The Fourth R

The three Rs in education were first introduced in print in 1818. They stand for “Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic.” These were considered the foundation of an elementary education. At that time, writing may have meant penmanship as much as spelling and grammar.

A fourth R was present in New England in the 17th century: Religion.

I propose that today’s education focuses so heavily on math and ELA that it might as well be just the 3 Rs that we are teaching our the loud cry for "21st-century skills." If you read about those skills, you will find such ideas as problem solving and critical thinking. Think about that for a moment, and you will realize that these skills have been crucial to humanity ever since it has existed. Survival of an extended family, tribe, or group often depended upon such skills in times of crisis.

What’s different today? Those skills remain important and haven’t really changed in their nature — only in the fact that they are often employed in technological situations. What is truly different now, and not coinciding with the turn of the century (or millennium) is that a much higher fraction of the population must have these skills to fill ever more demanding jobs.

We can no longer teach the same stuff in the same way and expect the higher achievers to figure out these important skills while allowing the rest to fall where they may. Many more graduates of our educational systems must enter our workforce with better thinking skills.

So it is that I propose that we add a fourth R to our list: Reasoning.

By reasoning, I mean many of those skills that are listed under the misleading title of 21st century. I mean valuable thinking skills such as logical thinking, critical thinking, and creative thinking. Our educators must deliver learning in these areas and help students to begin to employ them on a daily basis so that they become habitual and not just something they had to know to pass a test.

What is the best way to teach those skills within our current system? English language arts (ELA) doesn’t seem like the appropriate place. It should be developing our students’ communication skills, another old skill that has new relevance in today’s rapidly accelerating world of technology and science. Unlike days of old, communication today must focus on more than writing and speaking as well as reading and listening. Visual communication has become so important that it should be an integral part of ELA. New computer-based tools make this learning easy and even fun.

Mathematics certainly has some thinking in it. However, it is hard to imagine how it can go beyond logical thinking skills in a K-12 setting. Still, the services rendered by teaching about proofs and logic make this an important facet of developing good thinking skills. I suspect that few of the general population truly comprehend what it is to prove something.

History also has opportunities to explore thinking, although the usual history taught in high schools has little to do with thought processes, unless you count memorization. Not being a historian, I am not in a good position to comment deeply on this potential. I can only say that an excellent history course should have many opportunities for critical thinking.

I have now reached the fourth of the so-called core disciplines, science. Our science courses can address the necessary thinking skills for today’s world and tomorrow’s.

Steps have already been taken to integrate thinking into science. The “old science” instruction mostly emphasized memorized vocabulary, procedures, and formulas. The courses had little excitement beyond the occasional lab accident. As many have recognized and reported on, students were not investigating the universe. They were being told.

In recent years, America’s Lab Report (ALR) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have addressed this issue. They advocate strongly for more investigation and less being told.

I can think of three ways to obtain information in schools: find out, be shown, or be told. For a very long time, most students found out things by being told — by teachers, by textbooks, or by some sort of video. Being told implies passivity, a perfect pretext for falling asleep. Only a student’s innate curiosity could add more, and most middle and high school students have more pressing interests, mostly social and sports in nature.

Being shown certainly is better than being told. Just ask any writer: “Show; don’t tell.” Showing with showmanship may engage the imagination of students, and that’s better than putting them to sleep. Science teachers have done demonstrations for a very long time. Sometimes, these are interesting and done with panache. If the teacher follows up with questions that the student audience answers, some real learning might occur.

Nevertheless, finding out for yourself remains the hands-down best way to learn. It’s one reason why science laboratory experiences remain popular in science classes. There are other reasons such as students avoiding the “tell” lectures. Yet, as ALR so pointedly illustrated, the high school science lab experience (around 2004 when it was published) has been poor.

Finding out also involves real thinking because it requires some figuring out. Unlike coding, this skill should be exercised from the earliest possible age and built up over years until it becomes second nature. Data from the real world, empirical data, are complex and ambiguous. Students who face this sort of data must exercise their logical and critical thinking skills. They begin to understand the true nature of science.

After all, science is not a body of knowledge; it’s a way of thinking. Science has processes and concepts for investigating nature so that we really do find out how the universe, at both the minute and grand, works. Science works. Learning how to do science provides training in what Carl Sagan called a “baloney detection kit” — in other words, in critical thinking.

Investigations can also involve creative thinking, thinking that doesn’t just go outside the box; it ignores the box entirely. Where did this odd expression come from? Possibly, it originated from the old pencil and paper exercise of finding four straight lines you can draw through a 3x3 square of dots without lifting the pencil from the paper while including all nine dots. In any event, it has become such a common expression that it sounds trite. Too often, I hear someone say to think outside the box. It makes me ready to scream. Its overuse has made it rather meaningless, and it ignores the fact that you can find much of value in traditional ideas, those found inside “the box.” Let’s decide to think without the box, a much better approach.

Assuming that you are convinced that teaching science better will produce better thinking and better preparation for “21st-century” skills, how do you implement this idea? The NGSS have some great ideas but are only assessment standards. They are not curriculum standards. You may like to have more “hands-on” science in your classes. Beware of overdoing it. Professor Robert Yager warned against doing hands-on for the sake of hands-on and what harm doing science this way can do.

Let’s face it. Hands-on classroom science investigations take time, lots of it. They may be costly, less safe than you’d like, and require space you don’t have. While these are not reasons for not doing them, they are reasons for being selective. You’d like to have as many opportunities for students to investigate as you can, good investigations that challenge students to think.

Technology should have the answer, particularly computer technology. All of the set-up time and clean-up time might be eliminated. Data capture (making measurements) might be streamlined without taking this activity entirely away from students. A full 5E learning scaffold could be part of any technological solution, and that would make the teacher burden lighter. The entire process should be designed to ensure maximal learning and retention. Given what computers are capable of, why not?

Educators must have help to reinvent science education so that it teaches our students to think well. No one educator should have to do it alone. Educational technology (edtech) ought to help a great deal. In the past, edtech for science has consisted of some videos (now streaming) and some simulations (also now delivered from the web). That’s not enough.

Science videos can show concepts not available with experiments. They can show the motion of galaxies and the interior of cells and molecules. They can take students to remote locations on the Earth to see the interaction of plants and animals there. These are all good things and help students to understand difficult concepts. They show passively, though.

Animated simulations also give students insight into stuff you just cannot do, even in the most expensive laboratories. They also give students the opportunity to explore some “what if” scenarios in the virtual world of simulations. They do not deliver reality, though. In many cases, they can misrepresent the nature of science and so lead students astray. Use with care!

What should edtech provide? Here’s a very short list.

1. Reality. Science educational technology must deliver real experiments, not animations. Students should not be investigating formulas. The must investigate the real world.
2. Interaction. Edtech must be interactive. For example, students must do their own measurements and not be handed data sets on a silver platter.
3. Exploration. Students must be exploring based on inquiries. They then can discover ideas on their own or with minimal assistance.
4. Pedagogy. Any learning edtech should be employing proven pedagogy so that students have the optimal opportunity to learn.

How can online computer technology implement all of these features? Sure, remote robotic labs implement items 1 and 3 above, but fail on 2 and often fail on 4 without supplemental materials. Animated simulations deliver 3 and 4 but fail on 1 and 2. Is it too much to ask for online science learning edtech to provide all four? Take a look at each one in the context of online learning tools.

1. Reality: What could be easier? Video record experiments! Not so fast. Remember #2. Your videos must lend themselves to interactive measurement.
2. Interaction: Stop the video at intervals to allow students to make measurements, record data, and/or make notes. Devise the means to calibrate the videos and to display the data appropriately. How you do this depends on the level of student sophistication.
3. Exploration: Support inquiry, and allow students to do more than enough experiments to come to conclusions. Doing this requires you to design the software so that exploration is at the center of each activity as well as providing for students to make predictions and explain why they did or did not match experimental data.
4. Pedagogy: Today, the most accepted pedagogy is 5E. Be sure that your software works within this methodology. Ensure that you include supporting material so that students can have the information at their fingertips if they have questions.

You also have to provide tools for teachers to review student work and also deliver the instructional units at different levels of language and math to support differentiated instruction. If you include these differentiated units in the count, you’ll have to create over 1,000 such units to cover upper elementary school through high school and into non-major freshman college science.

My colleagues and I have created just such a system. It’s been in the field for a great many years collecting feedback from educators at all levels and being continually updated based on that feedback. Over one million students have done millions of instructional units with results that have ranged from good to spectacular. I invite you to visit smartscience.net to find out more.