Should everyone learn to think like a scientist? Nobel Prize laureate Saul Perlmutter (Physics 2011) believes doing so could improve essential critical thinking skills. In this interview he discusses why he has developed a unique high school course.
What is Scientific Thinking for All: A Toolkit?
Saul Perlmutter: “Scientific Thinking for All: A Toolkit is a new curriculum and teaching materials for high-school-age students, made available by the Nobel Prize in collaboration with UC Berkeley. It addresses a key educational challenge of our times: How do we figure out what is true about the world and make thoughtful decisions, individually and collectively?
A first approach might be to start fostering deeper, more reflective thought and discussions about a topic, with the goal of simply slowing down and taking more time to think through a problem. This is not wrong, but it has the danger of trying to leap to the desired outcome without building up the underpinnings that could make that outcome more possible. And that outcome is a demanding one: an expert-informed, evidence-based, logically consistent understanding of a complex issue that also weaves together the factual questions with the values and goals underpinning a decision. An analogy would be handing a complete novice a violin for the first time, placing them in a string quartet, and saying, “Concentrate on making this Mozart quartet really sound beautiful, bringing out the musical ideas as they pass from one instrument to the other.”
Clearly, in this case, we would instead suggest first teaching how to hold the violin, where and how to place your fingers, how to read music, how to move the bow, how to make a note sound good and in tune, how to play a scale, and so on, until the student was ready to tackle Mozart. Scientific Thinking for All is teaching the equivalent: ideas, techniques, and skills that together provide the underpinnings of thoughtful truth seeking and decision making.
One important – perhaps surprising – thread runs through so many of the tools scientists use: we started making the most progress when we began to deeply understand that we are usually wrong about something. There are so many ways to get things wrong: the data we depend on may be flawed, there may be a crucial misunderstanding in part of our interpretation of it, or – most dramatically – sometimes our entire picture of how something works turns out to be wrong. So science has developed around a suite of techniques to catch our errors, not least by working tirelessly with people we disagree with – not to convince them of our view, but to have them help us figure out our own mistakes! This is an importantly humble aspect of scientific thinking that also makes it much more possible – and important – for people to work across disagreement.
Our idea is that scientific thinking is an extremely powerful tool, but it is often only taught to scientists. We think this tool should be taught to everyone.”
You are clearly very passionate about teaching critical thinking skills. Why are you so concerned?
Saul Perlmutter: “We live at a dramatic moment in history: Our students are the very first living beings to grow up in a world where they have the tools to solve global-scale problems. We now know how to feed a planet of 8 billion people. We now know how to stop a pandemic from wiping out a large fraction of the population, as has happened previously. We now have techniques to stabilize global climate shifts, which in the past have led to the collapse of major civilizations. We even know ways to prevent an asteroid or comet from hitting the earth — the dinosaurs certainly couldn’t.
So one might have thought that this is a joyous moment to be alive, and that people across the world were now getting down to the work of planning for a thriving planet for all. Of course, that’s not what we see around us – we are instead aware of all the dangers and fears that are the flip-side of this highly capable world. The most salient remaining missing capability is thus the ability to think through problems together constructively and thoughtfully. If we can learn to do this, even partially, then we have a reasonable chance to solve all the other problems. This is why teaching these ideas and skills is so important: it is perhaps the biggest challenge of our times.”
Did you have an “Aha” moment about critical thinking and scientific culture?
Saul Perlmutter: “I remember watching a national debate in the media 15 years ago or so about some very practical problem (perhaps, what is an appropriate national debt level) and being struck by how far removed this national discussion was from the style of a similar discussion among scientists at the lunch table where I was sitting in the laboratory’s cafeteria. The scientists were using all these tools of thinking that they would also use when working on a science project.
The scientists all shared these tools, so they could use them together without having to explain them. But I was aware that these tools are mostly not explicitly taught in any science course that I know of. The scientists have generally learned them by apprenticeship during their research training, perhaps while doing their PhD research. But obviously these are not just tools for scientific work; they would be useful to everybody for all sorts of day-to-day decisions and larger societal decisions, just like the scientists at the lunch table used them. So the natural question was, Could we develop a course that could teach these ideas and skills to everybody whether or not they planned to become professional scientists and well before they would even consider a PhD programme?”
How did the course develop?
Saul Perlmutter: “The ideas for this course needed more than just the experience of one scientific field like physics, and it needed to bring in the capability to productively combine these factual tools with the values (and emotions) that drive decision making. So it was important the course be developed in a fully interdisciplinary way, bringing together natural science, social science, and humanities. I took advantage of the broad range of expertise at the University of California, Berkeley, and together with Prof. John Campbell in the philosophy department and Prof. Robert MacCoun, a social psychologist in the public policy school, we hung up notices at Berkeley asking for people concerned about our society’s decision-making to come help invent a course and “save the world!” About 25 or 30 people from across the campus, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral students started showing up to meetings that we held at the end of every Friday for about nine months.
We hunted for a set of the most crucial concepts and skill to teach that provide students with the thinking toolkit to understand the world and make decisions. We looked for ways to teach the material experientially so that students would recognize the issues when they appear in the world in any domain or disguise. And it also became clear that almost all of these ideas have aspects that depend on, or change with, their collective use, not just individual use. This could be when pairs of people make decisions for their family, groups of people make decisions for their organization, or entire populations of people make decisions for their society.
After teaching this course for a number of years at the university level at multiple leading universities, and seeing its impact on students, it became clear that this material would be important to teach at much younger ages, too. Working with the Nobel Prize Foundation’s outreach arm, we found a strong science education team at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, who had extensive experience translating university science courses into high-school courses. Their material was used in a surprisingly large fraction of schools across the country. Together with them, we have now prepared a six-unit curriculum that has been tested in high schools across the U.S. and the U.K., and is being distributed worldwide.”
Why is it important to link this work to the Nobel Prizes?
Saul Perlmutter: “The Nobel Prize for those who “shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” has always linked the advances of science and of peace in its choice of the original five prize areas. It also has always taken an international scope, saying “no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates.” So the idea of an educational effort in scientific thinking that can help people work together to peacefully advance the “greatest benefit on mankind” is a natural link. What other international organization every year reaches educators, parents, and students around the world with these aspirational goals in mind?”
How can people use the curriculum?
Saul Perlmutter: “On the Nobel Prize website, there is linked an entire curriculum of material, with student workbooks, and teacher’s manuals for six units that teach this material with many activities and discussions and projects. This can be taught as a single high-school course, and this has been done successfully at schools with very different levels of preparation. But other schools have had success with a cross-school approach, teaching different parts or activities from different units in a wide variety of existing courses, ranging from math, physics, chemistry, and biology, to history and civics. In these schools, the teachers of different subjects can come point the students to the cross-linking aspects of these different activities and their underlying tools, and the students can be motivated to learn additional material from the website or the related book that further ties the material together.
The material has also been taught in informal education settings, such as afterschool programs and summer camps. (This approach was particularly popular in the U.K.) We have also worked with science museums and on-line video series to make the material available in new formats.”
What will happen next? What is your vision for the course?
Saul Perlmutter: “It would be wonderful if this approach to scientific/critical thinking was adopted by educational systems all over the world. The more students who learn this toolkit of skills and concepts the more effective they will be, since people with a shared understanding of the tools are much more capable of using them in a deliberative decision-making process.
So far, there are a number of countries that are working on adopting it into their systems, and the International Baccalaureate system is exploring its use in their programs. We have also been working with the OECD education group, since they would like to be assessing the skills and concept acquisition taught in our toolkit as part of the upcoming PISA international assessments. This would be another important way to disseminate awareness of these educational goals.
It will be important to be continually updating and revising this curriculum, as we learn more about what works best for teaching the material in different contexts, contexts that change with each cultural environment where it is taught, and change over time as the information ecosystem evolves. We expect this updating work to be a shared effort between the teams that developed the original material and a growing community of educators who are teaching it around the world. A curated online community forum will make it possible for teachers and educators, students and parents, to share experiences, insight, and new teaching materials with each other and with the curriculum developers.”
All course materials and more information are available here: Scientific Thinking for All: A Toolkit