Even second-graders can learn how to distinguish good from bad sources of information, the differences between causation and association, and the elements of sound experimental design.

Such concepts were taught to second-graders in Ithaca this past spring using age-appropriate teaching modules from the Thinking Like a Scientist (TLAS) project, an ongoing educational outreach program developed by Cornell human development professor Wendy Williams.

"Growing up in the information age, these children are surrounded by a vast world of facts and figures, so it is important that they know what information they can and cannot deem reliable," Williams said. "TLAS has many variants, each aimed at teaching critical thinking and reasoning skills to a different group of young people. The underlying goal of TLAS is to train students to use the scientific method to solve problems in their daily lives."

One format of TLAS targets such underrepresented demographic and socio-economic groups in science as African-Americans, Latinos and economically disadvantaged white students at the high school level, with the goal of fostering both an interest in science and stronger critical thinking skills. For high school students, the TLAS curriculum includes in-depth classroom discussions focused on the scientific method and how it can be applied to everyday situations.

"Elementary students, however, represented new territory for the program," says Williams.

For her honors thesis last year, Jessica Zulawski '09 helped design TLAS materials for these younger students, and veteran teacher Laurie Rubin from Cayuga Heights Elementary School provided guidance and collaborative input, and then taught the TLAS lessons to her second-graders over a period of six weeks. The curriculum involved discussions about many principles of effective thinking, framed within the context of the psychology of food and eating behavior. Thus, students learned about the effects of visual cues on appetite, advertising and healthy eating, and how to find good sources of nutrition information.

Zulawski pre- and post-tested the second-graders' knowledge using various scenarios, asking the students if the hypothetical children in the scenarios exercised good or "not-so-good" thinking and why. The responses were scored by two independent raters, indicating the students' ability to generalize the scientific method to solve real-world problems.

"The results … showed a great deal of promise," said Williams. On average, students improved in their scores on each question by one full point (on a scale of 1 to 5) by the completion of the program, demonstrating a significant increase.

"This finding suggests that this curriculum could be useful in additional classrooms to improve the critical thinking abilities of other elementary school students, and warrants further exploration of TLAS for young students," concluded Williams. "Real-world problem solving means knowing how to sift relevant from irrelevant information and trustworthy from less-trusted sources, with the aim of building solid solutions responsive to multiple aspects of a problem (for example, how to create a healthy lifestyle). The knowledge and abilities these students gained from participating in the TLAS program are a start on their journey toward thinking like a scientist in everyday life.