Part 2 Practice: Essay

Focus question: How can we best teach students to think like scientists (or historians)?

Critical thinks in any curriculum involves employing materials and strategies to accommodate different students with varied learning styles. No matter the leaning material or style used, the main goal should be how to keep students up with the changing world despite the academic discipline they are undertaking. This is why the ACARA had focused on including critical thinking as a key competency in the Australian curriculum. Although critical thinking has been defined differently, whatever definition one might opt to use, the end goal should be to encourage developing a thinking culture (Schmaltz, Jansen, and Wenckowski, 2017). For students to think like a scientist, the teacher needs to focus on how to teach students to think and develop approaches and tools to fallacies relating to it. Equipping the students with core ideas and information helps them choose and decide on the right or valid information to use.

Students need to be told the structured language used in different fields to help them understand, adapt, and translate issues relating to the field on to daily life situations and coming up with an effective decision. Zwiers, O’Hara, and Pritchard (2014) have emphases on the importance of understanding basic academic language. For example, understanding the academic language used in scientific, when reporting a finding, requires one to use uniform language and reporting standards (European Society of Radiology (ESR). (2018). Educators need to encourage science students to understand and use scientific language and know the reporting structure to get the adopted world of science and prepare them to get involved in industrial involvement.

Although the argument is believed to relate to the political field, thinking like a scientist (for example), requires one to develop a logical scientific argument that is relevant to the issue at hand (Gray and Kang, 2014). Structured arguments on any discipline are based on some important reasoning or belief in that discipline. Thus, for a student to think like a scientist, he ought to develop the ability to understand the true premises for that belief. The educator can achieve this by exposing students to understand the basic beliefs and develop their arguments. Besides, the curriculum should offer educational programs that are empirical evidence-based, investigative in nature, and techniques that promote scientific thinking (Schmaltz and Lilienfeld, 2014). Similarly, science involves a lot of research; thus, educators should encourage students to do more research to develop evidence-based solutions.

Nearly most of the science books have the word “scientific methods.” These are a series of steps followed by Scientists to experiment and test ideas to come up with real results. Likewise, the educator needs to develop an inquiry-based learning environment and method that allows students to develop investigative skills and understand scientific methods used in solving problems (Abdi 2014; Lawson, Jordan-Fleming and Bodle, 2015). This helps increase students’ critical thinking abilities and incorporate basic psychological science principles in the world around them. Also, it helps students to acquire, such as analysis skills, disposition, and become open-minded.

Students need scientific thinking skills to help them understand some background knowledge of scientific claims. For instance, despite the information on climate change, some people have remained skeptical, ignoring its impacts (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 2016). Teaching learners think like scientists foster the necessary skills need in understanding some logic. Therefore, educators need to develop policies that help students acquire some skills useful in the workforce (Shrout and Rodgers, 2018)). This ensures students can recognize any replication claims and can gain advanced knowledge to apply in analyzing sophisticated data and can give a well-analyzed disclosure of their findings.

Science is a societal endeavor, and it cannot be conducted in its isolation without involving society. It also has societal impacts, thus requires students to develop creativity and intuition. As a result, educators need to create awareness of sensitive issues in the society, in the students’ cultural heritance and in multicultural setting (Shiraev and Levy, 2016). To foster students’ scientific thinking, educators need to teach on some social aspects such as attitude, biases, cross-culture research, communication, expression of emotions, among others. All of which the student will encounter in the workforce or will face in his life outside school. Therefore, educators and curriculum should offer multicultural approaches.

Using concrete scientific methods to improve students’ critical thinking abilities and offering profession oriented majors and programs like science to leverage high level of critical thinking in that field. There are countless resources educator can use to deepen students’ scientific processes. Therefore, encouraging students to reflect on the process and engaging them with questions and tests enhances their creativity. For instance, where a student has conducted inquired-based instructions, they should be encouraged to link the process they use to strategies used. Similarly, encouraging them to read the works of other scientists provides them with evidence of real work done, and they can relate or refer to such works when solving problems or conducting research.

While there are different curricula offered in schools, there are some ideologies that should be taught in combination with evidence-based approaches. Educators should be provided with courses and materials that promote scientific thinking. This creates a solid foundation for developing scientific thinking skills to students and the growth of expertise (Webb et al. 2017). The curriculum needs to revise regularly to ensure it remains effective and efficient. Also, revising and review curriculums and programs ensure the best scientific thinking approaches are incorporated to ensure students are offered updated information and skills. Therefore, the curriculum should remain relevant to students and give the student the necessary scientific needs in and outside school life.

Making students familiar with the basics of scientific thinking promotes critical thinking skills. For instance, a teacher discussing the issue to do with climatic changes will promote students’ skills if he tackles issues relating to global warming. These explicate and build up students’ scientific thinking if the teacher can give real data on global warming instead of just discussing climatic changes. To develop students’ thinking skills, which can be compared with skills for other scientists, motivators need to use real information to give the students the best instructions relevant to the future job market. Wieman (2014) adds that, should offer an opportunity progression process for students to advance from one level to the other.