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Excellent discussion, which I think clearly identifies a route to a better
way of education, that of creating goals around thinking skills, problem
solving, and understanding how knowledge (including STEM knowledge in
particular) is developed.  Fortunately, we are starting to get some good
models of how to achieve this kind of education.

Unfortunately, this route does not seem to be overcoming the rather
traditional approaches still being used to develop education standards,
which produce lists of hundreds of individual facts which students are to
learn.  It is easy to see where this comes from:  you assemble a panel of
experts on various topics (in any subject), and discover they cannot agree
on how to describe thinking skills, in part because they just haven't spent
the needed time articulating those skills and figuring out operational
definitions for them.  But they can agree on a list of key facts, formulae,
and definitions, which eventually become lists to be ticked off in
curriculum frameworks and tests.   The standards written this way do give
nods to thinking skills, but because these are not as crisply described as a
neat bulleted list of facts, the curriculum and texts and assessments based
on these standards tend to focus on the lists of key facts, not the skills
which produced them.  And soon the whole education systems seems a lot like
a device to enshrine dogma as bemoaned in this thread.

The good news is that some new frameworks for education are tackling
thinking skills head on, and coming up with some really exciting
alternatives to recall-based education goals.  Take a look at the National
Assessment of Educational Progress' recent framework for science, and
especially the brand new one for technology and engineering literacy
(http://www.nagb.org/publications/frameworks/science-2011.pdf and
http://www.nagb.org/publications/frameworks/tech2014-framework ), or the
Programme for International Student Assessment framework
(http://www.oecd.org/document/44/0,3746,en_2649_35845621_44455276_1_1_1_1,00
.html .  Yes, there are still standards about facts to have been memorized,
but there are a whole lot in these standards that require actually
demonstrating skills at gathering evidence, designing experiments, and
analyzing evidence, not just recalling what somebody else has concluded.  It
makes sense that these thinking-strategies are clearest in the technology
and engineering literacy framework, because unlike science there are fewer
lists of long-standing facts and formulae, and many of these would be
changing every day anyway.  So the engineers have worked hard to articulate
their key skills, like designing to constraints and optimization, which can
be taught, assessed, and used in daily life right away.  These qualities are
not easily demonstrated by multiple-choice questions, so NAEP has developed
computer based simulations and challenges which could transform assessment
in very nice ways.  [Disclaimer:  I've been involved in this work for the
past several years, and have become a fan.  Informal Science Educator Cary
Sneider has been a key player in this process for much longer, and played a
leading role in creating the technology and engineering framework.]

Even if this approach does creep into curriculum, curriculum standards, and
high-stakes tests, it will not eliminate the need for providing some
education around knowledge of consensus conclusions and those much-maligned
"facts."  Whether students accept evolution or not, we should expect they
could demonstrate a knowledge of what it claims and what the evidence is
supporting those claims.  And we can't talk about something if we don't
agree on a terminology and shortcuts (like a definition of Darwinian
evolution).  But as long as we also seek education in critical thinking
skills, then we can (and should) relinquish our fixation on fighting over
the one-and-only lists of facts to be learned.

Alan
________________________________________
Alan J. Friedman, Ph.D.
Consultant for Museum Development and Science Communication
29 West 10th Street
New York, New York 10011 USA
T  +1 917 882-6671
E   [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
W www.FriedmanConsults.com <http://www.friedmanconsults.com/>
 
a member of The Museum Group
www.museumgroup.com <http://www.museumgroup.com/>

> 



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