Cognitive Process-Based Education 17

Cognitive Process-Based Education 17 embodied within it what it means to do science. When science means learning facts about science, we are talking about useless information that is readily forgotten after the test. I have no idea why anyone learns to balance chemical equations or apply physics formulas or learns about biology classifications in high school. None of this is of any use to most adults. (It is easy to test, however.) When the stuff that is being taught does not relate to the inher- ent goals of the students, it will be forgotten. You can count on it. Why this stuff is taught is simply that it derives from a conception of science prevalent in the 1890s that has not been modified since. It is defended by people as a way to produce more scientists, which makes no sense since it probably deters more students from entering science than it encourages. Scientific reasoning, on the other hand, is worth teaching. Why? Because car mechanics, plumbers, doctors, and crime investigators, to name four random professions, all do scientific reasoning on a daily basis. As a society we anoint only doctors with the glory of doing actual scientific reasoning. The other professions get less glamorous interpretations. But they are all doing the same stuff. This is what they are doing: They are taking a look at evidence and trying to determine the probable causes of the conditions that they have found. To do this one must know what causes what in the real world, which is science; what counts as evidence of known conditions, which is sci- ence; and previous cases that are similar and that any good scientist must know. So while we may not think of a plumber as doing scien- tific reasoning, that is exactly what he is doing. Science is about creating hypotheses and gathering evidence to support or refute those hypotheses. Children are natural scientists. They often try stuff out—skipping rocks on the water or dropping stones from the roof or lighting things on fire—to see what happens. But there is more to science than trying stuff out. One must seek expla- nations and make sure those explanations are correct. Knowing what constitutes a correct explanation is really the essence of what scientific knowledge is about. But notice that there are correct explanations for HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023757