How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes 1917
How do we teach prediction when there is no script and there are no seemingly relevant prior cases? In some sense we can’t. We can teach people how to go about trying to make predictions. This is actually what science is about. Scientists create theories that make predictions, which they then try to verify with evidence. This process—hypotheses verified by evidence—can be taught in the sense that it is a way of thinking that can be practiced in various venues. It is reasonable to start teaching chil- dren to think in this way about the world around them. As for adults, teaching scientific reasoning in the context of corporate training is probably a less than optimal place to start. People in corporations need to be able to reason from evidence and to understand what data would confirm or deny the value of actions they have taken for the benefit of the company. This, of course, is scientific reasoning. But, unfortunately, the people who go into the business world tend to have never practiced scientific reasoning in their educational careers because they weren’t interested in science. But they must be interested in predicting well in order to succeed in business.
HOW TO TEACH MODELING
Building a model of a process is very difficult for a child to do and not so easy for an adult to do either. When you teach computer science, you learn this quickly enough. Computer programs are models of pro- cesses. People try to write computer programs by creating diagrams that model what happens first and then what happens next, and so on. These models are almost never right the first time.
Programmers learn to debug their programs, which means they continue to try to get their model to be accurate. But most people cannot do this very easily, and it is a very important skill. Knowing how to raise money is important if one wants to start a business, for example. The money-raising process can be understood, but one has to examine it and go through it.
This is just as true of ordering in a restaurant. Children may seem to know about ordering in a restaurant, but they may not understand money or service or having a job exactly and thus may have an er- roneous model of the process. Why does the waitress bring food, is a complex question for a 5-year-old, but also an important one. Build- ing models of how and why things work as they do, is significant for children to learn to do.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023863