2016六级12月份的两篇阅读选编.doc

Passage One More than a decade ago, cognitivescientists John Bransford and Daniel Schwartz, both then at Vanderbilt University, found that what distinguished young adults from children was not the ability to retain facts or apply prior knowledge to a new situation but aquality they called “preparation for future learning.” The researchers asked fifth graders and college students to create a recovery plan to protect bald eagles from extinction. Shockingly, the two groups came up with plans of similar quality( although the college students had better spelling skills).From the standpoint of a traditional educator, this outcome indicated that schooling and failed to help students think about ecosystems and extinction, major scientific ideas. The researchers decided to go deeper,however. They asked both groups to generate questions about important issues need to create recovery plans. On this task, they found large differences.College students focused on critical issues of interdependence between eagle sand their habitats(栖息地). Fifth graders tended to focus on features of individual eagles(“How big are they?” and “What do they eat?”). The college students had cultivated the ability to ask questions, the cornerstone of critical thinking. They had learned how to learn. Museums and other institutions of informal learning may be better suited to teach this skill than elementary and secondary schools. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, we recently studied how learning to ask good questions can affect the quality of people’s scientific inquiry. We found that when we taught participants to ask “What if?”and “How can?” questions that nobody present would know the answer to and thatwould spark exploration, they engaged in better inquiry at the next exhibit—asking more questions, performing more experiments and making better interpretations of their results. Specifically, their questions became more comprehensive at the new exhibit. Rather than merely asking about something t