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Essay Review of Exploring Science: The Cognition and Development of Discovery Processes by David Klahr1
What is scientific reasoning, anyhow? Is it some mysterious intelligence or method that scientists deploy, but that remains unavailable to the rest of us? If so, how do newcomers get access to it? Or is it simply a more specialized version of the thinking that all of us routinely engage in, albeit guided by some useful heuristics and techniques and constrained by particular forms of knowledge? If so, why do people need long years of schooling to acquire it? And how could such a presumably routine form of thinking generate such impressive, complex, and even counterintuitive products? Many have weighed in on these issues, including cognitive psychologists, philosophers, developmental researchers, science educators, and scientists themselves.
Partly because of the diversity of contributors, at this point in its evolution, research on scientific reasoning comprises a rather extensive body of work that subsumes a number of sub-fields. Considered as a corpus, the research is probably best described as unruly - it is certainly not motivated by a set of shared assumptions about what scientific thinking is, what needs to be included in an account of its processes or development, and how those components might be related. After all, given one's point of view, scientific thinking might be assumed to include any or all of the following: conceptual development, hypothesis testing, control of variables, theory change, correlation and contingency, induction, generation and interpretation of evidence, visualization, design of experiments, data modeling, causality, representational tools and notations, and a grasp of related ideas like uncertainty, probability, necessity, and sufficiency. A messy list, and one that is by no means exhaustive!
Given this breadth of the field, it is disappointing that so few researchers have approached scientific thinking programmatically, working in a systematic and sustained way to progressively widen the scope of phenomena brought under investigation. A notable exception is the research described in Exploring science: The cognition and development of discovery processes. This book recounts one of the most extensive, creative, and fruitful contemporary programs of research on scientific thinking, conducted over the last two decades by David Klahr and his colleagues, Kevin Dunbar, Anne L. Fay, David Penner, and Christian D. Schunn....