The conclusion belongs to a new research

Jan 30, 2009 10:15 GMT  ·  By

It's commonly believed that knowing and learning more scientific facts each day somehow contributes to the formation of a scientific line of reasoning in young adults, especially in middle- and high-school, and, later, in college. But a new research, conducted on American and Chinese teens, proved that to be utterly false. The investigators behind the new experiment said that the amount of knowledge each of the test subjects had was in no way related to the way they organized their thoughts or lines of logic, in order to answer a mental challenge.

The paper shows that, while students in China knew several times more things than those in America, both groups were equally poorly qualified to reason scientifically. The researchers draw attention to the fact that teachers have to go beyond simply stating the facts, if they are to make the children more sensible to logic lines of thinking.

Ohio State University associate professor of physics Lei Bao, the leader of the new research, analyzed the cases of more than 6,000 students, from four US colleges and three Chinese universities. He concluded that the Americans scored far less than their Asian peers on the test detailing factual knowledge of physics, averaging 50 percent, as opposed to the 90 percent of the other students. But both groups scored at about 75 percent in the scientific reasoning test, which is a very low score considering that all of them wanted to become majors in sciences or physics.

"Our study shows that, contrary to what many people would expect, even when students are rigorously taught the facts, they don't necessarily develop the reasoning skills they need to succeed. Because students need both knowledge and reasoning, we need to explore teaching methods that target both," Bao argued. "Each system has its strengths and weaknesses. In China, schools emphasize a very extensive learning of STEM content knowledge, while in the United States, science courses are more flexible, with simpler content but with a high emphasis on scientific methods. We need to think of a new strategy, perhaps one that blends the best of both worlds," he added.

"These skills are especially important today, when we are determined to build a society with a sustainable edge in science and technology in a fast-evolving global environment. The general public also needs good reasoning skills in order to correctly interpret scientific findings and think rationally," the researcher concluded.