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OCR for page 34
34
EDUCATION AND LEARNING TO THINK
of appropriate evaluation strategies. Part of the problem is our
penchant for testing. American pressures for standardized testing,
especially at the elementary and secondary school levels, make it
difficult for curriculum reforms that do not produce test score gains
to survive. But most current tests favor students who have acquired
Tots of factual knowledge and do little to assess either the coherence
and utility of that knowledge or the students' ability to use it to
reason, solve problems, and the like. To the extent that educators
are motivated to produce high test scores, such tests can have the
effect of suppressing efforts to expand higher order skill teaching.
As interest in thinking and reasoning skills has increased, there has
been growing effort to include thinking and reasoning in the batteries
of tests given to students. Several states now have or will soon
have such tests as part of their state competency testing programs.
So far, however, these tests appear to be very limited vehicles for
assessing or promoting the kinds of higher order thinking discussed
here. They consist mostly of isolated items that test students' critical
thinking and reasoning knowledge. But they do not provide the
scope or the opportunity for students to carry out extended analyses,
to solve open-ended problems, or to display command of complex
relationships, although these abilities are at the heart of higher order
competence. It seer likely that assessments of forms of thinking
that we recognize to involve nuance, judgment, and weighing of
alternatives rather than fixed answers will require techniques that
themselves depend on judgment and that are open to alternative
interpretations.
THINNING IN THE CURRICULUM
How can we summarize the evidence reviewed in the preceding
section, and what does it suggest to educators wishing to improve
their students' thinking abilities? It ~ clear that if we were to
demand solid empirical evidence supporting a particular approach
to higher order skit} development before implementing educational
programs, we would be condemned at this time to inaction. There is
far less empirical evidence of any kind available than we might have
imagined and the evidence we have is often of limited utility. In most
cases, the evidence amounts mainly to data showing that students
who have taken particular courses are more likely to perform well
on the tasks directly taught in the courses than students who have
not taken those courses. Only a few studies have assessed the key
OCR for page 35
LAUREN B. RESNICK
35
question of generalization to other parts of the school curriculum or
out-of-school performance.
Although we cannot offer a "seal of approval" for any partic-
ular approach, the cumulative evidence justifies cautious optimism
for the venture as a whole. Thinking and problem-solving programs
within the academic disciplines seem to meet their internal goals and
perhaps even boost performance more generally. It seems possible to
raise reading competence by a variety of methods, ranging from study
skill training through the reciprocal teaching methods of Brown and
Palincsar to the discussions of philosophical texts in Lipma~'s prm
gram. On the other hand, general improvements in problem-solving,
rhetoric, or other general thinking abilities have rarely been demon-
strated, perhaps because few evaluators have included convincing
assessments of these abilities in their studies.
Most programs reviewed here represent efforts to improve think-
ing skills through the addition of special courses or course units
rather than through the modification of the mainline curriculum.*
They thus offer a reasonable current estimate of how effective we can
expect separate thinking and reasoning courses to be. As we have
seen, although the available evidence does not establish that such
courses can produce broad transfer of learning, neither does it allow
us to strongly reject the separate course as an element in an edu-
cational reform program aimed at improving higher order abilities
in students. Based on present evidence, general course effectiveness
seems to depend on the extent to which it is accompanied by parallel
efforts across the curriculum.
Embedding Thinking Skille m Academic Disciplines
In this view, prudent educational practice should seek to em-
bed efforts to teach cognitive skills into one or another preferably
all~f the traclitional school disciplines, and it should do this ret
gardless of what may also be done in the way of special courses in
thinking or learning skills. This disciplin~embedded approach has
several advantages. First, it provides a natural knowledge base axed
environment in which to practice and develop higher order skills. As
we have shown earlier, cognitive research has established the very
*Some of the discipline-based problem-solving programs and some of the
reading and self-monitoring programs represent important exceptions. The
implications of these programs will be discussed further in subsequent sections.
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36
ED UCATION AND LEARNING TO THINrK
important role of knowledge In reasoning and thinking. One can-
not reason in the abstract; one must reason about something. Each
school discipline provides extensive reasoning and problem-solving
material by incorporating problem-solving or critical thinking train-
ing into the disciplines; the problem of "empty thinkings thinking
about nothing is solved. As knowledge in the discipline develops,
the base on which effective problem solving can operate is naturally
available.
Second, embedding higher order skill training within school dis-
ciplines provides criteria for what constitutes good thinking and
reasoning within the disciplinary tradition. Each discipline has char-
acter~stic ways of reasoning, and a complete higher order education
would seek to expose students to all of these. Reasoning and problem
solving in the physical sciences, for example, are shaped by particu-
lar combinations of inductive and deductive reasoning, by appeal to
mathematical tests, and by an extensive body of agreed upon fact
for which new theories must account. In the social sciences, good
reasoning and problem solving are much more heavily influenced by
traditions of rhetorical argument, of weighing alternatives, and of
rebuilding a case" for a proposed solution. Mathematics insists on
formal proofs a criterion absent In most other disciplines. Each
style of reasoning (and several others that could be elaborated) is
worth learning. However, only if higher order skills are taught within
each discipline are they likely to be learned.
Finally, teaching higher order skills within the disciplines will
ensure that something worthwhile will have been learned even if wide
transfer proves unattainable. This point is profoundly important. It
amounts to saying that no special, separate brief for teaching higher
orcler skills need be made. Rather, it proposes that if a subject matter
is worth teaching in school it is worth teaching at a high level to
everyone. A decision to pursue such an approach would transform
the whole curriculum in fundamental ways. It would treat higher
order skills development as the paramount goal of at! schooling.
Paradoxically, then, dropping the quest for general skills might, in
the end, be the most powerful means of cultivating generally higher
levels of cognitive functioning.
Saying that thinking skills should be incorporated into existing or
planned disciplinary courses is by no means suggesting an easy path.
We know less than we need to about how to do this job. Traditional
formulations of the issue largely interfere with the kind of inventive
educational thought and experimentation that will be needed to turn
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LA UREN B. RESNICK
37
classes in mathematics, history, physics, or English into arenas for
teaching thinking and reasoning abilities. For example, the classic
distinction between knowledge as something one reasons about and
skills as something one reasons with has, in practice, placed process
skills and knowledge in competition for limited instructional time.
The idea that certain forms of knowledge can be powerful tools for
learning and problem solving, or that processes and procedures are
an expression of principled knowledge, is something that scholars and
educators can agree on but have not really found ways to act on. (See
Bransford, in press, for a particularly perspicacious analysis of this
problem.) Instead, we have had reactive pendulum swings of atten-
tion either to process skills ("doing science, "doing history, etc.) or
to building large bodies of knowledge. Research and experimentation
focusing on how to truly combine these are badly needed.
Higher Order Approaches to the Enabling Disciplines
A particularly powerful way to begin transforming the school
program is to concentrate on those parts of the traditional curricu-
lum that enable learning and thinking in many fields. Reading is
such an enabling discipline. So is writing, along with, perhaps, skills
for effective oral communication. Mathematics is another candidate.
Math is involved in many other disciplines, and skills of ~mathema-
tization," that is, the construction of formal representations and
arguments, could be broadly enabling. The Wars," then, come off
rather well on this enabling criterion, although the reading, 'riting,
and 'rithmetic curriculum caller] for in this higher order perspective
will look quite different from the traditional hickory stick curriculum.
Furthermore, it seems appropriate to acid a Fourth R" reasoning-
to our list of potential enabling disciplines. Let us consider each of
these briefly.
We have already discussed some current research that points to
possibilities for changing the ways in which reading is taught. Thus
far the research has shown mainly how very weak readers can be
brought up to at least average performance levels. It ~ important
to engage these students in meaning construction activities based on
text in settings that incorporate modeling of good performance, lots
of feedback, and opportunities to do small bits of the task in the
context of seeing the whole job accomplished. However, we do not
know for certain that these same methods are all that are needed to
raise average performance levels to true high literacy levels. Finding
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38
EDUCATION AND LEARNING TO THINK
out what is needed to meet this goal is one important agenda for
future research. Cognitive researchers about to embark on studies
of this important topic would do well to examine the instruction in
the high literacy academy tradition for strong hypotheses about the
kinds of teaching likely to succeed.
The school curriculum has neglected writing for some time. Its
potential role as a cultivator and an enabler of higher order thinking
is very great, especially if we consider writing as an occasion to think
through arguments and to master forms of reasoning and persua-
sion that are valued in various disciplines. Existing research clearly
shows that children's and perhaps many teachers'-conceptions of
writing do not match what both skilled writers and cognitive re-
search on writing tell us about the process. Children, and unskilled
writers generally, tend to view composition as a matter of writing
down what they know; Scardamalia and Bereiter (1985) call this
the "knowledge testings strategy of writing. Children are not aware
of the role, or even of the existence, of the various discourse con-
ventions and structures good writers use and readers expect (see
Stein, 1986, for a review). Finally, they do not think of writing as a
problem-solving process (cf. Flower and Hayes, 1980) in which plans
must be made for communicating an organized point of view to an
audience, and they do not understand that revision is integral to
effective writing. Considerable research on the learning and teaching
of writing is now underway, some of it focused on writing as a gen-
eral too! for constructing and expressing arguments. Although the
approaches being tried are extremely varied, most reflect a general
point of view similar to the one underlying the successful approaches
to teaching reading as a higher order skill. They treat writing as
an intentional process, one in which the writer manages a variety of
mental resources-linguistic knowledge, topical knowledge, knowI-
edge of rhetorical forms, processes of attention and judgment to
construct a message that will have a desired impact on a reader. We
now need research that focuses explicitly on cultivating and assessing
these broad skills of meaning construction and interpretation. As in
the case of reading, examination of traditional instruction in rhetoric
and related fields should provide a profitable point of departure.
Mathematics must be discussed in somewhat different terms than
reading and writing. It is not only an enabling skill, widely called on
in a number of other disciplines, but also a discipline in its own right
whose particular knowledge structures must be learned. Mathemat-
ics also poses special problems, derived from its heavy dependence
OCR for page 39
LA UREN B. RESNICK
39
on formal notations. This has the effect of making it difficult for
students to use their informal and intuitive knowledge of mathemat-
ical concepts to support school mathematics learning and to advance
their mathematical competence. As we noted earlier, good evidence
suggests that much school mathematics learning proceeds as a matter
of memorizing rules for formal symbol manipulation without much
understanding of why the rules work as they do or what the symbols
stand for. If education were concerned only with the calculation skills
needed to Get bye in routine jobs and family obligations, this would
not cause much concern. But a high literacy approach to mathemat-
ics teaching cannot afford to let this separation between symbols and
meaning, between calculation and mathematical reasoning, survive.
Although many mathematics educators have sought ways of making
particular concepts and procedures more understandable to children,
to date no research has directly addressed the question of how ~ broad
meaning-construction approach to mathematics learning can be pros
moted among all students so that students themselves come to seek
the connections between formal notations and their justifying con-
cepts. This remains a major agenda for research leading to a higher
order approach to mathematics teaching.
Rezoning has never hac] an explicit place in the mass educa-
tion curriculum. Philosophy has no regular position in the standard
American high school curriculum, nor is reasoning specified as part of
the elementary school syllabus in the way reading, writing, and math-
ematics are. By contrast, both have been cornerstones of the elite,
academy education tradition. Thus, incorporating reasoning into the
regular educational program would extend the high literacy tradition
to the entire school system. However, it is not clear whether reason-
ing should be treated as a separate discipline or suffused through
the curriculum. Most philosophers working within the informal logic
movement want to see critical thinking or reasoning courses included
in the curriculum. Their argument is partly practical: reasoning
skills wall be passed over or trivialized if they are spread through
the curriculum and not given formal recognition. But there is also
a theoretical argument for treating reasoning as a separate enabling
discipline; this ~ that principles of logical reasoning are unitary, not
specific to particular domains of knowledge (see Paul, in press, re-
sponding to a contrary argument by McPeck, 1981~. Currently, we
have no empirical evidence to support the idea that teaching people
to recognize and analyze reasoning fallacies a core element in most
critical thinking and informal logic curricula in fact leads them to
Representative terms from entire chapter:
order skills
