Wendy M. Williams and Jessica Zulawski
Starting last winter, second-graders in an Ithaca elementary school classroom have enjoyed riveting discussions about how to distinguish good from bad sources of information, the differences between causation and association, and the elements of sound experimental design. While this may sound like material targeted at high school students, the second graders were taught the underlying concepts using age-appropriate teaching modules as part of the ongoing Thinking Like a Scientist (TLAS) project.
TLAS is an ongoing Cornell educational outreach program developed by Human Development professor Wendy Williams. TLAS has many variants, each aimed at teaching critical thinking and reasoning skills to a different group of young people. The underlying goal of TLAS is to train students to use the scientific method to solve problems in their daily lives. One format of TLAS targets under-represented demographic and socioeconomic groups in science—such as African American, Latino, and economically-disadvantaged White students—at the high school level, with the goal of fostering both an interest in science and stronger critical thinking skills. For high school students, the TLAS curriculum includes in-depth classroom discussions focused on the scientific method and how it can be applied to everyday situations.
Elementary students, however, represented new territory for the program. Thus, Williams enlisted Cornell Human Development senior Jessica Zulawski to help design a new variant of TLAS for these younger students. For her honors thesis, Jessica (under the supervision of Williams), translated the high school TLAS lesson plans into a format appropriate for a second-grade classroom. Laurie Rubin, a twenty-year veteran Ithaca teacher who has taught at Beverly Martin as well as Cayuga Heights elementary schools, played a critical role in the development process by providing invaluable input and guidance, and by teaching the TLAS lessons to her class of second graders.
The lesson plans were taught once a week in forty-five minute segments, but Ms. Rubin also reinforced the knowledge gained during this time by reiterating the material during other class time. The six TLAS modules taught by Rubin were titled “What is Science?,” “Define the Problem,” “Know Fact vs. Opinion,” “Weigh Evidence and Make Decisions,” ”Move from Science to Society, ” and finally, an overarching module that tied together all previous material. Examples in these lessons focused on the central theme of the psychology of food and eating behavior. The curriculum involved discussions on the effects of visual cues on appetite, advertising and healthy eating, and how to find good sources of nutrition information.
Improvement in students’ critical thinking skills was measured by rating students’ verbal responses to open-ended questions. Students were tested individually by Jessica, who transcribed their answers. Testing was conducted two months before the program began, just before program inception, and then two months later, at the conclusion of the program, to provide baseline improvement data for the students as well as program-related improvement data. Questions posed to students involved hypothetical children in real-world scenarios common in the students’lives, and the students were asked if the individual in the scenario was exercising “Good thinking” or “Not-so-good thinking,” and why. The responses were scored by two independent raters on a scale of one to five, indicating the students’ level of ability to generalize the scientific method to solve real-world problems.
The results on the effectiveness of the elementary program showed a great deal of promise. On average, students improved in their scores on each question by one full point by the completion of the program, demonstrating a significant increase. This finding suggests that this curriculum could be useful in additional classrooms to improve the critical thinking abilities of other elementary school students, and warrants further exploration of TLAS for young students.
The hope motivating the expansion of TLAS to this younger group of students was that these students would use the critical thinking skills gained through TLAS to become responsible consumers and users of information. Growing up in the information age, these children are surrounded by a vast world of facts and figures, so it is important that they know what information they can and cannot deem reliable. Real-world problem solving means knowing how to sift relevant from irrelevant information and trustworthy from less-trusted sources, with the aim of building solid solutions responsive to multiple aspects of a problem (for example, how to create a healthy lifestyle). The knowledge and abilities these students gained from participating in the TLAS program are a start on their journey toward thinking like a scientist in everyday life.
