Comments on: Teaching scientific knowledge doesn’t improve scientific reasoning

By: Kristina

Kristina — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:27:38 +0000

I am concerned with physicians whose training convinces them that they were taught the “truth” and that new ideas are therefore wrong. I went to college at The University of Chicago where science courses, especially one in biology, taught one how to think. For example, in biochemistry, an exam asked “How would you design an experiment to prove this?” My training in medical school was all rote learning. What if one’s college education was similar? Are these the doctors who practice “cookbook medicine”, following the edicts of insurance companies whose goal is to save money, and will use any argument to do so?

By: Kate

Kate — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:34:00 +0000

I think the idea of inquiry learning is great, but when you have been faced with a class of 16 year olds whose only motivation is to either get an “A” or just get done so they can zone out for the last 10 minutes of class, you realize that inquiry doesn’t work.

By: djn1

djn1 — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:25:23 +0000

Good education needs to provide students with a two rail track for learning. It is always necessary to teach specific content to build basic knowledge, but one must also provide opportunities to explore, inquire and apply learned knowledge. If students see the application of the material they have learned in ways that relate to the real world they are more apt to truly understand the area of learning.
Africangenesis, many children need specific step by step instruction to learn reading but some children actually put reading together with little more than some rudimentary explanations. For these children the step by step instructional system is painful. Reading instruction should be tailored to the child’s needs.

By: Murfomurf

Murfomurf — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:31:41 +0000

Surely a social scientist should have spotted the gigantic gap in their own reasoning on this topic- “everyone” knows that memory for facts has nothing to do with the ability to put disparate pieces of information together and see logical connections or disconnections. Many people can reason logically from an early age on most general topics, but some need intensive training to see logical vs. “concrete” or surface connections; others will never learn- their brains aren’t conducive to rule-bound reasoning.

By: mm

mm — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:55:04 +0000

Kids today have lot of computer based learning and experience lot of living in vitual world formed by TV and internet – to the extent they frequent do not differentiate between seeing something in virtual world vs real world.
Inquiry based learning – doing experiments – forces them to isolate and abstract essential facts in real world and reason from there rather than ingesting processed knowledge that is already clean. Creative process requires these skills and so do all true discoveries.
Are we handicapping kids by providing them more and more clean and processed bytes from virtual world ?
Seeing a real giraffe is no longer as exciting since there is so much exposure on TV. Learning bouncy in experiment leads to recall of similar demostration on TV – the curiosity needed to continue the experience is gone already – so inquiry based learning generates more irritation than motivation, forget learning the reasoning processes.

By: Lycosid

Lycosid — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:54:57 +0000

Can we scrap NCLB now?

By: RickD

RickD — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:37:33 +0000

“I have taught Chemistry to undergraduates for 14 years and find they do not pick up any critical thinking skills at all in college. They dissociate scientific knowledge from critical thinking skills they may possess when confronted with everyday problems(like whether to wear a warm jacket etc).”
I have to disagree with the tone of this comment. It is entirely possible for college students to pick up critical thinking skills. Indeed, “non-traditional” older students can pick up critical thinking skills.
It’s just that most undergraduates have been trained to think a certain way, and are at sea when asked to go beyond their training. I agree that it is important to introduce critical thinking at an earlier age, but critical thinking skills can be expanded at any age in life, as far as I can see.
Personally, I think my ability to reason mathematically had several growth spurts – in 7th grade, in 12th grade, twice as an undergraduate, and then at least twice as a graduate student.

By: RickD

RickD — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:32:44 +0000

An interesting study.
But really, the fact that American students can learn scientific reasoning without learning scientific knowledge does not imply that it is a good idea to do so.
It is important to both teach students how to think and to teach them what the body of knowledge is.
Inquiry-based learning has its place, but an education based solely on that would be way too inefficient. There is simply far too much to learn out there. At some point it has to be learned. It’s not as sexy to simply learn facts, but it is important to do so.

By: IST

IST — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:47:08 +0000

africangenesis> agreed. I don’t condone inquiry instruction for reading, especially remedial reading. I’ve taught middle grades reading (as well as sci and history, university level bio and ed courses, and now HS science), and for the lowest readers the directed instruction seems to work best, no matter how mind numbing it is for the teacher. The comment in that regard was just wishful thinking: I’d like to assign outside reading, and I KNOW it would need to be done in class. Time doesn’t permit this, and in their case inquiry instruction( wherein they can internalise the concepts without needing to read them first) actually speeds the process along. My AP Bio class is assigned outside readings which are discussed in a socratic seminar style once a week. In fact, I use less inquiry instruction with them (although they are required to design their own experiments for some topics) because they seem to learn better in the mannr you and I were taught.

By: africangenesis

africangenesis — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:16:33 +0000

IST,
Unfortunately, I think the method of improving your sophomores reading skills is the opposite of letting them “arrive at the concept on their own”. The authors of PhonoGraphx make the point that it took millenia and our best minds to invent the phonetic alphabet system, yet we are asking our students to guess how it works on their own. Many don’t quite guess right. Reading is so important, that in this case, the “outside” reading should occur in class, the anachronisms left in the phonetic system by the now silent gutterals and the great vowel shift should be explicitly understood, so that the phonetic rules can not just be memorized and internalized, but can actually make sense. Your students are guessing wrong, based upon beginning and ending letters, word shape and context. They are quite intelligent in this regard, that is how they got this far, but they can fail miserably on novel scholarly material. What is remarkable is not that so many have gotten this far by guessing, but that there are actually a few that have guessed right. Were they just lucky, or do they have some of that same genius that was required to invent the phonetic alphabet system?