LABORATORY OF CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES: RESEARCH ON SCIENTIFIC AND CRITICAL THINKING

We need every student to learn more, think better, and build up competencies for daily life in addition to developing as an integral person. Learning is a direct consequence of thinking so we must teach our students to think scientifically and critically. Science gives us a perfect context to carry out this kind of learning experiences from childhood and promote this type of thinking. Thus, this work will introduce “science” in the classrooms to experiment with all the contents of the curricula and to promote the reflection about this experimentation. At first, we need to know what teachers are doing, so our objectives are: (1) Analyze the use of active learning that allow to experiment with the contents of the curricula in the classrooms; (2) Analyze the strategies that teachers use to encourage scientific and critical thinking in their students; and (3) Analyze teaching needs in those areas. The participants of this study are 65 teachers of the primary and secondary stages who have been interviewed through an ad hoc questionnaire created for this research. This instrument is composed by three different content blocks relating with our objectives and exploring about the knowledge and use of active learning strategies, the knowledge and use of thinking strategies and teacher needs in their classrooms. Our sample was recruited through purposive sampling method in six different school centers, these centers were in 2 different Spanish cities. Teachers usually know what active learning is but they have difficulties integrating this type of methodologies and strategies in their classroom. Most of participants have no correct knowledge about how to promote a critical and deeper thinking in their students. If learning is a direct consequence of thinking we need to teach and develop this kind of knowledge and skills in our teachers, and then, they will be able to cultivate thinking dispositions and active learning in school settings.