad natural explanations for how the natural world works and tests those explanations by making observations of the natural world.
- Scientific explanations must be predictive and hence, falsifiable or testable.
- Science is an intellectual and social endeavor
- The process described above is carried out by individuals and communities. In that sense, science is also a social system for building knowledge about the natural world.
- Science involves individual reasoning and large scale interactions among scientists all around the world. The social nature of science is a critical component of its success.
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