Jeff Ricker wrote:
>I have been thinking more about the post I sent to TIPS, yesterday. In
>that post, I was wrestling with an issue that often bothers me: I
>frequently sense a passive resistance among my students with regard to
>learning about scientific reasoning and its importance in their everyday
>lives. ....
But
>I believe that the problem runs much deeper than this: many of them seem
>to expect that scientists should provide them with certain answers to
>their questions. When we do not do this in our courses, our students
>seem to feel as if we have failed in some way; and they may even begin
>to suspect that psychology is not really a science, after all.
>
>The problem, I am beginning to think, lies in the consumer orientation
>endemic in American culture (and perhaps, to some degree, in the rest of
>Western culture).
While all of this (and the rest of your post) may be true, there is a
simpler alternative. Students have learned that science gives certain
answers in all of their science courses. I certainly do not remember
learning scientific reasoning in my high school and college chemistry and
physics courses. We learned the results, what the world is like. I learned
a little of the scientific method in my college biology course but it was
the psychology courses that really stressed the scientific method/critical
thinking aspects. Now this was quite a few years ago but I am not convinced
that the situation has changed much.
I hesitate to bring this up as I do not have a reference, but I recall a
study a number of years ago that concluded that psychology courses did the
best job of teaching the scientific method, better than the more accepted
sciences.
Jeff Nagelbush
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ferris State University
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