How to Develop Scientific Thinking in Children

Scientific thinking is a habit of holding an idea loosely enough to test it. It is not knowledge of science, and a child can have a great deal of the second with none of the first.

The four moves

Noticing something odd. Everything starts here and it is the part most easily trained out of children, by adults who answer every question rather than sitting with it.

Offering an explanation you might be wrong about. The willingness to guess, publicly, before knowing.

Working out what would tell you. The hardest move and the actual core of it. Not what would confirm your idea, but what would settle it either way.

Changing your mind when it does. Rare in adults, and largely a matter of whether being wrong has ever been safe.

The conversations that build it

"What do you think?" before answering anything. This single habit does more than any activity. A child whose questions are always answered immediately learns that knowledge arrives from adults.

"How could we find out?" The move from opinion to test. Often the answer is trivially easy and nobody thought to do it.

"How do you know?" Asked neutrally, about anything, including things they are right about. It separates knowing from having heard.

"What would change your mind?" For older children. If nothing would, it is not a belief about the world.

The habit of predicting

Before any experiment, before opening the oven, before the race down the hill: what do you think will happen, and why.

Committing to a prediction is what makes the result informative. Without it, whatever happens looks like what you expected, which is a bias adults have too.

What undermines it

Answering everything. Uncertainty is the working condition of science and a child who is never left in it does not develop tolerance for it.

Demonstrations that always work. They teach that the answer is known and the activity is theatre.

Treating being wrong as failure. A hypothesis that turns out wrong is a successful experiment. If that is not the household's attitude, children stop guessing.

Never being wrong yourself. A child who has watched an adult say "I thought that too, and it turns out I was wrong" has seen the whole method.

Where it lives outside science

Worth pointing out, because this is the transferable part. Why is the bus always late on Tuesdays. Does the thicker coat actually keep you warmer. Which route is really faster. Is that advert telling the truth.

Scientific thinking is not a school subject. It is what a person does when they want to know rather than to be right.