The 74 recently released a piece titled, “9 Things Science Tells Us about How Kids Learn to Read and Think Critically.” The article makes a compelling argument for more exposure to science and social science content matter even in the face of easy access to information. The argument is that one cannot think critically without the background knowledge necessary.
Excerpts from the article appear below:
Here’s a quick summary of an iconic study (which has been affirmed many times): researchers took a group of junior high students and gave them two tests — one was a standard reading comprehension test, the other assessed their knowledge of baseball. Researchers were then able to break the students into groups: high or low reading ability, and high or low knowledge of baseball.
The students were then given a passage describing part of a baseball game. They were asked to retell what happened and, using a model of the field and players, show what happened.
As expected, the students who scored high in reading and baseball performed the best, and those who scored low in both did the worst. But what about those two groups in the middle? Did the strong readers without much knowledge of baseball outperform the weak readers who knew a lot about baseball? No. The more knowledgeable students outperformed the stronger readers. In fact, they performed almost as well as the students who were both knowledgeable and strong readers.
Much like reading comprehension, the key to critical thinking is knowledge. But while broad knowledge is essential to being a good reader, deep knowledge is needed for critical thinking. The implications for education are clear: if we want students to think like scientists or historians, we have to teach them the academic content that scientists and historians know. As with reading comprehension strategies, tips like “scientists use unexpected results to form hypotheses” or “historians consider the source when interpreting a text” can be helpful reminders — but they can’t be acted upon without the relevant, domain-specific knowledge.
For more, see https://www.the74million.org/flashcard/9-things-science-tells-us-about-how-kids-learn-to-read-and-think-critically/1
