Nuclear Power in New Zealand

Introduction

It is becoming more and more vital for schools to teach their learners a future-proved skill-set than subject knowledge, in order to get them ready for the upcoming unforeseeable work environment (Robles, 2012). This skill set is referred to by Kay (2010) as the twenty-first-century skills, including critical thinking skill. This webpage is to explore the feasibility of developing critical thinking skill through collaborative teaching and learning between the subjects of statistics and physics from two different learning areas of the New Zealand Curriculum [NZC] (Ministry of Education New Zealand, 2007). Both mathematics and science learning areas are traditionally already associated with learners’ growth in critical thinking skill (Aizikovitsh-Udi & Cheng, 2015; Bailin, 2002). However, this growth is more in a technical sense without much social interest. To overcome this shortcoming of the two areas, this site suggests a collaboration between the two. In this collaboration, by investigating a particular social-scientific issue, namely nuclear power in New Zealand, through the lens of statistics, we hope to provoke students’ critical thinking skill on a social level.

This site is organized as follow. The Background page introduces critical-thinking education and how it is best achieved by teaching controversial issues in a cross-curricular approach. The tab of Controversy presents the background of the controversial in our collaborative teaching example. The Teaching page shows how our example collaboration teaching is organized and how it is linked to the two National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) achievement standards. Finally, the Conclusion tab includes my reflections on such a collaborative teaching compared to the more traditional way of education. In short, this site is trying to answer the following question:

How collaborative learning can be used to provoke critical thinking on a social level?