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January 30, 2009
Studies show . . . or maybe not
American college freshmen know fewer facts about science than do their Chinese counterparts, according to a new study, but both groups have a comparably poor ability to reason scientifically.
In other words, the Americans tested were bone ignorant and the Chinese at least knew some facts. A lot of facts, if you trust the test scores. I think I'd rather teach a class of freshmen to reason who knew things than to teach a class who knew nothing both facts and how to reason - but maybe that's just me. Now this sounds likely:
Lei Bao, the study's lead author and director of Ohio State University's Physics Education Research Group, said this runs contrary to the commonly held belief that reasoning skills develop as students are "rigorously taught the facts."
O.K. - reasoning skills do not come automatically with learning facts. But unless you can show that teaching the Chinese students lots of facts made it harder to later teach them scientific reasoning I'm not sure this study proves that Chinese secondary science education is anything like as bad as that in America, which that first paragraph suggests. Go look at the comparative scores!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at January 30, 2009 9:22 AM