Thread by @SfPRocur

“Evidence-based science reading skills”

That’s a loaded phrase. Let’s start by unpacking it.

If we were in one if my training seminars, one of the first questions I’d ask is whether anyone ever taught you explicitly how to read a scientific journal article.

My data suggest there’s a 20% chance anyone ever did. And I’d wager that’s actually an optimistic number.

If you think about it, 20% as an optimistic number, that's rather nuts!

Reading is at the heart of formal education. There is no other skill that is as crucial to accessing vast quantities of knowledge as is reading.

And it's likely this precisely where the problem begins.

We all learned how to read when we were children. It's an old, yet apt adage that first we learn to read, and then we read to learn.

The problem is the unspoken assumption that all knowledge is directly accessible through simply reading. But is it?

When we learn to read, the bulk of our reading is classical literature, i.e. stories. We are taught as children implicitly that stories are things that happened, i.e. we never give kids a definition of what we're reading them, or what they're learning to read. They figure it out.

Unfortunately, something quite similar happens when we get older and start reading expository writing. Though we will be told little, with a few exceptions, as to how we should approach it, we will typically be told that what it is not is a story.

And we were generally expected to muddle through until we somehow figured it out. Most of expository reading is taught this way. Not all, but most.

All that said, teachers are not idiots, not by a long-shot. And many have figured out what some things need explicit teaching.

The problem is that teachers are not generally trained researchers. They try things out in the classroom, write descriptions of what they did if it seemed to work, and then other teachers adopt their methods.

This is a simplistic description, but I think captures the process.

This is where the evidence-based component appears:

We actually know quite a bit about human cognition (replication crisis notwithstanding). We know a great deal about how we learn. This knowledge has been applied broadly, mostly in kindergarten through pre-university settings.

But there are gaps, and an important one is in the teaching of science.

A consequence of our obsession with new scientific information is that a prerequisite for teaching science is being at the forefront of science, and not necessarily knowing how to teach.

If this is all sounding like stuff you all already know, it's because it is. My point is to describe yet one more bad consequence of our current knowledge building infrastructure, namely that we're not teaching the basic skills that are the foundation of all further learning.

A few of the points I've made:

1. Reading is by & large assumed to be just reading

2. Most teaching methods are based on the specific experiences of teachers in their classrooms.

3. Most of these methods are never tested.

4. In higher ed, there is little teaching training.