{"id":462,"date":"2007-10-23T21:28:47","date_gmt":"2007-10-24T02:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/10\/23\/curriculum-based-on-critical-thinking\/"},"modified":"2007-10-23T21:32:41","modified_gmt":"2007-10-24T02:32:41","slug":"curriculum-based-on-critical-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/10\/23\/curriculum-based-on-critical-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Curriculum Based on Critical Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University has an opinion article in the Oct 14, San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>.\u00a0 It explains how other countries are testing students’ 21st century skills and how NCLB is not helping to prepare our students for the knowledge economy that creates our high standard of living.<\/p>\n

The focus of the opinion piece is testing.\u00a0 Our tests in the United States are usually multiple choice.\u00a0 Other countries use an assortment of questions that focus on critical thinking skills.\u00a0 Here is a paragraph from the paper.<\/p>\n

In the United States, a typical item on the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, asks students which two elements from a multiple choice list are found in the Earth’s atmosphere. An item from the Victoria, Australia, high school biology test (which resembles those in Hong Kong and Singapore) describes how a particular virus works, asks students to design a drug to kill the virus and explain how the drug operates (complete with diagrams), and then to design and describe an experiment to test the drug – asking students to think and act like scientists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Critical thinking skills are definitely harder to assess.\u00a0 It takes a long time to grade a test with open ended questions that can have many different paths to a correct answer.<\/p>\n

I had to take three calculus courses in college.\u00a0 I took the first two from the same professor who focused on real-world applications of mathematical principles.\u00a0 The questions on the tests always looked completely different than the ones in the book.\u00a0 I learned that I couldn’t memorize all the homework and then do well on the tests.\u00a0 I had to understand the concepts. I learned to understand how calculus\u00a0could be used as a tool to solve real problems.<\/p>\n

When it came time for the third calculus course, the section offered by the “real-world professor” was at the same time as one of my major courses so I had to register for another section taught by the “multiple choice mathematician”.\u00a0 That’s right.\u00a0 All the tests were multiple choice.\u00a0 While I can remember many questions verbatim from the first two courses, I cannot remember a single concept from the third class.<\/p>\n

I’m sure the tests in that third course were a lot easier to grade, but that didn’t help me when it came time to use those principles in\u00a0my upper-level science courses.<\/p>\n

Changing our curriculum to focus\u00a0on critical thinking and problem solving skills will not be easy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Our standard of living depends on this change.\u00a0 Our students must be able to function in the real world which is not multiple choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University has an opinion article in the Oct 14, San Francisco Chronicle.\u00a0 It explains how other countries are testing students’ 21st century skills and how NCLB is not helping to prepare our students for the knowledge … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[340,2],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-education","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}