The relationship between conceptualization of science and thinking skills: key empirical evidence for scientific competence

Abstract

Recent studies argue that epistemic and meta-cognitive competency-based learning, characteristic of the science-technology-society-environment (STSE) approach, and critical thinking skills have a mutual impact and dependence. The literature review indicates that there are more and more studies that include cognitive thinking skills related to STSE learning, although few studies focus on this intuitive mutual relationship and even less that demonstrate the empirical relationship between thinking skills and STSE epistemic learning; in particular, the analysis indicates that most of the works are incomplete, since one of the two terms of this relationship is often missing, either thinking skills or epistemic knowledge. This work empirically studies the relationship between these variables, evaluating five thinking skills (explanation, decisions, sequencing, part-whole relationships and logical reasoning) and some epistemic variables on the conceptualization of science and computes the correlations between both measurements in a sample of lower-secondary students. The results confirm the initial hypothesis about the relationship between thinking skills and epistemic knowledge, although this relationship appears complex and dependent on the variables considered: the relationship is clear, positive and significant between all the skills and the appropriate ideas about science, yet not with the variables on uninformed epistemic ideas. The interpretations and consequences of these results for research and for the teaching of scientific competence, STSE topics and critical thinking skills are discussed.