《思想者指南系列丛书：如何提升学生的学习能力（英文版）》：
　　The Key Concept of the Course
　　This course is entirely concerned with the development of scientific thinking.Humans do not naturally think scientifically; our thinking is often unscientific,or pseudo-scientific. Yet, as humans we live with the unrealistic but confident sense that we, in forming our beliefs, have fundamentally figured out the true nature of things, and that we have done this objectively. We naturally believe in our intuitive perceptions about the physical world-however inaccurate. We do not naturally raise to consciousness our assumptions about how the physical world works, the unscientific way we use information, the uncritical way we interpret data. We do not naturally question our concepts and ideas, or the fact that we often reason from an unscientific perspective.
　　All of this is true, despite the fact that most people take many years of "science" in school. To become a scientific thinker is to reverse this process by learning to take charge of the ideas one has about the physical world. It is to think consciously and deliberately and skillfully about that world. In short, it means training our minds to think scientifically.
　　A critical approach to leaming science certainly entails organizing and internalizing facts, taking command of technical terminology, and coming to understand scientific procedures-but not in isolation. Our goal in this course will be to learn science as a system ofintegrally connected meanings that are tied to important ideas in other disciplines. Learning key organizing ideas in science should fundamentally transform the way we see the physical world.We should take these ideas with us throughout our lives and use them to think through the scientific issues we face.
　　A critical approach to learning science requires us to ponder questions,propose solutions, and tlunk through possible experiments, Yet many texts treat the concept of 'ethe scientific method" in a misleading way. Not all scientists do the same kinds of things-some experiment, others don't, some do field observations, others build models, and so on. For example, chemists,theoretical physicists, zoologists, and paleontologists pursue different types of questions; the nature ofthese questions will determine the scientific processes they need to use and the thinking they need to do to answer them. Furthermore,scientific thinking is not a matter offollowing a step-by-step procedure. Rather it is a kind of thinking in which scientists continually move back and forth between questions they ask about the world, observations they make, and in many instances, experiments they devise to test out various hypotheses,guesses, hunches, and models. Following their lead, when we thinking scientifically, we continually think hypothetically: "Ifthis idea of mine is true,then what will happen under these or those conditions? Let me see, suppose we try this. What does this result tell me? Why did this happen? Ifthis is why, then that should happen when I..." It is more important for you to get into the habit of thinking scientifically than to get the correct answer through a rote process you do not understand. The essential point is this: you should do your own thinking about scientific questions from the start. Your role is not to passively take in what scientists or textbooks tell you. Rather it is to grasp the spirit of scientific thinking.
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