Developing Critical Thinking Through Scientific Inquiry PDF Download

"Science for Critical Thinkers" is a comprehensive approach to developing student's critical thinking skills in science. Written by two science educators with over 30 years combined teaching experience in middle and high school instruction, the book promises to educate and develop young minds, ages 10-13, to think as scientists do. This 500-page science resource is a perfect curriculum for homeschoolers. It contains four years of science study conveniently packaged into one book; the Nature of Science, Physical Science, Life Science and Earth and Space Science. Each unit is composed of labs kids can do at home, enrichment activities, a science art project, an engineering project, an oral skill building activity, writing activities, observation activities, online activities, practice questions with an answer key, problem solving questions and more than enough content to start properly developing scientific thinking. The book also contains a science pre-test to assess student's prior learning before beginning the curriculum; a comprehensive glossary, a calculations section; instructions on how to use the book, instructions for answering questions scientifically; and graph paper for their graphing activities. Content is presented in a ready-to-use and easy-to-understand format. From the onset of the course students start applying the scientific method in the design of their own controlled experiment. They use a science journal for recording observations, data, and completing their laboratory exercises. 18 inquiry and science process skills are presented to master. These include classifying, collecting data, communicating, comparing and contrasting, concluding, defining problems, experimenting/investigating, generalizing, hypothesizing, identifying and controlling variables, inferring, interpreting data, making and using models, making decisions, manipulating materials, measuring and estimating, observing, and predicting. Students develop a discipline of scientific thinking as they participate in the activities outlined in each unit. They will take what they routinely learn with the curriculum as a building block and use it to apply science knowledge to real life situations they encounter. The world becomes their classroom as they begin to question, investigate, explore and make discoveries on their own initiative. Online and library research is encouraged as students begin to think about science in more enlightened and enhanced ways. Pushing a cart in the supermarket will have them thinking about Newton's laws of motion. When they see their cuts and bruises healing nicely, they will think about the process of mitosis. Learning about science from a critical thinking perspective helps kids to improve their problem solving abilities and allow them to think systematically and logically when dealing with issues of a practical and intellectual nature. The text provides excellent preparation for a systematic study of science later in the high school years.