Developing Critical Thinking Through Science

Contains standards-based activities for the physical sciences that help students learn the scientific method and develop analysis skills that can be applied to science and other subjects.

Critical thinking is an essential skill for learners and teachers alike. Therefore, it is essential that educators be given practical strategies for improving their critical thinking skills as well as methods to effectively provide critical thinking skills to their students. The Handbook of Research on Critical Thinking and Teacher Education Pedagogy examines and explains how new strategies, methods, and techniques in critical thinking can be applied to classroom practice and professional development to improve teaching and learning in teacher education and make critical thinking a tangible objective in instruction. This critical scholarly publication helps to shift and advance the debate on how critical thinking should be taught and offers insights into the significance of critical thinking and its effective integration as a cornerstone of the educational system. Highlighting topics such as early childhood education, curriculum, and STEM education, this book is designed for teachers/instructors, instructional designers, education professionals, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and academicians.

This book promotes the effective implementation and development of critical analysis in physics. It focuses on explanatory texts concerning subjects typically dealt with in secondary or higher education and addressed in an academic or popular context. It highlights the general difficulties and obstacles inherent in teaching physics and shows how some tools can help to combine successful criticism and better understanding. The book examines the main reasons to call a text into question and looks at risk factors such as simplifications, story-like explanations and visual analogies. It takes inventory of the benefits and limits of critical analysis and discusses the complex links between conceptual mastery and critical attitude. The book ends by offering tools to activate critical thinking and ways for educators to guide students towards productive critical analysis.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science's report on Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education suggests that instructors "can no longer rely solely on trying to cover a syllabus packed with topics" but rather should "introduce fewer concepts but present them in greater depth." They further suggest that the principles embodied in a set of core concepts and competencies should be the basis for all undergraduate biology courses, including those designed for nonmajors. The theme of Tools for Critical Thinking in Biology will be the first and most fundamental of these competencies: the ability to apply the process of science. Biology courses and curricula must engage students in how scientific inquiry is conducted, including evaluating and interpreting scientific explanations of the natural world. The book uses diverse examples to illustrate how experiments work, how hypotheses can be tested by systematic and comparative observations when experiments aren't possible, how models are useful in science, and how sound decisions can be based on the weight of evidence even when uncertainty remains. These are fundamental issues in the process of science that are important for everyone to understand, whether they pursue careers in science or not. Where other introductory biology textbooks are organized by scientific concepts, Tools for Critical Thinking in Biology will instead show how methods can be used to test hypotheses in fields as different as ecology and medicine, using contemporary case studies. The book will provide students with a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of such methods for answering new questions, and will thereby change the way they think about the fundamentals of biology.

This book examines the learning and development process of students’ scientific thinking skills. Universities should prepare students to be able to make judgements in their working lives based on scientific evidence. However, an understanding of how these thinking skills can be developed is limited. This book introduces a new broad theory of scientific thinking for higher education; in doing so, redefining higher-order thinking abilities as scientific thinking skills. This includes critical thinking and understanding the basics of science, epistemic maturity, research and evidence-based reasoning skills and contextual understanding. The editors and contributors discuss how this concept can be redefined, as well as the challenges educators and students may face when attempting to teach and learn these skills. This edited collection will be of interest to students and scholars of student scientific skills and higher-order thinking abilities.

Written and extensively class tested with NSF/NIH support, this timely and useful text addresses a crucial need which is acknowledged in most universities and colleges. It is the need for students to learn to write in the context of their field of study; in this case science. Although numerous "how to" writing books have been published, few, if any, address the central pedagogical issues underlying the process of learning to think and write scientifically. The direct connection between this writing skill and that of critical thinking is developed with engaging style by the author, an English professor. Moriarty's book is an invaluable guide for both undergraduate and graduate science students. In the process of learning the specific requirements of organization demanded by scientific writing, students will develop strategies for thinking through their scientific research, well before they sit down to write. This instructive text will be useful to students who need to satisfy a science writing proficiency requirement in the context of a science course, a course in technical writing, advanced composition, or writing for the profession.

FULL COLOR VERSION. A BLACK AND WHITE VERSION IS ALSO AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE."Science for Critical Thinkers" is a comprehensive approach to developing student's critical thinking skills in science. Written by two science educators with over 30 years combined teaching experience in middle and high school instruction, the book promises to educate and develop young minds ages 10-13, to think as scientists do. This 450-pages, full color science resource is a complete curriculum for private and homeschools alike. It contains four years of science study conveniently packaged into one book; the Nature of Science, Physical Science, Life Science and Earth and Space Science. An exceptional value for discerning parents. Students utilize the text from late elementary school straight through middle school. Each unit is composed of labs kids can do at home, enrichment activities, critical thinking activities, a science art project, an engineering project, an oral skill building activity, writing activities, observation activities, online activities, practice questions with an answer key, problem solving questions and more than enough content to start properly developing scientific thinking. The book also contains a science pre-test to assess student's prior knowledge before beginning the curriculum; a comprehensive glossary, a calculations section; instructions on how to use the book, instructions for answering questions scientifically; and graph paper for graphing activities. Content is presented in a ready-to-use and easy-to-understand format. From the onset of the course students start applying the scientific method in the design of their own controlled experiment. They use a science journal for recording observations, data, and completing their laboratory exercises. 18 inquiry and science process skills are presented to master. These include classifying, collecting data, hypothesizing, identifying and controlling variables, and more. Students develop a discipline of scientific thinking as they participate in activities outlined in each unit. They will take what they routinely learn with the curriculum and use it to apply science reasoning to the real life situations they encounter. The world becomes their classroom as students begin to question, investigate, explore and make discoveries on their own initiative. Online and library research is encouraged as students begin to think about science in more enlightened and intuitive ways. Pushing a cart in the supermarket will have them thinking about Newton's laws of motion. When they see their cuts and bruises healing nicely, they will think about the process of mitosis. Learning about science from a critical thinking perspective helps kids to improve their problem solving abilities and allow them to think systematically and logically when dealing with issues of a practical and intellectual nature. The text provides excellent preparation for a systematic study of science later in the high school years.

The Thinker’s Guide to Scientific Thinking focuses on developing the intellectual skills inherent in the well-cultivated practice of every area of scientific research and study. It helps students and practicing scientists come to reason within the logic of science and to see the field as a cohesive whole. From astronomers to zoologists and physicists to chemists, skilled scientists use careful analysis to question data, test theories, draw logical conclusions, and propose feasible solutions. Students in science courses, and scientists themselves will find their analytical abilities enhanced by the engaging framework of inquiry set forth by Richard Paul and Linda Elder in this guide. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fairminded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.