Improving Students’ Scientific Thinking

The production of a scientifically literate population is a fundamental goal of our educational system. The justifications for that goal, and descriptions of paths toward it, have been reiterated many times in recent decades, as exemplified by major policy statements and specific recommendations from prestigious organizations ranging from "Benchmarks of Scientific Literacy" (AAAS, 1993) to the recent "Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC, 2012). Consequently, substantial effort has been devoted to determining how to increase the likelihood that, as students progress through school, they will acquire at least a rudimentary understanding of fundamental domain-general scientific concepts and procedures, as well as a nontrivial amount of domain-specific concepts. However, given the vast number of those procedures and concepts, it is not surprising that the full science curriculum presented to students from pre-school through high school has often been characterized as "a mile wide and an inch deep" (Li, Klahr, & Siler, 2006; Santau et al., 2014). Thus, the challenge facing researchers interested in improving science education is to enhance the quality and generality of the answers to two related questions: What is scientific thinking? and How can it be taught? In this chapter, we attempt to answer the first question by presenting a brief summary of a broad framework that characterizes the essential aspects of scientific thinking and reviewing the developmental origins of scientific thinking. We answer the second question by describing a few representative examples of research on teaching science in specific domains, such as physics, biology, and earth sciences - organized according to the framework - and selected from the extensive literature on different ways to improve children's basic ability to think scientifically.