:: The 4th Era ::

The Australian Curriculum acknowledges that developing thinking skills is a primary purpose of education, and identifies critical thinking as an important capability for the 21st century. Critical thinking has, of course, long been a valuable skill for young people to master, though its importance is expected to increase
as the world becomes ever more augmented
by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Despite consensus on the need for critical thinking, there is still considerable debate over how it is learned and, subsequently, how education can best support students to develop critical thinking capabilities. Some believe that critical thinking can be taught as a generic skill independently from subject content, while others contend that content mastery is pivotal
to the development of thinking capabilities.
This paper considers what cognitive science can tell us about how critical thinking is acquired, and the implications for how education might best develop young people’s critical thinking capabilities in light of this evidence.

Computational thinking is one of the biggest buzzwords in education—it’s even been called the ‘5th C’ of 21st century skills. While it got its start as a way to help computer scientists think more logically about data analysis, lately it’s been catching on with instructors in a diverse number of subjects—from science to math to social studies.

One reason for its emerging popularity? It’s engaging.

“Ask yourself, would you rather get to play with a data set or would you rather listen to the teacher tell you about the data set?” asks Tom Hammond, an associate professor for the teacher education program at Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania. “Most are more interested in getting hands-on, even if it's just looking at the map and saying, ‘What about this?’”

Hammond is a social studies teacher by training with a natural interest in computer science, a subject he’s also taught. Now he’s championing a new approach to his subject that combines computational thinking with data visualization tools, like geographic information systems, or GIS, which pair maps with layers of data—so that users can see, say, election results by county or state borders in the colonial era.