Kuhn, Deanna (2005). Education for Thinking. Reviewed by Eric Jabal, OISE

Kuhn, Deanna (2005). Education for Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.     ISBN 0-674-01906-7 Reviewed by Eric Jabal Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto November 14, 2007 "Why go to school?"―a question I often asked as I laboured through my own high school days. Though I relished the company of my peers and the sports I played, I cannot say the same for life in the classroom: too much content to cover, too little time spent talking about it, and too many rote tasks to complete. Paradoxically, it is largely because of this experience that I returned to schools more than a decade ago as a teacher, administrator, and now scholar-practitioner-leader, working with a network of international schools in Hong Kong to understand better and enhance students’ academic and social engagement. "Why go to school?" is the question that Deanna Kuhn opens with in Education for Thinking. A Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, she argues that getting children to think well is a key educational imperative, a leitmotif that can be traced through her corpus of work in development, cognition, and pedagogy. In this latest instalment, Kuhn combines the power of scientific rationality (i.e., coordinate theory and evidence to address a hypothesis) (Kuhn, Amsel et al., 1988) with the utility of argumentative reasoning (Kuhn, 1991) to call for their development as part of a “thinking curriculum.” For Kuhn, “Inquiry and argument are competencies of value to students from all segments of society. Even more than competencies, they are ways of knowing the world and of acting on and within it…. that we would equally like to see develop in young people from the most and the least privileged segments of society” (p. 197). The book is Kuhn’s “road map” and destination guide to achieve education for thinking and/as education for life. In Chapter 1, Kuhn presents and debunks four alternative purposes of education (i.e., to instil knowledge; to develop skills; for selection; and for citizenship). She then offers the eponymous title “education for thinking” as the fifth and most defensible imperative, which she casts in terms of two specific sets of intellectual skills: inquiry (i.e., enable students to seek answers to questions they find worth asking) and argumentation (i.e., enable them to support their claims and to judge those of others). Her contribution to the debate, Kuhn suggests, is an empirically-grounded education-for-thinking case that is developmental in nature. Further, she seeks to enhance our understanding and direct our teaching of the “thinking skills that are exercised in everyday, non-academic settings,” and to which educators ought to attend if they are to “equip students for life’s demands and opportunities” (p. 13) beyond the classroom. Chapter 2 rounds off the book’s introduction by contextualising Kuhn’s main empirical proven grounds: two public middle schools in New York City at “opposite ends on a continuum of perceived quality” (p. 17). Over a semester, she conducted classroom observations of a seventh- and eighth-grade Social Studies class, student and teacher interviews, and survey work. Despite the marked differences in the culture, academic achievement, and socio-economic status of their inner-city and suburban populations, as well as resources and climate, two convergent findings to emerge were: the mismatch between the intended instructional goals, in terms of inquiry and argument skills development, and the actualised learning; and the absence of “activities that have clear, readily discernible intrinsic value” (p. 27), which “students will readily be able to see for themselves are worth doing” (p. 30). Kuhn concludes that students at the “struggling” inner-city school “could not buy into school”; those at the “best-practice” suburban school “could not see their way beyond school”; and students at neither were really sure “how or why school learning connects to life beyond school” (p. 24). The latter half of Chapter 2 moves from the obstacles to the opportunities to cultivate “effective thinking” skills. Kuhn characterises this process within a four-step typology of epistemological understanding: realist (pre-school), absolutist, multiplist/relativist (adolescence), and evaluativist. Integrating qualitative and quantitative data points, she posits that while “transitions from realist to absolutist to multiplist… do not require a great deal of tending…. helping young people climb out of the multiplist well… requires the concerted attention of parents and educators, especially as it is this progression that is critical to the development of intellectual values” (p. 35). This conceptual backdrop sets up the interventions Kuhn conducted at the “struggling” and “best-practice” schools, which were designed to nurture students’ values and skills for inquiry and argumentation and move them towards the evaluativist level, where “thinking and reason [are] recognised as essential support for beliefs and actions. Thinking is the process that enables us to make informed choices between conflicting claims. Understanding this leads a person to value thinking and to be willing to expend the effort that it entails” (p. 33). The rest of the book defines, exemplifies, and offers suggestions for teachers on how to scaffold this core set of intellectual skills and values, drawing on numerous vignettes to demonstrate how cognitive development through inquiry (Part II) and reasoned argument (Part III) can be cultivated in the classroom. In Part II, Kuhn focuses on inquiry skills, understanding, and values as a necessary foundation for life and, backward-mapping, as an integral part and process of schooling. Inquiry learning is seen to be a superior educational goal than traditional instruction because students pursue “authentic investigation of real phenomena” and use “intellectual skills like those practised by professional scientists in generating new knowledge” (p. 39). Its social-constructivist premise draws on Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky to argue that formal schooling ought to build on children’s natural curiosity about, and tendency to act on, the world around them as they make sense of it. Whilst inquiry learning is widely embraced by educators, Kuhn’s fieldwork suggests that a disconnect persists between “executing the activity and developing the skills” (p. 41). Students tend to produce outcomes, which often merely illustrate prior beliefs, rather than analyse and understand the contributing factors that lead to these outcomes; they take an “engineering” rather than a “scientific” focus. In Chapter 4, Kuhn presents two analytic frameworks – i.e. thesis/evidence and cause/effect – as generative approaches to inquiry learning that get students to assert and justify claims and to explore and explain patterns and relationships. Her interventions demonstrate the enhanced understanding that can be achieved as students are forced to consider inferences that derive from their existing beliefs, on the one hand, and inferences that emerge from the evaluation of new evidence, on the other. In Chapter 5, Kuhn illustrates how these frameworks can undergird a systematic approach to inquiry. As the middle-school students worked through the three phases of inquiry (i.e. identify purpose: Is there something to find out that is distinguishable from what is already known?), analysis (i.e. to represent, examine, and interpret evidence with respect to a theory), and inference (i.e. What can I know? How do I know?), they had to contend with claims (theory – what makes sense to me?) and evidence (data – a source of knowing). In the process, the students began to appreciate the different epistemological status of knowledge as facts and opinions versus knowledge as judgements informed by evidence and deliberation. Operationalising this distinction is both the journey and the desired destination that Kuhn’s inquiry learning “road map” takes us on. In Part III, Kuhn turns to argumentative reasoning as a complementary intellectual capacity and necessary process and product of schooling-for-life. Reasoned discourse, individual and dialogic, is offered as “the most powerful means of evaluating competing ideas and constructing shared understanding” (p. 173). In Chapter 6, Kuhn’s fieldwork shows how “weaker” argumentation prevails because “in neither classroom did students direct their remarks to one another…. Each student’s utterance was a new, and isolated, communication to the teacher” (p. 123). Kuhn contrasts such “consecutive self-expression” to “genuine discourse,” which “students engage in as soon as they leave the classroom and enter the schoolyard. One student makes a claim, another challenges it, and others may join in; strict reciprocity between any pair of participants is not expected, but still a speaker addresses the claim that has just been made, with the goal of reaching a resolution” (p. 124). It is this interactive dynamic, in which the focus is on both what one thinks and why one thinks it (i.e. claim, counter-claim, arguments for/against each), that Kuhn believes can be facilitated when “serious, value-laden issues” are used to engage students as part of a meaningful and purposeful “thinking curriculum.” In Chapter 7, Kuhn clarifies the specific skills of argument. She starts by focusing on the crucial tripartite relationship between evidence, the self’s perspective and knowledge, and the/(an) other’s perspective and knowledge. Drawing on her own data and the empirical work of others, Kuhn shows the importance of getting students to understand and avoid “identity fusion” – i.e. to be able to step back and look at a writer’s text as an object of cognition and not to conflate it with their own perspective and knowledge. Appreciating this distinction is a necessary and vital first step to evaluating an argument. Kuhn then uses more data to illustrate how teachers can guide students to evaluate the epistemic strengths of the two argument types (i.e. evidence- and explanation-based). In Chapter 8, Kuhn marries her rationale on the centrality of argument with the skills to map out the activities and associated cognitive goals that constitute her comprehensive “argument curriculum”: Generating reasons (goal: reasons underlie opinions; different reasons may underlie the same opinion) Elaborating reasons (goal: good reasons support opinions) Supporting reasons with evidence (goal: evidence can strengthen reasons) Evaluating reasons (goal: some reasons are better than others) Developing reasons into an argument (goal: reasons connect to one another and are building blocks of argument) Examining and evaluating opposing side’s reasons (goal: opponents have reasons too) Generating counterarguments to others’ reasons (goal: opposing reasons can be countered) Generating rebuttals to others’ counterarguments (goal: counters to reasons can be rebutted) Contemplating mixed evidence (goal: evidence can be used to support different claims) Conducting and evaluating two-sided arguments (goal: some arguments are stronger than others) Kuhn’s selection and discussion of fieldwork data on capital punishment show that while giving students a reason to inquire and argue may lead naturally to dialogue, dialogic argumentative discourse does not readily ensue. However, the scaffolded dialogic exercises used in her intervention get students to engage the claims of others with the goal of weakening them, while advancing arguments that strengthen their own position. These are the very education-for-life skills and values that make Kuhn’s “thinking curriculum” central to what students ought to be doing in schools. In sum, Kuhn has much to offer educators who are against fact-heavy, discussion-light, test-centric schooling and for cultivating students’ courage to think, question, and act. Conceptually, its lucid treatment of argument and inquiry in education will enrich the thinking of practitioners and pre-service teacher educators alike; pedagogically, the empirically-derived and field-tested strategies will enhance their instructional repertoire needed to promote these sets of intellectual skills. Teachers and curriculum designers in a pinch ought to read the book-ends, Chapters 3 (Learning to learn), and 8 (Developing argument skills). The visuals used throughout and transcriptions of student exchanges, in particular, can be readily integrated into in-service programmes to develop teachers’ practical understanding of the higher-order cognitive skills of inquiry and argumentative reasoning and approaches to develop them. In short, Kuhn’s inquiry and argument educational “road map” is a recommended guide for those who are serious about readying students to think and to learn in academic and everyday, non-academic settings. References Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, D.; Amsel, E.; O'Loughlin, M.; & Beilin, H. (Eds.) (1988). The development of scientific thinking skills. San Diego: Academic Press. About the Reviewer Eric Jabal is a PhD candidate in educational administration at OISE-University of Toronto. His research interests focus on the relationship between culture, identity, and international schooling. He has recently accepted a new position as Post-15 Learning Director at an international secondary school in Hong Kong.