Teaching Kids to Think
Learning how to learn is a major objective of schooling. Yet, in my view, the emphasis in most schools is on WHAT to learn, not HOW to learn. My Improve Your Learning and Memory blog is aimed at filling that gap, yet these useful ideas have a hard time penetrating curricula that are designed to teach to government-mandated tests. Yet another, apparently unmet, challenge in education seems to exist: teaching students how to think. A recent U.S. Dept. Education survey reported in the Nation’s Report Card suggests that science students may be learning how to perform simple investigations but do not do well in thinking about the meaning and implications of the results and how to use data to make decisions. About 2,000 students in each grade level 4, 8, and 12 were tested in three real-life science problem-solving scenarios in an interactive computer test environment. Anybody can take the tests, which are posted on the NRC website; the tests are easy and fun. The test records r...