Más allá de la comprensión científica: educación científica para desarrollar el pensamiento

Abstract

[eng] In the context of science education, going beyond the scientific and technological literacy focused on understanding is raised, to attain an ambitious aim on developmental cognition: teaching to think right as a key to improve social and personal life. To this aim, an analysis of research on thinking processes along three key innovative areas of science education: nature of science, argumentation and scientific competence or scientific literacy. The set of concomitances between critical thinking, as a tool of general right thinking, and scientific thinking, in science education, show the parallelism and the relationships between those different aspects of thinking. This results suggest that the learning problems raised in these three key innovative areas may be solved through early teaching of critical thinking skills in science education, which will improve scientific thinking; in turn, improved scientific thinking in these three areas is expected to feedback the progress of critical thinking, opening an improvement virtuous circle. Therefore, teaching students right thinking, both critical and scientific, and training teachers toward this new, transversal and significant aim for all key competences are proposed.