How Can We Teach Logical Reasoning in STEM?

What defines our approaches to teaching?

Our focus is on student-centered approaches to teaching, founded upon the understanding that all students are capable of engaging in critical thinking and logical reasoning. Instructors can help promote student buy-in by purposefully and explicitly aligning learning goals, assessments, and activities. We can further our commitment to inclusive and effective teaching by contextualizing lesson content and materials (e.g., cases) so that they are relevant to our students’ experiences, employing strategies that build on students’ prior knowledge, and conveying to students how and why cultivating logical reasoning (LR) skills in our courses may be valuable to them beyond the classroom.

What do we mean by teaching logical reasoning in STEM courses?

Our instructional design materials incorporate and align with the elements of LR and CT, mentioned above, and offer students exposure to interrelationships between CT and discipline-specific STEM content. Our initial curricular tools will be formatted as mini-lessons equipped with suites of resources. We suggest discussing these mini-lessons as a formative assessment that may be delivered in-class or asynchronously. We envision that the discrete, modular resources we will create -- such as infographics, short videos, checklists, problem-based worksheets, and/or sets of discussion prompts that are customizable to different STEM topics -- would be conducive to early adoption by STEM instructors who wish to pilot teaching LR skills in their courses.

Although individual learners can complete activities that support their development of LR skills, group activities -- such as peer review and in-class exercises that engage teams of learners in dialogic problem-solving -- may provide synergistic effects. By enlisting learners in partnerships with teachers and/or peers during LR exercises, we can move beyond inculcating rote knowledge that must be accepted without question to, instead, building transferable skills and frameworks of reasoning that invite further inquiry and exploration.

What do we mean by making logical reasoning transparent in STEM teaching?

Critical thinking and logical reasoning are integral to the practice of scientific inquiry -- from experimental design to data interpretation, evaluation, and inference. STEM instructors can make LR more transparent in their courses by leveraging LR pedagogies to introduce learners to the epistemological foundation of science. Intentional teaching of CT and LR begins with helping students understand the utility of those skills by designing curricula that lead students to view LR as a valuable set of skills and help students recognize the LR foundations of STEM disciplines. For example, learners can deepen their understanding of the nature of logical arguments by examining the relationship between evidence and conclusions within inductive and deductive arguments where inductive reasoning uses empirical observations to arrive at general concepts that may or may not be true. Likewise, iteratively revising a model of a real-world phenomenon by incorporating new data helps learners value LR as a useful set of strategies inherent in building scientific knowledge. Furthermore, introducing LR early in a given course and accentuating LR frequently across the life cycle of that course would maximize the likelihood of learners’ internalizing these habits of mind. However, practicing LR in several activities may be an achievable intermediate goal, as instructors work towards infusing logical reasoning throughout a single course or even beyond, into subsequent courses.