How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes 127

How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes 127 what is inside each egg by shaking and listening to the sound generated. After he takes a first guess, show him the list of what items are in each egg and have him guess again. See if he changes his mind about some of the previous guesses. Now open the eggs and see how close the guesses were to what was actually inside each egg. Now, let’s make a musical instrument called a kazoo. Cut a small square of wax paper about 1 inch larger than the end of the cardboard tube. After doing that, wrap the wax paper over one of the ends of the tube and put a rubber band over the paper to hold it in place. Now, put the open end of your kazoo up to your mouth and hum a tune into it. Notice how the kazoo buzzes and vibrates to amplify (make louder) the sound of your voice. Of course, this is not exactly what I have in mind when I suggest focus- ing school on experimentation. Say the word experiment and the word science usually follows right away. This is unfortunate because most kids won’t become scientists any time soon. Also, most kids already know what they are being asked to “experiment” about. They know the pencil falls and they know you can make noise by blowing through things. They may not understand how all this works, but they won’t understand much mote after doing these so-called “experiments.” Experiments in the larger sense are about attempts to find out what is true about things you are uncertain about. The issue is how to do that when you are wondering about something. To do this we need to constantly deal with what kids are worrying about and ask them to determine how they can find out what is true. This is experi- mentation that can be helped by teachers. It needs to be individually focused, however. You can’t have a class worry collectively about any one thing. Each kid has his own concerns, HOW TO TEACH EVALUATION For an issue that is so important to so many people, it is astonishing how difficult this seems to be. Just say no to drugs campaigns don’t work and people wonder why. Abstinence campaigns don’t work and people wonder why. It is not all that mysterious. You can’t teach HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023867