Bottom-Up Learning in 7th Grade Science Hopes to Turn every Child into a Genius

To a parent looking at her child's 7th grade science homework, it can seem quite workaday, quite pedestrian. To any parent who dreams of a wonderful future in the sciences for their child, the top-down instruction system that regular schooling involves has to be disappointing. They teach a child all the rules and the theories first, and at the end of each chapter, they try to challenge the child’s understanding with a bunch of problems. This kind of “lay a strong foundation” method certainly does make competent scientifically-literate children. What it doesn't do is to build good scientific imagination that is capable of envisioning the great and powerful new things in science.

People read about how the real experts in any field have a gut instinct for their area of expertise. A great basketball player or chess player can look at the field before them, envision all kinds of possibilities and go for the one that they just believe will work. They don't sit and work anything out. They just see the solution. There's a saying that geniuses are not common because that means of becoming one haven’t been made widely available yet. Educators today want to see if genius can be taught. They wish to see if they can teach 7th grade science students a reliable gut instinct about their physics and math.

The way they wish to go about it happens to be pretty daring for a school lesson plan. There is no more top-down. It's all bottom-up from now on. What that means is, that students are supposed to just learn to perceive patterns in things before them instead of learning the rules and hoping that a kind of instinct can fall into place one day. The brain, they believe, is a surmising machine. It can develop ideas about things without certain knowledge of the details. Most people have an eye for something or the other. Some people are good at learning tunes quickly; some are good with wordplay. Whatever kind of gut-instinct pattern recognition or surmising a child is naturally good at, educators hope it can transfer to useful 7th grade science.

Education has usually gone with the belief that people need to fully understand something before a gut instinct can reliably form. But scientific experiments show otherwise. In one study, people who were shown paintings of different kinds of artists were quickly able to point out similarities among paintings by the same artist. Once the brain has an actual goal in mind, it can quickly find ways to pick out patterns and clues.

One way that schools are teaching 7th  grade science students about fractions, that follows this method, has been to allow them to use a computer program that graphically shows them how to make fractions by cutting up blocks enjoining them. Students always dramatically improve in their ability to handle fractions after putting themselves through a course such as this. Using video games such as this one can build up mental images in children's minds of how scientific concepts actually fall together. It's an exciting new time for middle school education.