Improving Young Minds
Maybe it’s some kind of law of nature that immediately after I write a blog post about a subject, the next day there will be new stories related to the same subject. Last week I wrote something about critical thinking and, shortly thereafter, there was an interesting story in Science Daily claiming that tests show that college freshman majoring in science have terrible reasoning skills whether they were educated in the U.S. or in China.
My first reaction was, “Duh!” Young people in general have terrible reasoning skills. That’s why those of us who are older call them idiots. At this point it would be polite of me to explain that I’m just kidding but, in fact, I’m not much. Face it, how many people look back on their younger selves and think, “Wow! I was sure smart then! I wish I was that smart now!”? I have my glasses on and I still can’t see any raised hands. But, believe it or not, this is not intended to trash the thinking capacity of young people. I was trashing a study about them, actually.
The article about the study mentioned that Chinese students knew many more facts than American students (but please don’t get me started on the state of science education in America!) but performed just as poorly on tests of scientific reasoning. That is, even the ones who knew many scientific facts were unable to solve many of the problems they were given.
From this, the researchers (Or maybe it was the reporters. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. But don’t get me started on the state of science journalism in America either!) concluded “that educators must go beyond teaching science facts if they hope to boost students’ reasoning ability.” I found this to be a very poorly reasoned conclusion based, as it was, on the strange assumption that it’s even possible to teach reasoning or that it’s possible to teach it to children. Talk about a triumph of optimism over experience!
To illustrate the point, let’s go to another study [reported in The Shortsightedness Of Youth], that used a popular test of deferred gratification to find out …. (No drum roll is necessary but feel free to provide one anyway) that young teenagers don’t like to defer gratification. Interestingly, rather than relating this to education, television or bad parenting (all of which are popular scapegoats for children’s problems), they related it to physical brain development. “The study found that teens are shortsighted more due to immaturity in the brain systems that govern sensation seeking than to immaturity in the brain systems responsible for self-control.”
This is perfectly reasonable. It means that young people think differently because the organ of thought is not yet fully developed.
It is not a big stretch to see that this same developmental issue may apply to critical thinking and scientific reasoning. It is possible that critical thinking takes time to learn, and new college freshman haven’t had minds capable of learning it long enough to have become very proficient at it. Far be it for me to let teachers off the hook for poor educational outcomes (but I swear I won’t say anything about science education in this country) but incomplete brain development is a better explanation for the similarity of outcome for otherwise completely dissimilar student groups than the theory that all science teachers in both the U.S. and China are failures.
The really interesting thing here is the poor scientific reasoning in the conclusion that both countries need to learn better methods of teaching scientific reasoning. It seems that whoever formed that conclusion did so because it was the conclusion they expected or wanted, rather than actually applying their gray matter to find a really good explanation. And if adults (I presume they are adults. Few school kids get enough funding to perform these kinds of studies) have that much trouble with scientific reasoning, why would they expect anyone else to be good at it?
Maybe good reasoning skills can’t be taught at all. Maybe it’s a genetic thing, like being smart or tall or extremely loquacious (look it up. It means this post has gone on too long). Someone should study that.
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