About the author

Dan Rhoads

Dan is a postdoc working at the University of Cyprus in developmental biology. He has a BSc in molecular biology and a PhD pharmacology and biochemistry.

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One view on the aim of graduate studies towards a PhD is to foster critical learning and thinking habits, much more so than to simply learn facts. You’re supposed to learn how to “think like a scientist,” or develop and mature your intellectual behaviors in the discussions of difficult concepts (AKA, problems).

“Habits of Mind are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolutions of which are not immediately apparent,” (Costa & Kallick, below the fold).

By definition, a problem is any stimulus, question, task, phenomenon, or discrepancy, the explanation for which is not immediately known. Thus, we are interested in focusing on student performance under those challenging conditions that demand strategic reasoning, insightfulness, perserverence, creativity, and craftsmanship to resolve a complex problem. Not only are we interested in how many answers students know, but also in knowing how to behave when they DON’T know. Habits of Mind are performed in response to those questions and problems the answers to which are NOT immediately known. We are interested in observing how students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce knowledge. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.

Although that’s written by Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick from their perspectives as educators, those interests could be said of any PhD curriculum. Moving beyond simply reproducing knowledge to creating knowledge is one of the most vital aspects of scientific discovery and advancement, and begins with how one learns and teaches him or her self.

Now, I disagree on the relative importance of some items on Costa’s 16 ‘habits of mind’ over others – managing impulsivity, listening with empathy, and finding humor make for being a nice person, but don’t matter a great deal for creativity and critical learning/thinking. And accuracy is a misnomer – the scientist shouldn’t strive for accuracy, but for precision (there’s a difference).

Alternatively, thinking flexibly, metacognition, applying past knowledge, asking insightful questions, and data collection and interpretation are all vital to a creative mind of discovery.

The AAAS has a similar book out titled �Science for All Americans,� which discusses Habits of Mind in Chapter 12. That accounting of Habits of Mind describes 5 aspects:

1. Values and Attributes, including knowledge of the social values inherent in science, mathematics and technology, and attitudes towards learning in these and other disciplines. In particular, science education is in a particularly strong position to foster three general societal values: curiousity, openness to new ideas, and informed skepticism.
2. Computation and Estimation: thinking skills that enable knowledge to be understood and applied effectively in solving problems.
3. Manipulation and Observation: �Everyone should acquire the ability to handle common materials and tools for dealing with household and other everyday technologies, for making careful observations, and for handling information.�
4. Communcation Skills: �Discourse in science, mathematics, and technology calls for the ability to communicate ideas and share information with fidelity and clarity, and to read and listen with understanding. Some of the skills involved are specific to science, mathematics, and technology, and others are general—although even those are not independent of content.�
5. Critical-response Skills: �In various forms, the mass media, teachers, and peers inundate students with assertions and arguments, some of them in the realm of science, mathematics, and technology. Education should prepare people to read or listen to such assertions critically, deciding what evidence to pay attention to and what to dismiss, and distinguishing careful arguments from shoddy ones. Furthermore, people should be able to apply those same critical skills to their own observations, arguments, and conclusions, thereby becoming less bound by their own prejudices and rationalizations. Although most people cannot be expected to become experts in technical fields, everyone can learn to detect the symptoms of doubtful assertions and arguments.�

Now, those skills were written with the general public in mind, for education levels much lower than what I’m talking about here. That’s all well and good, but for the time being I’m talking about graduate students, who should have greater support in developing these skills, just as faculty should have greater support in instilling these skills in their apprentices (which is what graduate students are, really).

Also, they’re not skills, they’re habits, as mentioned above. How do you teach habits? Behavioral conditioning of the sort that grad school does already. How do you teach habits better? Practice. Discuss. Repeat.

Related posts:
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Sb: The project of being a grown-up scientist (part 1), and the response, Scientific Careerism 101: Yes, grad students and postdocs it IS your fault