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Does Higher Education Improve Student Scientific Reasoning Skills?

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Abstract

An ultimate goal of higher education is to prepare our future workers with needed knowledge and skills. This includes cultivating students to become proficient reasoners who can utilize proper scientific reasoning to devise causal inferences from observations. Conventionally, students with more years of higher education are expected to have a greater level of scientific reasoning. Also expected traditionally is that studying science and engineering or attending top-rated universities can better promote students’ scientific reasoning than studying other majors or attending lower ranked institutions. In this study, we used Lawson’s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) with 1,637 Chinese students in different years of study, different fields, and different university tiers. It was found that regardless of which major or university students entered, their scientific reasoning measured by the LCTSR showed little variation across the entire 4 years of undergraduate education. Simply put, there was little association between tertiary-level learning and scientific reasoning. This study calls our attention to the status quo of higher education and motivates researchers across the globe to look into this issue in their own nations.

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Notes

  1. It is worth noting that the framing of scientific reasoning in the present study is anchored in the theoretical basis of evidence-based hypothesis generation and evaluation—a framework grounded in the relevant literature (see, for example, Braaten & Windschitl, 2011; D. Kuhn & Dean, 2004; Lawson, 2004; Lawson et al., 2000; Zimmerman, 2000). It is true that scientific reasoning may involve pure mathematic-logical processes, which without considering any science content will only yield either true or false outcomes. However, scientific statements in essence are human-constructed descriptions or explanations about the natural world (Kuhn & Hacking, 2012; Popper, 2002). They are tentative, subject to change, and cannot be oversimplified into dichotomies of absolutely true or false (Akerson, Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Lederman, 2007). In this study, we follow the aforementioned literature on scientific reasoning and focus on key skills needed for constructing evidence-based causal inferences.

  2. Scientific reasoning and content knowledge are often intertwined, forming a mutually corroborative relation (see, for example, Coletta & Phillips, 2005; Nieminen et al., 2012; Schauble, 1996; Schunn & Anderson, 1999; Zimmerman, 2007). The philosophical debate on whether acquisition of content knowledge should precede formation of reasoning (or vice versa) is beyond the scope of the study.

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Acknowledgment

This study is partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant No. DRL 1252399).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teaching and Learning, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Lin Ding & Katherine Mollohan

  2. Physics Editorial Department, People’s Education Press, 100081, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Xin Wei

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  1. Lin Ding
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Correspondence to Lin Ding.

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Ding, L., Wei, X. & Mollohan, K. Does Higher Education Improve Student Scientific Reasoning Skills?. Int J of Sci and Math Educ 14, 619–634 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-014-9597-y

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