Teaching students to think critically about science and origins

In David Long’s article, Scientists at Play in a Field of the Lord, he studies the discourse between a network of regional scientists, atheists, activists and evolutionists at the opening of The Creation Museum on Memorial Day, 2007. This review essay examines the teaching of evolution through the teacher’s ‘lens of empathy’ and also considers a ‘pupil centeredness’ approach. As a practicing science educator, I have found it paramount to take into consideration my students’ backgrounds and their families’ beliefs in order to understand their preconceived notions about the origins of life. By teaching evolution as ‘a theory with both facts and fallacies’ only then does it become an opportunity for critical thinking that fosters growth and risk taking in a safe environment. Most times students hear evolution preached as a one-sided lecture by teachers who believe it’s “my way or the highway” and leave little or no room for dialogue. I believe that a teacher’s job is to stay updated with current research on the theory of evolution and then present all the information to students in a way that creates personal opportunities for them to adjust their existing schema without demeaning them, their ideas, or their faith or belief system. This not only shows value, compassion and tolerance for them as thinking humans, but also allows them opportunities to develop critical thinking, which helps to shape whom they become as adults.     

Another way to think about the work we do: counselling for work and relationship

Counselling for work and relationship is proposed as another way of thinking about vocational psychology and vocational guidance. It can contribute to the search for a new paradigm for these fields. Central to this way of thinking are two shifts. A shift from a discourse about career to a discourse about work, and a shift to expand the focus of attention beyond the occupational domain to include multiple social contexts of work and relationship across both occupational and personal domains of life. The ways in which these shifts are responsive to theoretical and social contexts is considered.     

Correlates of metacognitive control in 10-year old children and adults

Metacognitive control is an important factor for successful learning and has been shown to increase across childhood and adolescence. Only few studies have attempted to investigate the cognitive processes and psychological mechanisms that subserve metacognitively-based control and the development thereof. Accordingly, the aim of the current study was to gain an insight into the cognitive and psychological correlates that relate to metacognitively-based control processes. Specifically, we were interested in two measures of metacognitive control: learners’ ability to self-regulate their study time in a study time allocation paradigm, as well as the efficiency with which they allocated their study time. It was of particular interest to explore the relation between declarative metamemory and procedural metacognitive skills. In addition, we assessed learners’ general cognitive and executive abilities. We tested a group of 10-year olds and a group of adults. Surprisingly, and in contrast to previous studies, the current study does not support a relation between declarative metamemory and procedural skills, or executive functions and intelligence and procedural skills. We interpret our results in line with a dual systems view of metacognitive abilities and further speculate whether procedural skills might become increasingly independent and automated with age.     

Development of metacognitive concepts about thinking in gifted and nongifted children: Recent research

This article provides an overview of recent research in our laboratories on the development of metacognition in gifted and nongifted children. Research examining the development of children's metacognitive knowledge of mental activity concepts, general declarative metacognitive knowledge, and specific metacognitive attributions are reviewed. The present studies found, as had Alexander, Carr, and Schwanenflugel (1995), patterns of gifted and nongifted metacognitive development differed depending on the type of metacognitive knowledge being examined. Specifically, recent research on knowledge of mental activity concepts showed no clear advantages for gifted children over nongifted children. Declarative metacognitive knowledge research continues to support a monotonic advantage hypothesis in which gifted children show consistent advantages over nongifted children during the early elementary school years. This advantage, however, is short-lived due to the possible presence of a ceiling effect showing a closing of the declarative metacognitive knowledge gap between gifted and nongifted children around fourth grade. Finally, recent research on specific metacognitive attributions suggests that more intelligent children develop more sophisticated attributions over time but their ability to use this information may be more dependent on other individual differences variables that may or may not be related to intelligence such as knowledge base familiarity. We conclude that it is important to differentiate the types of metacognitive knowledge being measured in studies as we investigate individual differences in the development of children's metacognitive insights about thinking.     

Science of learning is learning of science: why we need a dialectical approach to science education research

Research on learning science in informal settings and the formal (sometimes experimental) study of learning in classrooms or psychological laboratories tend to be separate domains, even drawing on different theories and methods. These differences make it difficult to compare knowing and learning observed in one paradigm/context with those observed in the other. Even more interestingly, the scientists studying science learning rarely consider their own learning in relation to the phenomena they study. A dialectical, reflexive approach to learning, however, would theorize the movement of an educational science (its learning and development) as a special and general case—subject matter and method—of the phenomenon of learning (in/of) science. In the dialectical approach to the study of science learning, therefore, subject matter, method, and theory fall together. This allows for a perspective in which not only disparate fields of study—school science learning and learning in everyday life—are integrated but also where the progress in the science of science learning coincides with its topic. Following the articulation of a contradictory situation on comparing learning in different settings, I describe the dialectical approach. As a way of providing a concrete example, I then trace the historical movement of my own research group as it simultaneously and alternately studied science learning in formal and informal settings. I conclude by recommending cultural-historical, dialectical approaches to learning and interaction analysis as a context for fruitful interdisciplinary research on science learning within and across different settings.     

Teachers and science curriculum materials: where we are and where we need to go

Curriculum materials serve as a key conceptual tool for science teachers, and better understanding how science teachers use these tools could help to improve both curriculum design and theory related to teacher learning and decision-making. The authors review the literature on teachers and science curriculum materials. The review is organised around three main questions: What do teachers do when using science curriculum materials?, What happens when teachers use science curriculum materials? and Why do teachers make the decisions they do? For each question, the authors first summarise the findings of two key reviews from the mathematics education literature, then situate the findings from science education in juxtaposition with those findings. The review uncovers that relatively little is understood about the mechanism underlying how teachers interact with curriculum materials. To try to address this gap, complementing and extending the field’s existing understandings of the teacher–curriculum relationship, the authors make four propositions, grounded in the literature on self-regulation. The propositions reflect a mechanism for teacher curricular decision-making. The self-regulation perspective also helps to develop more targeted support for science teachers aimed at the uptake, adaptation and enactment of curriculum materials in ways that are intended, and that teachers themselves experience as an improvement in their teaching. The authors conclude with a call for research that further explores the ways in which individual science teachers’ decision-making is situated within the wider sociocultural context.     

Depressed mothers' judgments about their children: an examination of the depression-distortion hypothesis

The belief that depressed mothers have distorted perceptions of their children's problems has gained considerable currency in recent years. The empirical basis for this belief at present amounts to little more than reliable demonstrations that depressed mothers tend to report more behavior problems in their children than do nondepressed mothers. An obvious alternative to the distortion interpretation is that depressed mothers are accurate about their children's behavior problems. We examined these competing models by comparing teachers' ratings of children with ratings provided by their mothers, who varied on the dimensions of depressed mood, depressed clinical state, and history of depression. Mothers' and teachers' ratings yielded substantially similar portraits of child behavior problems at the group level, with children of in-remission and in-episode mothers manifesting significantly higher levels of behavior problems than children of control mothers. Moreover, agreement between mothers and teachers was in the moderate range for all index groups and did not differ significantly from the mean level of mother-teacher agreement reported by other investigators based on unselected samples. The limitations of these findings and of earlier reports for assessing a depression----distortion influence on mothers' ratings of their children are considered.     

The things (we think) we (ought to) do: Ideological processes and practices in teaching

Ideologies of education and of teaching are complex and layered, and they contain macro-social, institutional as well as micro-ideological levels. Building on cases from the UK and South Africa, this paper argues that notions of ‘professionalism’ among teachers display such ideological layering, and that such notions are heavily invested with interests that transcend the operational or institutional scales. In the case of the UK, we discuss the way in which a teacher described her experience of taking a degree course, exposing a rift between individual, experiential knowledge and institutional, organisational knowledge, characteristic of the large-scale transformations of the educational field in the UK. In the South African case, we show how a white teacher instructing black township children deploys images of the disciplined body that derive from the Apartheid ‘old order’. In both cases we see that views of professionalism are infused with micro-ideological, practical beliefs as well as with macro-ideological social and political views. In terms of the implications of our line of argument for teacher education we conclude that student teachers should be taught explicitly about the discourses by which teaching is constructed so that they are able to reflect more critically on their professional practice.     

Talking about science: An interpretation of the effects of teacher talk in a high school science classroom

This paper builds on research in science education, secondary education, and sociolinguistics by arguing that high school classrooms can be considered speech communities in which language may be selectively used and imposed on students as a means of fostering academic speech community identification. To demonstrate the ways in which a high school teacher's language use may encourage subject area identification, the results of an interactionist analysis of data from a 2-year ethnographic study of one high school chemistry classroom are presented. Findings indicate that this teacher's uses of language fell into three related categories. These uses of language served to foster identification with the academic speech community of science. As a result of the teacher's talk about science according to these three patterns, students developed or reinforced particular views of science. In addition, talking about science in ways that fostered identity with the discipline promoted the teacher as expert and built classroom solidarity or community. These results are discussed in light of sociolinguistic research on classroom competence and of the assertions of science educators regarding social and ideologic implications of language use in science instruction.     

Coming to my grown-up self: Young adults learn about young children

At first I didn't want to play with it because it looked too gooey, admits eighteen-year-old Sa'shawn about the fingerpaint she used in her child care class, until someone from my class put it on my hand and it didn't feel as bad as it looked. Then I got started and there was no stopping me. After that, when I came to my grown-up self, I noticed that the children would love it.Rachel Theilheimer teaches child care to young adults at YALA and is an instructor of Early Childhood Education at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Interested readers can write to YALA at 320 E. 96th St., New York, NY 10028.     

Talking back to power: snowballs in hell and the imperative of insisting on structural explanations

This viewpoint explores and shares our experience of ‘doing’ feminism in the context of its apparent ‘demise’. We were recently invited to attend an event at the Cabinet Office, to ‘discuss the impact aspirations and expectations within the community have on the educational achievement of young people in deprived areas’. The seminar was entitled, ‘Expert Seminar with the Minister for the Cabinet Office: Community Aspirations and Educational Attainment’. Appalled, both at the grammar (!), and the deficit account implications underpinning the Cabinet Office Invitation, we made contact with one another, and agreed that we would attend the seminar with the specific intention of challenging this discursive premise. We seek to use this Viewpoint to reflect on the experience in relation to academic activism and ‘speaking back’, as well as to take the opportunity to re‐state a few of the key points that detonate the deficit discourse in relation to the educational attainment of working‐class pupils.     

Trust in testimony: how children learn about science and religion

Many adult beliefs are based on the testimony provided by other people rather than on firsthand observation. Children also learn from other people's testimony. For example, they learn that mental processes depend on the brain, that the earth is spherical, and that hidden bodily organs constrain life and death. Such learning might indicate that other people's testimony simply amplifies children's access to empirical data. However, children's understanding of God's special powers and the afterlife shows that their acceptance of others' testimony extends beyond the empirical domain. Thus, children appear to conceptualize unobservable scientific and religious entities similarly. Nevertheless, some children distinguish between the 2 domains, arguably because a different pattern of discourse surrounds scientific as compared to religious entities.     

Prior experience shapes metacognitive judgments at the category level: the role of testing and category difficulty

Most metacognition research has focused on aggregate judgments of overall performance or item-level judgments about performance on particular questions. However, metacognitive judgments at the category level, which have not been as extensively explored, also play a role in students’ study strategies, for example, when students determine what topics to study for an exam. We investigated whether category learning judgments (CLJs) were sensitive to differences in the difficulty of general knowledge categories. After either studying or being tested on facts from several categories (e.g., Shakespeare, Astronomy), participants estimated the likelihood that they could correctly answer new questions from those categories on a later test (i.e., they made CLJs). Results of two studies showed that CLJs were sensitive to differences in category difficulty. Further, participants gave lower or more conservative CLJs when they took an initial test as compared to studying questions from the categories. Results are discussed in terms of the value and relevance of CLJs both in educational settings and in theories of metacognition.     

First- and second-order metacognitive judgments of semantic memory reports: The influence of personality traits and cognitive styles

In learning contexts, people need to make realistic confidence judgments about their memory performance. The present study investigated whether second-order judgments of first-order confidence judgments could help people improve their confidence judgments of semantic memory information. Furthermore, we assessed whether different personality and cognitive style constructs help explain differences in this ability. Participants answered 40 general knowledge questions and rated how confident they were that they had answered each question correctly. They were then asked to adjust the confidence judgments they believed to be most unrealistic, thus making second-order judgments of their first-order judgments. As a group, the participants did not increase the realism of their confidence judgments, but they did significantly increase their confidence for correct items. Furthermore, participants scoring high on an openness composite were more likely to display higher confidence after both the first- and second-order judgments. Moreover, participants scoring high on the openness and the extraversion composites were more likely to display higher levels of overconfidence after both the first- and second-order judgments. In general, however, personality and cognitive style factors showed only a weak relationship with the ability to modify the most unrealistic confidence judgments. Finally, the results showed no evidence that personality and cognitive style supported first- and second-order judgments differently.     

现代体育与科技发展的互动作用

科技的进步为体育的发展创造了有利的条件 ;而现代体育人文、体育管理、体育自然学科的渗透与发展 ,使体育功能的范畴更加广泛 ,体育与体育科技的发展带动社会经济的发展 ,从而推动了科技的进步 .     

How can we find out what 3 and 4 year olds think? New approaches to eliciting very young children's understandings in science

This paper outlines work in progress on a study which is investigating what children understand about natural and processed materials and how scientific learning on the topic could be extended and reinforced in the home. Four different interview schedules for eliciting children's understanding were developed and tried out. Children's understandings prior to each of the four units, and at the conclusion of the teaching program were documented through individual interviews. Family interviews were also conducted prior to and at the conclusion to the teaching. In this paper the difficulties associated with researching young children's thinking are explored. The rationale for a storytelling context for the interviews is presented, and there is a preliminary discussion on the effectiveness of the methodology utilised. Specializations: early childhood science education; the Curriculum Corporation K-3 Science Program. Specializations: primary science education, teacher education in science, adult experiences of science and technology; the K-3 Science Program.     

Multi-method assessment of metacognitive skills in elementary school children: how you test is what you get

Third grade elementary school children solved tests on mathematical reasoning and numerical facility. Metacognitive skillfulness was assessed through think aloud protocols, prospective and retrospective child ratings, teacher questionnaires, calibration measures and EPA2000. In our dataset metacognition has a lot in common with intelligence, but planning measured with teacher ratings plays a role above and beyond IQ. Moreover, we found that skills are generally related, but that it is more appropriate to assess them separately. In addition, results show the value of an experienced teacher as actual measure of metacognitive planning skills. Our dataset suggests convergent validity for prospective and retrospective child ratings, but no significant relationship with the other metacognitive measures. Metacognitive skillfulness combined with intelligence accounts for between 52.9% and 76.5% of the mathematics performances. The choice of diagnostic instruments highly determines the predicted percentage. Consequences for the assessment of metacognitive skills are discussed.