Teaching Skepticism In Science Classes Instead Of Facts

[cleanhippie]

Every few years, an international test is given and American students finish in the middle of the pack. They went up during the 2000s but American kids have never been at the top - international students learn facts and American kids learn 'how to think'. Americans were 11th out of 12 countries taking the international assessment the first time it was given in the early 1960s. They are not testing what American students are learning.

Given the rampant criticism educators, the government and students get from cultural pundits ('dismal', 'being left behind', etc.) each time one of those assessments is given, it seems like a non-starter to try and change education to teach more critical thinking.

But a group is trying. They call it the 8+1 Science concept and it calls for a radical overhaul in K-12 schools that moves even farther away from memorizing scientific facts and puts more focus on helping students understand eight fundamental science concepts. The "plus one" is the importance of inquiry, the practice of asking why things happen around us – and a fundamental part of science.

The 8+1 concepts were derived from two basic questions: What are things made of and how do systems interact and change? The eight concepts are: atoms, cells, radiation, systems change, forces, energy, conservation of mass and energy, and variation. Traditionally, science in the United States has been taught in separate classes for chemistry, biology and physics, without clear connections being made between the subjects. The 8+1 effort encourages K-12 teachers to use the eight science concepts to build understanding within and between their courses as students advance through the grades.

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/teaching_skepticism_science_classes_instead_facts-88752

Read the rest at the link.

[RobertEarl]

1. The answer is 9. 8 + 1 = 9

I learned that in school.

Joking has now ended.<<<<<

I like this concept. It requires thought and understanding and not just rote learning. It is such a simple concept why has it not been instituted?

[cleanhippie]

2. +1=10

I agree.

[provis99]

4. complex frameworks like these are too hard for the average schmuck to learn.

Rote learning of isolated facts can work for any idiot; all it requires is memorization. what they're proposing to teach here is a little too sophisticated.

[SamG]

3. I think good teachers have always tried to...

teach these skills to their students, be it in science class or history or language arts or math classes.

Teaching the skills of critical thinking and research methods, together with problem solving and open-mindedness has been how I have distinguished the really good teachers in any number of fields of study.

[Jim__]

5. Does anyone know if the math piece has been tried?

... Redo math too. There is no reason students learn algebra, then geometry than trigonometry and then calculus. Spend much less time on geometry and teach calculus before trigonometry and math understanding would go up as well.

"The natural world seems to operate through these laws and concepts, but when it comes to schooling we don't teach children these laws and then show how these apply in different situations," said Michigan State University Distinguished Professor of statistics and education William Schmidt.

I remember high school geometry was really the first time that I understood that math was more than just a set of rules. It could actually be figured out. The first time I took calculus was as a high school senior. The concept of a limit was difficult to grasp and math largely became memorization again.

Do they have courses set up for this sequence? I'd love to read through those courses.

[bananas]

9. That jumped out at me as well - "Spend much less time on geometry"

Last edited Sun Apr 8, 2012, 05:34 PM - Edit history (1)

IIRC, high school geometry was where the concept of proof was really developed.

[bananas]

11. Has high school geometry already been watered down this much?

My recollection is that high school geometry is where the concept of proof is really developed,
I just did some googling to refresh my recollection and came across this:

http://www.math.caltech.edu/people/oped.html

A Plea in Defense of Euclidean Geometry

The following appeared in the Friday, February 6, 1998 issue of the Los Angeles Times.

Math education: Fewer classes require proofs--more whittling away of
exposure to logic and critical thinking.

By BARRY SIMON

While I grew up in snow country, I can't tell my kids that I trudged miles through snow to get to school. But I can tell them I learned proofs in high school geometry, which could become as much a part of a vanished virtuous past.

One of the pleasures of being on the faculty at Caltech is interacting with our bright undergraduates. For the past two years, I've asked the incoming freshmen in my calculus/probability class whether they had proofs in their high school geometry course. About 40% have not, and more than half of the remainder had at best a cursory few weeks. So less than one-third have had the kind of rigorous theorem/proof course I had back in James Madison High School in Brooklyn more than 30 years ago.

Why do I mourn this loss of what was a core part of education for centuries? After all, we no longer require Greek and Latin in high school and Euclid was just one of those Greeks, wasn't he? While the geometric intuition that comes from the classical high school geometry course is significant, what is really important is the exposure to clear and rigorous arguments.

Modern mathematicians don't use the two-column proofs so beloved by my high school geometry teachers, and real life rarely needs the precise rigor of mathematicians, but those who have survived those darned dual columns understand something about argumentation and logic. They can more readily see through the faulty reasoning so often presented in the media and by politicians.

<snip>

[Jim__]

17. I took the geometry described in that article.

He took it 30 years ago in Brooklyn. In New York State there were statewide tests for certain high school subjects. Geometry was one of them. So, if you took the New York State regents exam, you had to know certain aspects of geometry, and giving proofs was definitely something that you had to know.

That's the part of geometry that I found so helpful in building a foundation for math - doing proofs.

[izquierdista]

6. Sounds like bullshit to me

If we can just eliminate ALL facts, think how much brainspace the kids would have for concepts!

Except it doesn't work that way. Science is tedious. You observe, observe and observe, and try to tease some facts out of those observations. Put those facts together and soon a structure begins to emerge -- a concept which will might have some predictive value. And then you confirm that prediction with more observation.

It is nice to be able to learn facts directly, reading the observations of others and not having to invest the time they did to arrive at a conclusion. But to skip to concepts directly? Kind of like reading literature before you have a reading vocabulary. Come to think of it, that's been tried as well.

I'm going to have to agree with SamG's comment above. Good teachers can put some structure to a long list of facts and get the students to understand the overriding concept. But there is a place for committing facts to memory in education. It's not a random coincidence that people who are good at trivia and spitting out facts also are usually very smart people. If you want to speak a foreign language, you need to know the vocabulary, and that takes memorizing. If you want to speak science, you need to know a bunch of facts in a certain area of science.

[cleanhippie]

7. I think you may have missed the point.

I'm unsure the author was advocating NOT teaching facts, but instead, to teach inquiry and critical thinking skills so that students arrive at the facts on their own, instead of rote memorization.

[izquierdista]

8. Rote memorization has its place.

If you don't load in some basic facts first, there is precious little to do critical thinking with. A good teacher knows the right balance.

[Igel]

12. They don't learn the facts on their own.

You'd need experiments with no extra degrees of freedom, no choice but to force the students into coming up with the one true conclusion.

To do that you need to so contrain the experimental protocol that they have dozens of odd pieces of observation and contraint to deal with, to assimilate and to synthesize and they have a day or two to do it in.

This is hard to set up and hard for the kids to do.

Even if you have the right experiment and all the details ironed out, half the kids won't follow them. They'll misread the instructions. They'll do part D before part F. They'll use 3 drops of this stuff instead of 5, or use the wrong stuff and fail to write things down.

The result is that they still come up with facts. Facts based upon personal observation. The kinds of facts that we want them to arrive at, the result of their own initiative and thinking. Problem it, they're usually just plain wrong and you, the teacher, wen't able to monitor 8 or 16 different groups for each of 10 steps in the course of the 40 minutes they were doing the lab, while helping to calibrate this scale, resupply the acid that was knocked over, or dealing with the two students who were late and the one who needed a pass to go to the nurse.

And heaven help you if you help a student and carelessly commit a speech error in the 4 seconds available to you as you watched another student do something dangerous.

[HereSince1628]

10. I am glad people are thinking about the problem, but I think this isn't the solution

Last edited Mon Apr 9, 2012, 05:34 PM - Edit history (3)

It reminds me a lot of the original approach of the BSCS. As someone who taught freshman biology at university for 30 years I think that NSF funded effort, and it's unfortunate offspring, was poorly considered.

This 8 + 1 thing reminds me of those efforts, particularly an orientation that starts with the smallest possible things to understand--the components of atoms.

1) In addition to pedagogical issues, the thing that I see missing is the concept of integration of small things into bigger more complex and diverse things which exhibit emergent properties that weren't existent in the components from which they were made. Emergent properties not only can be studied THEY MUST BE STUDIED at higher levels of phenomenological integration/hierarchy and consequently at different levels of resolution than those of a group of like typical cells, molecules, or physical forces.

Explaining predator-prey relationship in terms of basic physical forces and chemical energy is possible (and done), but it provides a quite narrow platform for asking questions or for framing solutions for the sorts of problems encountered by most people actually dealing with predators (or prey) as part of their environment.

It's my experience that anticipation of emergent properties at different levels of resolution is a very important principal in 'the physical sciences' but I can't really speak for physics or chemistry. Levels of organization and integration into hierarchical systems is extraordinarily important to understanding to biology.

As an illustration I'll suggest that the concept of a 'skeletal bone' isn't really built into what knowledge can be drawn from a nominally 'typical cell'. Meaningful vocal communication requiring two individuals with complex bodies, special senses and organ systems doesn't follow as a logical certainty from anything that we 'know' by having a concept of a cell--contingent evolution of hierarchical levels of function does.

Without bones, there isn't muscular-skeletal system and vertebrate locomotion. And again conceptual understanding of a nominally typical 'model' cell doesn't anticipate an opposing thumb and grasping hand or a hoof much less organisms swinging through trees or stilting across a savannah.

It's true that eumetazoans are modular in some manner of cellularconceptualization, but awareness that an animal is essentially a big bag of many tiny somewhat similar bags composed of variations on mostly similar sub-cellular components falls way short of providing any understanding the structure of hominid social groupings on which each and everyone of us depends daily.

At a practical level, if you want an 18 year old to graduate from HS with knowledge of the basics of human reproduction, thorough knowledge of biochemistry is not as important as fully understanding the importance of ejaculation and coitus...things which definitely are not anticipated by knowing the basic molecular and membrane components of a nominally 'typical cell'.

Without an appreciation for emergent properties at different levels of resolution in sub-levels and higher levels of integrated hierarchical systems, understanding biology is very compromised. This 8 +1 thing seems to have been constructed by people without much appreciation for biology beyond the level of cellular and molecular biology.

Interestingly enough, this "from the bottom up path" used extensively in biology education largely ignores the historic fact that understanding emerges by integrating understanding from multiple lines of inquiry, nothing is seen to be waiting for a technological or intellectual development. By using the bottom-up pattern, rather than modelling student discovery/education on the model of successful research, biology courses can't follow the historic pursuit of questions in the teaching of methods of scientific inquiry or adequately express the importance of being broadly aware of advances beyond one's narrow interest.


2) My experience trying to teach beginning undergraduate biology to both majors and non-majors is that pedagogically things must go from the most familiar toward things that are novel. Starting first graders on the path to understanding biology by beginning with atoms and cells seems much more like starting with the least familiar.

The BSCS based curriculum model nearly universally used by American textbook publishers and American colleges and universities up to 3 years ago (when I left college teaching) began with atomic parts and biomolecules. It admittedly goes in a usually logical way from small to big (starting with the components of which other things are built and then moving on to the things that are built). But this really forces teachers to begin with what, frankly, is most UNfamilar in order to get to familiar things like plants and animals after 4 months of work (Of course one might argue that a person who has been dealing with the notion of polymerized bio-molecules, genomes and proteomes since kindergarten won't feel that way after 13 years, though I find the idea of first grade proteonomists who are struggling through their McGuffy readers rather mind boggling).

Finally, call me a radical politicized liberal academic if you wish, but I can't imagine an approach that more purposefully hides the utility of organismal and ecological biology and value of scientific integration.

This is an approach that leaves undeveloped, if not destroyed, K-12 students' interest in vast important areas of biology by having them spend 13 years at school to emerge with an understanding of biology that begins with atoms and stops with cells.

That's utterly heart breaking when you think about what that means to developing in the human population anything approaching biophilia.

[caraher]

13. I think the 8+1 developers are mainly not biologists

It appears physical scientists with a Michigan State connection dominate the group. A lot of people are think broadly along the lines of teaching more about scientific inquiry with less focus on specific content, but I'm not convinced these folks have the right formula...

[HereSince1628]

14. I think scientific process has often been misreprented in biology

I also think it undervalues the importance of 'facts' to creative inquiry and interpretation of biological evidence.

"The Scientific Method" is often presented as beginning with an observation. That's a neat rhetorical approach that allows a linear process to be developed. And that model conforms to a story that fits the ideology of post-depression America. It begins with an unknowing/naive/ignorant person gaining empirical knowledge by simple observation which when followed up with discipline ultimately can be shaped into eternal laws of science.

You'll recognize the version of that story developed by the BSCS in the late 1950's. They called it THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD and it was adopted for America's biology texts goes something like this:

observation--hypothesis--controlled observation--analysis--conclusion--a number of successful repetitions = integration into theory...successful tests of theory... scientific law.

Over the past 5 decades it's been modified to allow some cyclic behavior between conclusion and hypothesis, but it remains much like the idea presented in the late 1950s. And that model is easy to teach and memorize but it doesn't correspond very well with my real-life experiences in science.

If you think about that standard linear model of scientific method that we force feed elementary and secondary students, you'll notice some short-comings.

Firstly, it leaves no place for education, be it elementary, secondary or higher ed. And in point of fact, most American scientists now acquire much of their foundation knowledge from formal education. After that, if you're a lucky scientist you'll have friends in your same field who will help you stay up to date by talking/texting with you, but you'll still be forced to read formal scientific publications and to attend scientific meetings. The point is constantly educating yourself about what others have learned is a sine qua non of having a cutting edge understanding in whatever narrow field you work. Personal scientific inquiry falls light years short of being adequate as THE methodology for being a scientist.

Secondly, and more importantly to understanding science, mere observation isn't usually the start of inquiry. Mere observations, are typically forgotten almost as fast as they are formed. You observe the staircase you climb everyday, do you know without looking how many steps it has?

Yes, accidents and unexpected things like falling apples, lack of growth of bacteria around mold on a petri dish happen...but they are marvelous examples of a prepared mind suddenly presented with something recognized as explanatory. And I stress PREPARED=educated/experienced mind. A mind rich in factual details and expectations: a mind that is loaded with of prior understanding.

What arouses the sort of curiosity that gives birth to the intentional inquiry of science is an awareness that somehow an intentional observation is both possible and that it will help one understand something something which isn't known with certainty.

That's a special sort of curiosity. It arises from a desire to make a comparison of what you think you know and what you think you can observe.

The creation of such things depends on prior knowledge, and because such things usually hang on a few diacritical details, the more "facts" you acquire about the field you work in, the more likely you'll have more spontaneous and meaningfully impulses of curiosity about your understanding of your field.

Consequently my personal view of scientific inquiry and the one I trained my undergrad research students and graduate students to respect is one in which scientific inquiry is a cycle that starts with--engages in the middle-- and ends with--what scientists in our field currently thought they knew.

The state of current understanding guides both the creation of a scientific question/the prediction/hypothesis of a study and guides the design of methods of gathering empirical evidence.

The methods of analysis of that evidence is directed by current state of understanding (and it is both possible and valuable to go back and "reprocess" old evidence as new methods are developed).

The interpretation and conclusions drawn on the evidence is going to depend upon how it squares up with current understanding.

Whether or not your new understanding is integrated into the body of other scientists' conceptual understanding will depend on how others view it in light of their collective current understanding.

It's my experience that scientific creativity, the thing that drives a successful scientific career, largely depends upon novel juxtapositions of things already known and things suspected.

Just as human productivity and creativity increases as a power function of the available artifacts of civilization, the capacity for new meanginful juxtapositions increases exponentially with knowledge of details, facts and methods.

[mike_c]

15. I see this as a problem of integration and organization....

Like you, I teach freshman (more-or-less) biology and lower division zoology, as well as upper div ecology and entomology. One of the big problems with content driven approaches is that in the rush to cram in factoids, we often overlook the importance of organizing and integrating that information into knowledge structures that themselves exhibit important emergent properties. That is especially important for undergrads, because they are often inexperienced at doing this, even when they think they're good learners. Too often they equate "good learner" with having a facile memory, or simply with academic rewards like getting good grades (but that last is another problem altogether).

Properly organized, the conceptual hierarchy of biology becomes obvious, and the importance of scale becomes apparent for understanding processes. To recycle your example, bones are emergent properties of cells, but understanding the nature and activities of osteoblasts and osteoclasts, along with the other cells contributing to bone origins and maintenance, along with the properties of living bone, creates opportunities to organize and connect that knowledge to create understanding-- or at least to predict further knowledge-- that goes beyond what is contained within the set of facts that comprise the original information.

That is the heart of scientific inquiry, I think. Too often we take the easy way out when explaining "the scientific method" as a process of explaining observed phenomena, but in practice we more often extrapolate from known information to predict future observations according to conceptual models that follow from the organization and integration of information we already have ("observed phenomena" are a subset of that information). For example, if the balance of activity of osteoblasts and osteoclasts-- under hormonal control-- maintains bone density, then dietary calcium deficiency is likely to accompany shifts in that balance that lead to loss of bone, such as might occur in post-menopausal women. Now one need only find a population of post-menopausal women on the verge of developing osteoporosis to test that model.

Osteoporsis isn't the point, of course, but rather that what we do with information, how we organize it and how we make connections between otherwise disconnected "facts" is far more important than simply learning more facts. Both are necessary, however. I think that a significant proportion of the "facts" we "know" are themselves emergent predictions from other information rather than real "facts." Probably half the time when students ask a question in class, I don't REALLY know the answer, in the sense of having learned that bit of knowledge in the past and stored it away for future retrieval (at least not if they really good, interesting questions!). Instead, I do my best to extrapolate from information that I do have-- with varying degrees of confidence-- and make a best guess prediction. Emergent knowledge!

[HereSince1628]

18. Yes, IMO scientific understanding is more a conceptual scaffolding than a pile of facts.

Building that conceptual scaffold should be seen as part of the process of science. But it often isn't. The popular models of 'THE' Scientific Method used in elementary and secondary schools throughout this country include neither overt mention education or exposure to basic methods of organizing information. How can such a model possibly be seen as educationally sufficient?

People who dismiss conceptual 'facts' generally conceive of 'facts' as piles of inert factoids rather than as information hubs, memory nodes, capable of transferring stimulus through multiple internodes within a dynamic neural network of conceptualizations.

In my way of thinking scientific 'knowledge' exists in vivo as just such dynamic networks of organized memory not as disheveled piles of unconnected and discarded memes. Consequently I see nodes of conceptualized 'facts' as very good things, indeed essential things to the construction of biological understanding. The more nodes and internodal links between them the better. The "finer the mesh" of the network, the more associations will be made and the more reactive and arousable the network will be. To me, getting educated is about somehow hanging conceptual information/meme on neural nets to form "information web"/"concept maps." When these maps get well developed, the association between nodes becomes more complex and more immediate.

I agree with you that overtime some of us become very well practiced in moving our conscious focus along such networks. In the process we can and do gain the capacity to anticipate what sorts of things should 'fill in the blanks.' That's exactly the capacity that produces expectations, predictions and hypotheses. It is also a requisite of arriving at knowledge expanding conclusions.

Sometimes the "pot-hole filling" is purposeful/intended extrapolation, sometimes it's purposeful/intended interpolation, sometimes it's rather unexpected, a sudden awareness of a novel bridging of nodes jumping off one sub-web and onto another. And that later sort of event is what I conceive as happening when cross-disciplinary links create 'breakthroughs' in understanding (think about the way the biological problem of finding the molecule of Mendels "factors" of inheritance depended upon conceptual bridging of as seemingly remote ideas as a DNA polymer and the physics of a cathode tube).


[a digression....Among American education specialists and the general public 'facts' and memorization of 'facts' is primarily associated with tediously boring drill. When loaded with adjectives as "tedious" and "boring" the value of memed 'facts' is handicapped by prejudice. Memorization isn't always boring or tedious. Anyone who has sat with a child and sung their 'ABCs' knows that. They also know the durability of memory acquired in exactly that manner. Several studies of American adults have found that when asked to list the English alphabet, it is more often than not done through the use of that preschool ABC song memorized by repetition so many decades before. The primary feature of mnemonic devices such this one recognized by anyone who passed comparative anatomy--"On Mount Olympus Towering Top A Finn and German Viewed Some Hops, or the more provocative sexual versions of that, isn't "boring" but "facilitating". True, it takes a bit of repetition but it produces very durable memory.]

[caraher]

16. Also.. regarding starting with the familiar...

I agree that it is pedagogically more effective to start with the familiar, even when you are highlighting unfamiliar or unnoticed aspects of what students have already seen. From a certain reductionist point of view it seems most logical to start with a parsimonious set of basic principles and build up from there, but only a few subsets of scientific knowledge are truly amenable to such an approach even at advanced levels of understanding, and even fewer are best taught that way.