There is so much focus on teaching of science and maths in schools. The syllabus for Science is especially large as it has to cover the huge amount of knowledge we have gathered so far. The gap between the cutting-edge science and level at which kids start learning science is vast. Children have a long way to go.
To cover this divide, science is split into subjects such as physics, chemistry and biology. Going even deeper into optics, mechanics, electricity etc. The focus in on the contents of science. Rarely do we teach children how science really works. The real initiation of children in science lies in teaching them the scientific process, not piles and piles of already derived science.
I had an unexpected opportunity to take this diversion in my class. One day I said that doing meditation every day should help in exam. Naturally children asked me, how do I know that ? I had to admit that I didn't really know if that was true. So we decided to find out. This is how science starts - almost always with a question - even a silly one. Would daily meditation improve exam performance ? that was the question.
The only way to find out was to do an experiment. What should we do to find out ? I asked children. Unbelievably I got some very good suggestions. Ideas that go to the very core of Science. One girl asked, how will we ever know if it worked unless we compared ? - that is what the controlled experiments are all about. A boy said that the two exams (with and without meditation) should be comparable. That's the idea of removing systematic errors. Another girl said, its easy to measure the exam performance, but how do we measure meditation ? That was profound. We needed a quantitative measure of meditation. We decided on a 5-point scale for mediation ( 1 is bad, 5 is excellent). A boy asked how many measurements should be done ? that leads to concept of independent measurements, variance and confidence in the data.
Every one agreed that we should measure mediation for next 20 days, at least twice a day. At the end of it there would be an exam. We will compare that performance to the one in the past. Frankly, this is a tougher experiment than normal science. Here, children have to be honestly rating their own meditation - objectively !
Its been four days now, my class is measuring their own meditation on the scale of 1-5. They are meticulously writing their observations in a table - with date and time. We will then roughly correlate these with their exam grades.
It may be that the results will show us nothing. And that is ok. There are three possible out-comes of any experiment, a Yes or a No or the results could be Inconclusive. In fact, rarely does a single experiment prove or disprove anything. Children will discuss what other parameters needed to be controlled.
We may not find link between meditation and performance with this experiment. But I hope children would learnt something about how science works,
To cover this divide, science is split into subjects such as physics, chemistry and biology. Going even deeper into optics, mechanics, electricity etc. The focus in on the contents of science. Rarely do we teach children how science really works. The real initiation of children in science lies in teaching them the scientific process, not piles and piles of already derived science.
I had an unexpected opportunity to take this diversion in my class. One day I said that doing meditation every day should help in exam. Naturally children asked me, how do I know that ? I had to admit that I didn't really know if that was true. So we decided to find out. This is how science starts - almost always with a question - even a silly one. Would daily meditation improve exam performance ? that was the question.
The only way to find out was to do an experiment. What should we do to find out ? I asked children. Unbelievably I got some very good suggestions. Ideas that go to the very core of Science. One girl asked, how will we ever know if it worked unless we compared ? - that is what the controlled experiments are all about. A boy said that the two exams (with and without meditation) should be comparable. That's the idea of removing systematic errors. Another girl said, its easy to measure the exam performance, but how do we measure meditation ? That was profound. We needed a quantitative measure of meditation. We decided on a 5-point scale for mediation ( 1 is bad, 5 is excellent). A boy asked how many measurements should be done ? that leads to concept of independent measurements, variance and confidence in the data.
Every one agreed that we should measure mediation for next 20 days, at least twice a day. At the end of it there would be an exam. We will compare that performance to the one in the past. Frankly, this is a tougher experiment than normal science. Here, children have to be honestly rating their own meditation - objectively !
Its been four days now, my class is measuring their own meditation on the scale of 1-5. They are meticulously writing their observations in a table - with date and time. We will then roughly correlate these with their exam grades.
It may be that the results will show us nothing. And that is ok. There are three possible out-comes of any experiment, a Yes or a No or the results could be Inconclusive. In fact, rarely does a single experiment prove or disprove anything. Children will discuss what other parameters needed to be controlled.
We may not find link between meditation and performance with this experiment. But I hope children would learnt something about how science works,
- Start with a question
- Do a clean experiment
- Prove, Disprove or declare to be Inconclusive.
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