A Defence of Teaching General Thinking Skills

There has been developing interest in thinking skills in schools over the past decade. However in the UK the consensus seems to have been against the possibility of the very existence of general thinking skills. We present three main arguments in defence of general thinking skills which hinge upon assumptions in a priori arguments about transfer, we suggest that a clearer definition of the domains of knowledge theory is necessary for the way it is used against thinking skills and we offer a consideration of the expert/novice objections about subject or domain-specific knowledge.     

Thinking skills: The question of generality

This paper examines the question of whether there are useful general thinking skills. It offers a working definition of 'thinking skill' and identifies ways in which this concept has been over-applied. Thinking skills, used across domains, are not inevitably weak as a result of the generality-power tradeoff. Admitting that thinking skills require domain-specific knowledge for their application, it is contended nonetheless that there are general thinking skills that involve substantial amounts of domain-independent knowledge. These skills usually address 'generic thinking tasks', common mental challenges that people face in many practical and intellectual endeavours, including the 'domain of practical affairs'. The educational implications of these findings are discussed.     

Conditional inference and advanced mathematical study: further evidence

In this paper, we examine the support given for the ‘theory of formal discipline’ by Inglis and Simpson (Educational Studies Mathematics 67:187–204, 2008). This theory, which is widely accepted by mathematicians and curriculum bodies, suggests that the study of advanced mathematics develops general thinking skills and, in particular, conditional reasoning skills. We further examine the idea that the differences between the conditional reasoning behaviour of mathematics and arts undergraduates reported by Inglis and Simpson may be put down to different levels of general intelligence in the two groups. The studies reported in this paper call into question this suggestion, but they also cast doubt on a straightforward version of the theory of formal discipline itself (at least with respect to university study). The paper concludes by suggesting that either a pre-university formal discipline effect or a filtering effect on ‘thinking dispositions’ may give a better account for the findings.     

Implications of domain‐general “psychological support skills” for transfer of skill and acquisition of expertise

The article proposes that individuals who acquire certain psychological support skills may experience accelerated learning and enhanced performance in many domains. In support of this proposal, we present evidence that these skills enhance learning and performance, that they are domain‐general in that they can be applied in a variety of domains, and that they can be taught and learned. We also discuss two implications of the skills for current theories of expertise. The first is that any observed transfer of expertise between domains might result as much from the support supplied by application of the skills during learning and performance as from any direct transfer achieved due to two domains sharing similar task elements. The second is that use of these skills might contribute to an understanding of how performers sustain the motivation necessary for the extended period of deliberate practice required to maximize skill acquisition.     

Harnessing the Power of Social Media in the Classroom: Challenging Students to Create Content to Share on Social Media Sites to Improve Learning Outcomes

Many young adults consume news, political, and historical information through social media sites, and yet students do not always connect this information to the academic knowledge they learn in their classes. In addition, while students learn academic writing and presentation skills, they may not feel equipped to present the knowledge that they have learned to a non-academic audience. I detail a class assignment in which students produce a social media project that imparts academic knowledge to a general audience. These have taken the form of short videos, websites, a documentary and even poems and songs. Drawing on a survey of the students, as well as a content analysis of the projects, I find that the project is successful in achieving several teaching goals, including knowledge retainment, critical thinking skills, making real world connections with class material, student empowerment, and improving communication skills.     

Are There Domain–Specific Thinking Skills?

Adopting a much broader notion of thinking than that associated with the Critical Thinking movement, this paper addresses the question of thinking skill generality. An analysis of the concept of 'thinking skill' suggests ways in which this notion has been misapplied. The paper demonstrates the importance of thinking tasks and argues for a non–universalistic notion of thinking skill generality. The domains–view of thinking is assessed, evidence from secondary research being used to show that thinking skills are not domain–specific simply by virtue of being instantiated with disciplinary content. The prevalence of general procedural knowledge in our thinking practices notwithstanding, empirical evidence suggests the existence of at least two kinds of domain–specific thinking skills: those in which thinking is essentially the application of domain–specific declarative knowledge; and those addressing specialised, domain–specific, thinking tasks.     

The effect of the biology critical thinking project on the development of critical thinking

This article describes the Biology Critical Thinking (BCT) project in which carefully designed activities for developing specific critical thinking skills are incorporated into the biology curriculum. The objectives were to find out whether the BCT project contributes to the development of critical thinking skills in various biological and nonbiological topics and how it affects students' biological knowledge and classroom learning environment. The study consisted of 678 seventh graders who were assigned randomly into two groups that studied the same seventh-grade biology textbook. Only one group, the experimental, completed the BCT activities. The results indicate that the students in the experimental group improved their critical thinking skills compared to their own initial level and compared to their counterparts in the control group. Improved critical thinking skills were observed in a new biological context and nonbiological everyday topics, suggesting generalization of thinking skills across domains. The experimental students scored significantly higher than the control on a knowledge test, suggesting that “knowledge of facts” as one educational goal and “learning to think” as another, need not conflict, but rather can interact with each other. Finally, the results show that BCT involvement decreased the frequency of teacher-centered teaching and enhanced student-centered, more active learning.     

Teaching Thinking Skills in Context-Based Learning: Teachers’ Challenges and Assessment Knowledge

For an educational reform to succeed, teachers need to adjust their perceptions to the reform’s new curricula and strategies and cope with new content, as well as new teaching and assessment strategies. Developing students’ scientific literacy through context-based chemistry and higher order thinking skills was the framework for establishing a new chemistry curriculum for Israeli high school students. As part of this endeavor, we developed the Taste of Chemistry module, which focuses on context-based chemistry, chemical understanding, and higher order thinking skills. Our research objectives were (a) to identify the challenges and difficulties chemistry teachers faced, as well as the advantages they found, while teaching and assessing the Taste of Chemistry module; and (b) to investigate how they coped with teaching and assessing thinking skills that include analyzing data from graphs and tables, transferring between multiple representations and, transferring between chemistry understanding levels. Research participants included eight teachers who taught the module. Research tools included interviews, classroom observations, teachers-designed students’ assignments, and developers-designed students’ assignments. We documented different challenges teachers had faced while teaching the module and found that the teachers developed different ways of coping with these challenges. Developing teachers’ assessment knowledge (AK) was found to be the highest stage in teachers’ professional growth, building on teachers’ content knowledge (CK), pedagogy knowledge (PK), and pedagogical-content knowledge (PCK). We propose the use of assignments designed by teachers as an instrument for determining their professional growth.     

Skills, Socrates and the Sophists: Learning from History

The Sophists, and the Socratic response they provoked, are considered in order to elucidate issues raised by present-day skill-talk. These issues include: whether skills avoid questions of ends and truth; the existence of general skills, such as critical thinking; the importance of knowledge; skills and the personality; and some implications for teaching and philosophy.     

The expert learner: Strategic, self-regulated, and reflective

Reflection on the process of learning is believed to be an essential ingredient in the development of expert learners. By employing reflective thinking skills to evaluate the results of one's own learning efforts, awareness of effective learning strategies can be increased and ways to use these strategies in other learning situations can be understood. This article describes how expert learners use the knowledge they have gained of themselves as learners, of task requirements, and of specific strategy use to deliberately select, control, and monitor strategies needed to achieve desired learning goals. We present a model of expert learning which illustrates how learners' metacognitive knowledge of cognitive, motivational, and environmental strategies is translated into regulatory control of the learning process through ongoing reflective thinking. Finally, we discuss the implications that the concept of expert learning has for instructional practices.     

Operation ARA: A computerized learning game that teaches critical thinking and scientific reasoning

Operation ARA (Acquiring Research Acumen) is a computerized learning game that teaches critical thinking and scientific reasoning. It is a valuable learning tool that utilizes principles from the science of learning and serious computer games. Students learn the skills of scientific reasoning by engaging in interactive dialogs with avatars. They are tutored by avatars with tutoring sessions that vary depending on how well students have responded to questions about the material they are learning. Students also play a jeopardy-like game against a feisty avatar to identify flaws in research and then generate their own questions to determine the quality of different types of research. The research examples are taken from psychology, biology, and chemistry to help students transfer the thinking skills across domains of knowledge. Early results show encouraging learning gains.     

Assessment and teaching of science skills: whole of programme perceptions of graduating students

This study reports on science student perceptions of their skills (scientific knowledge, oral communication, scientific writing, quantitative skills, teamwork and ethical thinking) as they approach graduation. The focus is on which teaching activities and assessment tasks over the whole programme of study students thought utilised each of the six nominated skills. In this quantitative study involving two Australian research-intensive universities, the teaching activities identified by students as developing the broadest number of skills were laboratory classes and tutorials. Lectures were only effective for developing scientific knowledge and, to a limited extent, ethical thinking. Assessment tasks that students perceived to utilise the broadest range of skills were assignments and oral presentations. The findings of this study document the students’ perspective about their gains in skill sets, and the teaching activities and assessment tasks that require them to use and thus develop these skills. The findings provide an opportunity to evaluate the constructive alignment of skills development, teaching activities and assessment tasks from a student’s perspective. Further research is required to actually measure the skills that students gain over their whole programme of study.     

Towards powerful learning environments for the acquisition of problem-solving skills

It is generally agreed that acquiring thinking and problem-solving skills is nowadays a primary objective of general education. Responding appropriately to this challenge requires an answer to the following questions: 1. what does the acquisition of problem-solving skills involve, and 2. how can those abilities be fostered through systematic instruction? This contribution describes a four-step model of skilled problem-solving processes, and gives an overview of three major categories of cognitive skills involved in competent problem solving, namely, the flexible and integrated application of domain-specific knowledge, of heuristic methods, and of metacognitive skills. Furthermore, a framework is presented for the design and elaboration of powerful teaching-learning environments in which such problem-solving skills can be acquired efficiently. Two basic ideas underlying this model are: the view of learning as a constructive process, and the idea of cognitive apprenticeship as an effective and appropriate method for learning and teaching. Finally, some recent research findings supporting the educational significance of the framework are briefly reviewed.     

计算思维融入高职计算机基础课程的探索

计算思维是一种重要的思维方式和教学理念,适合于培养学生将专业背景与计算机技术结合起来以解决各领域专业问题的能力。文章通过案例探讨如何将计算思维融入到高职计算机基础课程中,使学生在学会计算机基本操作技能的同时,初步具备以计算思维进行思考与问题求解的能力。     

Science on Television: Storytelling,Learning and Citizenship

In this article, we critically examine skills that are necessary for the effective learning of science in adolescent populations. We argue that a focus on twenty-first-century skills among adolescents within the context of science instruction must be considered in light of research on cognitive and social development. We first review adolescents’ emerging abilities in terms of five domains identified by the National Research Council Board on Science Education: adaptability, complex communication/social skills, non-routine problem-solving skills, self-management/self-development and systems thinking. We next describe practices that science teachers can use to enhance the development and use of emerging cognitive abilities in adolescents. We conclude by providing seven research-based recommendations for adolescent science instruction.     

On the basis of source: Impacts of individual differences on multiple-document integrated reading and writing tasks

Few studies have explored how general skills in both reading and writing influence performance on integrated, source-based writing. The goal of the present study was to consider the relative contributions of reading and writing ability on multiple-document integrative reading and writing tasks. Students in the U.S. (n = 94) completed two tasks in which they read text sets about a socioscientific issue, generated constructed responses while reading, and then composed integrated essays. They also completed individual difference measures (general knowledge, reading skill, reading strategy use) and wrote independent essays to assess their writing ability. Mixed effect models revealed that general knowledge and reading skills contributed to integrated essay performance, but that once general writing ability was entered into the model, it became the strongest predictor of integrated writing scores. These results suggest the need for deeper consideration of the role of writing skills in integrated reading and writing tasks.     

建立国家开放大学在线辅导共同体探索

一个理想辅导技能的框架,与学生学习的成果相关。这些学生需要掌握各类知识和技能,这些知识技能包括认知领域以及其他四个领域。辅导工作(行为)帮助学生掌握各种技能(如判断内涵的技能、批判性思考的技能等等),而许多教师本身可能就缺乏这些技能。这种学习和学习技能涵盖了所有这五个学习领域:环境、认知、元认知、情感和管理领域。辅导教师在学生作业中通过批改评阅的方式留下的辅导反馈,可以而且应该尽可能合理地涵盖所有五个领域。文章回顾了开放式学习中在线辅导的环境、认知、元认知、情感与管理五种领域的功能,来探索通过建立辅导教师在线共同体的积极作用。     

A case study of scientific reasoning

Concern is increasingly being expressed about the teaching of higher order thinking skills in schools and the levels of understanding of scientific concepts by students. Metaphors for the improvement of science education have included science as exploration and science as process skills for experimentation. As a result of a series of studies on how children relate evidence to their theories or beliefs, Kuhn (1993a) has suggested that changing the metaphor to science as argument may be a fruitful way to increase the development of higher order thinking skills and understanding in science instruction. This report is of a case study into the coordination of evidence and theories by a grade 7 primary school student. This student was not able to coordinate these elements in a way that would enable her to rationally consider evidence in relation to her theories. It appeared that the thinking skills associated with science as argument were similar for her in different domains of knowledge and context. Specializations: science learning, scientific reasoning, learning environments, science teacher education. Specializations: cognition, reasoning in science and mathermatics.     

Differences in Metacognitive Regulation in Introductory Biology Students: When Prompts Are Not Enough

Strong metacognition skills are associated with learning outcomes and student performance. Metacognition includes metacognitive knowledge—our awareness of our thinking—and metacognitive regulation—how we control our thinking to facilitate learning. In this study, we targeted metacognitive regulation by guiding students through self-evaluation assignments following the first and second exams in a large introductory biology course (n = 245). We coded these assignments for evidence of three key metacognitive-regulation skills: monitoring, evaluating, and planning. We found that nearly all students were willing to take a different approach to studying but showed varying abilities to monitor, evaluate, and plan their learning strategies. Although many students were able to outline a study plan for the second exam that could effectively address issues they identified in preparing for the first exam, only half reported that they followed their plans. Our data suggest that prompting students to use metacognitive-regulation skills is effective for some students, but others need help with metacognitive knowledge to execute the learning strategies they select. Using these results, we propose a continuum of metacognitive regulation in introductory biology students. By refining this model through further study, we aim to more effectively target metacognitive development in undergraduate biology students.