C389 Science, Technology, and Society, catalog number EDUC 5409, is a two-CU School of Education course about science as a humanistic and social activity: how science shapes society and technology, and how society and technology shape science back. The two-way arrow in that description is the entire assessment. Submissions that trace influence in one direction only are the most common form of half-finished work in this course, and they are half-finished in a way their authors rarely notice.
Reciprocal influence, and why one direction is easy
Ask any teacher how science affects society and you will get a good answer immediately: vaccination changed mortality, the transistor changed communication, fertiliser changed agriculture and population. That direction is intuitive because it is how science is usually taught, as a supply of discoveries that arrive and then have consequences.
The other direction takes deliberate work and is where the marks are. Society decides what gets studied by deciding what gets funded. Institutions decide what counts as a finished result by deciding what can be published and who reviews it. Technology decides what can be observed at all, since a question about cell structure cannot be asked before a microscope exists and a question about the genome cannot be asked before sequencing is cheap. Public concern redirects research programs. Regulation shapes which experiments are permissible. None of that makes science arbitrary. It makes science a human institution with inputs, and describing those inputs accurately is what this course means by a humanistic and social endeavour.
A second distinction runs through everything assessed here, and getting it wrong is expensive. An empirical claim is a claim about what is the case, settled in principle by evidence. A value claim is a claim about what should be done, settled by argument about goods and priorities. Science produces the first and contributes to but never settles the second. A submission that slides from a finding to an obligation without noticing has committed the error the course is designed to expose, and it usually happens in one unmarked sentence in the middle of a paragraph.
Third, this is a teacher preparation course, so the point is transferable to a classroom. A teacher who can separate the empirical from the evaluative can run a discussion about a contested application of science without either shutting the discussion down or letting evidence become a matter of preference. That skill is why the course exists.
Turning scored aspects into a section plan
Scored detail for any WGU course lives inside your Course of Study rather than the public catalog, so open the rubric and count aspects before drafting. Each aspect is scored on its own against a three-point scale and a score of 2 in every aspect is what passes a task. Aspects do not average, so a vivid account of a technology's social effects earns nothing toward an aspect asking how society shaped the science.
Where your version is assessed by submitted work, build the outline from the aspect list and use the rubric's own nouns as headings. Writing about science and society invites essay form, which is exactly the form that hides a missing scored move inside otherwise engaging prose.
The word budget, worked. Take a rubric with five scored aspects and directions asking for around 1,300 words. Reserve 110 words for an opening naming the case you will analyse, and 90 for a close, leaving about 1,100 for the scored body. Five into 1,100 is 220 words per aspect. Then weight it deliberately: any aspect asking how society or technology influenced the science needs about 320, because that direction requires evidence rather than intuition, and an aspect asking you to describe an application is complete in roughly 150. Take the difference from the descriptive aspect and the arithmetic still lands.
One rule specific to this course. Choose your case before you plan the sections, and choose one where you can document both directions of influence. Half the difficulty students report in C389 is a case selection problem wearing a writing problem's clothing. A well chosen case makes every aspect answerable; a poorly chosen one leaves you inventing social influence you cannot support.
A structure for analysing a science and society case
Where your directions supply an arrangement, follow theirs. Where they do not, this order forces both directions of influence into the open and keeps empirical and evaluative material apart.
| Section | What belongs in it | How it gets scored |
|---|---|---|
| Case and period | The specific development, where and when, stated narrowly enough to be documented | Not usually scored alone, but a vague case makes every later aspect vague |
| The science itself | What was actually discovered or built, explained accurately at the level of mechanism | Scored for content accuracy; this is still a science course |
| Science shaping society | What changed for people, institutions or the environment, with evidence | The easy direction; scored for specificity rather than for scope |
| Society shaping science | Funding, regulation, public pressure, institutions or values that steered the work | The direction that separates strong from adequate submissions |
| Technology as enabler and product | What instruments made the science possible, and what technologies came out of it | Scored where the rubric names technology; the enabling half is usually missing |
| Empirical and value claims separated | What the evidence establishes, and what remains a question of priorities | Scored wherever the rubric asks about the limits of scientific authority |
| Classroom application | How pupils would examine this case, at a named grade band, with the discussion structure | Scored for a specific pupil task rather than a topic suggestion |
| References | Historical and scientific sources plus standards, in the required style | Scored wherever citation is named in the rubric |
Give the society shaping science section your best evidence. It is the aspect most often scored as unmet, and it is unmet not because students disagree with the claim but because they assert it generally rather than showing it in the case they chose.
Evidence craft for a course about how knowledge gets made
This course asks for two kinds of accuracy at once, historical and scientific, and mixing up which claim needs which kind of support is the usual source of trouble.
- Support historical claims with historical sources, and scientific claims with scientific ones. A history of a discovery is not evidence for how the mechanism works, and a modern textbook is not evidence for what people believed at the time.
- Date everything. In a course about influence, chronology is the argument. If the funding decision followed the discovery, it cannot have caused it.
- Show the causal link rather than the coincidence. Two things happening in the same decade is not influence, and the sentence that connects them is the part being scored.
- Keep the science accurate even when the focus is social. A misdescribed mechanism undermines the analysis built on it, and evaluators in a School of Education science course notice.
- Label value claims as value claims. Writing that a society had to choose between two goods is legitimate analysis; writing that science showed which choice was right is not.
- Cite in the style your directions require and match the reference list to the in-text citations. Restate rather than quote, since submissions run through a similarity check.
Strong submissions do one further thing: they name the counterargument. Somebody at the time thought the science was wrong, or the technology unnecessary, or the risk unacceptable, and saying what that objection was and how it was answered turns a narrative into an analysis.
What separates Competent from a submission sent back
Because aspects are scored independently, a returned C389 task usually has one direction of influence missing or one claim unsupported rather than a general weakness.
- Every scored aspect has a heading in the rubric's own wording.
- Both directions of influence appear, each with evidence rather than assertion.
- The science is described accurately enough that a science specialist would accept it.
- Chronology is explicit, so causal claims are at least possible in time order.
- Empirical and value claims are separated somewhere visible in the document.
- Any classroom application names a grade band and a pupil task, not a topic.
Performance assessment work at WGU can be revised and resubmitted without a grade penalty, so a return is a delay rather than a mark against you. In a six-month flat-rate term that delay is the whole cost, and a two-CU course is exactly the kind students schedule as filler around a heavier course. A filler course that takes three weeks because the case was badly chosen has consumed time budgeted for something four times its size.
If your plan attaches a proctored objective assessment to this course, the line does not move. Proctored exams are yours to sit. We prepare only: case selection, argument mapping across both directions of influence, practice separating empirical from evaluative claims, and an honest readiness call. We do not sit assessments and we never ask for portal credentials.
Five mistakes that cost time in C389
- Writing only about impacts. The influence runs both ways, and the harder direction is where the aspects concentrate.
- Choosing a case too large to document. The industrial revolution is not a case. A specific development, in a specific place and decade, is.
- Letting a finding become an obligation. Evidence about what will happen does not by itself establish what should be done, and the slide usually happens in one unnoticed sentence.
- Getting the science wrong while writing about its context. Content accuracy is still assessed, and a misdescribed mechanism weakens everything built on it.
- Treating classroom application as a closing gesture. Where an aspect asks how pupils would engage with the case, it wants a task, a grade band and a discussion structure.
How support works on this course
Send the rubric from your Course of Study and the task directions. Work comes back aspect-mapped: a case narrow enough to document, both directions of influence evidenced rather than asserted, chronology made explicit, the science described accurately, and empirical claims kept separate from value claims. Where an aspect asks for classroom use, you get a specific pupil task at a named grade band rather than a suggestion.
If you are still choosing a case, that is the cheapest place to get help. Ten minutes spent testing whether a case can support both directions of influence saves the rewrite that a poorly chosen case guarantees.
Questions candidates ask about C389
Is C389 the same course as EDUC 5409?
Is C389 a science course or a social studies course?
Can you take a proctored assessment for me?
Choosing a case for a science and society task?
Send your Course of Study rubric and the task directions. You get a case that can carry both directions of influence, evidenced and aspect-mapped.
Where C389 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 5 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.