UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC REASONING develops critical reasoning skills and guides students in the improvement of their scientific and technological literacy. The authors teach students how to understand and critically evaluate the scientific information they encounter in both textbooks and the popular media. With its focus on scientific pedagogy, UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC REASONING helps students learn how to examine scientific reports with a reasonable degree of sophistication. The book also explains how to reason through case studies using the same informal logic skills employed (...) by scientists and to analyze a complex series of propositions and hypotheses using sound scientific reasoning. (shrink)

History, Philosophy and Science Teaching argues that science teaching and science teacher education can be improved if teachers know something of the history and philosophy of science and if these topics are included in the science curriculum. The history and philosophy of science have important roles in many of the theoretical issues that science educators need to address: the goals of science education; what constitutes an appropriate science curriculum for all students; how science should be taught in traditional cultures; what (...) integrated science is; how scientific literacy can be promoted; and the conflict which can occur between science curriculum and deep-seated religious or cultural values and knowledge. In part, answers to these questions hinge on views about the nature of science, views that are best informed by historical and philosophical study. Outlining the history of liberal, or contextual, approaches to the teaching of science, Michael Matthews elaborates contemporary curriculum developments that explicitly address questions about the nature and the history of science. He provides examples of classroom teaching and develops useful arguments on constructivism, multicultural science education and teacher education. The book will appeal to school and university science teachers, educators of science teachers, and historians and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Most current conceptions of critical thinking conceive of critical thinking in terms of abilities and dispositions. In this paper I describe a common type of problem students experience with critical thinking and argue that conceptualizations in terms of abilities and dispositions do not provide a way to understand this problem. I argue, further, that a useful way to think about the problem is in terms of epistemological understanding, and that this way of thinking about the issue can provide both pedagogical (...) and conceptual grounding to efforts to foster critical thinking. (shrink)

Conceptualizations of critical thinking framed in terms of mental processes have been highly influential in contemporary education. Such conceptualizations have, however, been criticized by philosophers of education both because of the problematic nature of the notion of mental processes and because of their lack of a normative dimension. I argue, however, that the reliance on the notion of skills in the accounts of some of these same philosophers renders their accounts potentially subject to some of the same criticisms which they (...) level against process conceptualizations. This problem becomes particularly salient in the debate over the generalizability of critical thinking where the introduction of the concept of skills frames the issue in terms of the transfer of an inner process or ability. I argue that critical thinking is better conceptualized in terms of the achievement of certain understanding or intellectual resources. The problem of generalizability then becomes one of determining the range of use and application of the principles and criteria which constitute our public traditions of inquiry rather than one of determining the transference of some putative mental ability. (shrink)