Many students find science extremely, inspiring and interesting. Science instills a sense of manipulation and enables students to develop understanding and form questions based both on the knowledge they already have and the insight they wish to gain in the future. Students who excel in science lessons are likely to develop a strong ability to think critically.
Concepts such as logical deductions and inference, parsimony, and not accepting arguments (or dismissals) based on authority but from evidence and skepticism would all be handy. Teaching someone how to appraise and evaluate conflicting evidence and any bias in that evidence would be useful ‘life skills’ for pretty much everyone. Let’s face it; it ultimately comes down to trying to spot patterns, work out reasons for them, and to spot errors and mistake: how can learning these skills be bad or unimportant?
Of course many of these are taught in various ways and in subjects well beyond science, (history lessons for me at least included things like looking for bias in various accounts of events), but I do rather like the idea of formally teaching students what it means and why it’s important. I don’t think I was ever taught the “scientific method” as concept, we were just told there was a right and wrong way to do things, and while that included excellent guidelines about things like eliminating alternative possibilities to the cause of the results (effectively applying a control) the concept of a control in itself was not.
Something that laid out the ideas and reasons behind accurate formal writing, using good judgment, formulating rules, testing ideas, parsimony, and bias would be an excellent introduction to the scientific method, but also to thought itself. Teach kids how to think, how to evaluate and judge, how to process information and come to rules and conclusion about the world. Get that right and they will be armed with a powerful set of tools that will literally last them a lifetime, and frankly it’s hard to see how that cannot be good. I don’t think kids are incapable of learning these thing as concepts and entities, and already many if not all of them *are* taught – but in a more systematic and integrated framework, I would expect them to stick better in the mind and let the kids see how the ideas work together. The benefits to science teaching (and many of the arts) are clear if the children had an established concept of how to present and test their ideas independently and to evaluate material put in from of them, as well as having something to take outside the classroom for the future.
By: DEO DERRO L. DUCOT |T-II | MNHS-Cabcaben
