That quote is dead on, about how science should be taught.

teaching science as a set of accumulated facts can fail to convey ....  (can't quote more without the font turning funny) ....

When was this written, and in what country?  I taught grade 2 from about 1982 - 1984 and even then science was not taught as "a set of accumulated facts".  When it came to concepts being taught, this was done experientially and it was fun, especially when it ends with popcorn!  That snack featured in the unit on heat (things expand when hot, contract when cold -- except for the anomaly of water; freeze a bottle of water to discover this) - we made popcorn and asked ourselves why it was bigger.  The school was in a rural area, and the kids got excited about telephone wires, which sag on hot days and are straight on cold days - same phenomenon.  The popcorn was an actual prescribed activity listed in the Curriculum Guidelines prior to the Harris educational reform, and probably still exists.

If in 1982 "teaching a set of accumulated facts" was not happening in Ontario, I wonder that it is being addressed.  In other countries, how is it taught?

Scientific thinking is a habit of preschool children in the sense that they experiment to find out what will happen if .... and then want to know why.  Teachers can channel this, and above all, not kill that curiosity or deaden it which umpteen things built into the school system can do.  Have you read John Holt?  Over-directing and testing of the wrong kind, among others, can hurt the natural urge to learn that children possess. 

For free exploration which nonetheless enforces concepts being learned, we had  "activity tables".  These were tables at the back of the room with various open-ended activities set up, with a set number of students allowed at any given activity.  A child who had finished his assignment could choose any activity while his classmates were still working.   For example, in one month there was a fish tank filled with water, and kids loved putting kleenex in the bottom of a cup, placing this in the tank upside-down and have the amazing result of the kleenex staying dry.  That led to "why?" and "what can we do with this?" which scientists and inventors ask.  2 - 3 kids would huddle around the water tank in excited whispers, two more would be at another station, while another was earnestly writing the story he had pulled out of the "story hat": write a story about .....

The cool thing about the activity table is that the kids chose it so they wanted to be there.  They were not graded on their activities so there was no fear of failure or judgment, what they needed to learn was being reinforced, and the reward was actually "study" - they would buckle down at their desks doing their spelling or math, so that they could have a chance to do even more school work.  But they didn't perceive this as school work.    Even cooler: they took these ideas out with them at recess, tried things at home, and shared them with parents and popped up with new things they had done in the morning's Show and Tell. 

Um ... I get kind of enthusiastic. 

The conference discussions suggested that even small children are capable of scientific reasoning.

Was there ever a doubt? 

Instead of learning key words relating to seed growth ....

Yes, but who would do that?  Especially for that age group?

An interesting article for a number of reasons.

Maxi

Originally written by Maxi Schwarz-Bastami on September 25, 2009 4:57 PM In other countries, how is it taught?

As for seeds and biology in general (and chemistry and physics), since I can remember from the elementary school back in the mid-1960s, these kinds of basic things were always taught by experimentation.

Nowadays, experiments play a crucial role in the International Baccalaureate (=high school) science program. I don't know, though, what kind of school experiments are possible to teach the phenomenon of global warming...

Education in Hiding

An inspiring story about an underground university in Minsk.

Somewhere in an outlying district of Minsk, Belarus, four graduate students gather in a two-room apartment. The location is semisecret. They are attending a seminar on independent news media, a subject banned from the country’s classrooms. They sit in a cozy circle and, one by one, read essays they have written at home, in Belarusian, which may not be used in teaching even though it is an official language.

Originally written by Jacek K. on September 11, 2009 3:06 PM I am sure of one thing: Ethiopians must be shocked to hear  that there is a country where 45 per cent of inhabitants believe the Earth was created by God within the past 10,000 years. I am sure all Ethiopians are familiar with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus).

...and now her ancestor Ardi:

The big news in the journal Science today is the discovery of the oldest human skeleton -- a small-brained, 110-pound female of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed "Ardi." She lived in what is now Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, which makes her over a million years older than the famous "Lucy" fossil, found in the same region thirty-five years ago.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/ardi-oldest-human-skeleto_n_306033.html

 

Science is making access to this extraordinary set of materials FREE (non-subscribers require a simple registration). The complete collection, and abridged versions, are available FREE as PDF downloads for AAAS members. (http://www.sciencemag.org/ardipithecus/#)

Fossils of the Human Family: Timeline
This timeline shows the fossils upon which our current understanding of human evolution is based. The new fossil skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed Ardi, fills a large gap before the Lucy skeleton, Australopithecus afarensis, but after the hominid line split from the line that led to today's chimpanzees. (Science magazine) (http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/10/01_ardiskeleton.shtml#)

An excerpt from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/health/13klas.html?em

So I decided to test my digital immigrant biases— which tell me that no one can study effectively while watching, listening, surfing, messaging — against my professional experience, which tells me that medical students who don’t study effectively can’t learn the huge and complex body of material they have to master, and will therefore not pass their frequent tests. In other words, I asked my son and his friends, people in their early to middle 20s who do an awful lot of studying.

These medical students did sound like expert studiers, in that they had paid close attention to the different kinds of concentration required for different tasks.

“If I’m studying to memorize,” my son told me, “I’m still usually chatting”— instant messaging, that is. “But it’s usually not real-time chatting. I’ll look up every once in a while and I’ll chat; I may have a movie going on in the background, but I’ll go for a movie I’ve already seen.”

He had even conducted an experiment: “So I did a time study where I calculated on average how many pages of a paper I could read when I had a movie on in the background versus when I didn’t. I found I could read at about 80 percent efficiency.” So the distraction was worth it; it meant he could go on reading for much longer stretches.

That question of how to keep yourself studying for long periods preoccupied other medical students. One said she did her best studying at the gym, usually on the elliptical machines; she taped the lectures and played them over at a fast speed while working out.

But you can’t work out all the time. “The day before a big test,” she said, “I usually do go to the gym and listen and work through one of the lectures that I might feel is more important, and then I would just go through everything.”

New research has shown that the greatest barrier to development in the Arab states is the poor educational system, the Economist reports. This applies as much to Saudi Arabia as it does to Egypt. "A quarter of the kingdom's university students devote the main part of their degree course to Islamic studies, more than in engineering, medicine and science put together. And despite changes to Saudi curriculums, religious study remains obligatory every year from primary school through to university. ... Arab countries now spend as much or more on education, as a share of GDP, than the world average. They have made great strides in eradicating illiteracy, boosting university enrolment and reducing gaps in education between the sexes. But the gap in the quality of education between Arabs and other people at a similar level of development is still frightening." http://www.signandsight.com/features/1948.html

Originally written by Jacek K. on December 10, 2007 4:28 PM Interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in I.Q., sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/opinion/09nisbett.html?em&ex=1197435600&en=7713fd7a79e46edc&ei=5070

http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Stupid-People-High-IQ-tests-.aspx?utm_content=11.20.09+Sci-Tech&utm_campaign=Science-Technology&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

Just because people are intelligent doesn’t mean they’re smart. Though IQ tests do pretty well measuring intelligence, they don’t test for rational thought, according to the New Scientist. The magazine quotes cognitive psychologist Jonathan Evans saying, “IQ is only part of what it means to be smart.”