Background

Background – Cross-Curricular Teaching and Learning

According to the report of a collaborative study conducted by Dell Technologies and a futures research group, Institute for the Future (IFTF), “85% of the jobs that today’s learners will be doing in 2030 haven’t been invented yet” (IFTF, 2017, p. 14). Although the base of the predicted number 85% is questionable and so the claim of this quote has been proven to be merely a myth (Newton, 2018), this false prediction is still being widely spread in mainstream media (Mekouar, 2019; Mills, 2019). The reason behind the widespread of belief in this overwhelming figure in 2019, only 11 years away from the targeted year of the prediction, is that the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital process automation has been transforming many jobs over the last two decades in an unprecedented scale (Smith & Anderson, 2014). This trend of workforce transformation is likely to continue in the future (Manyika et al., 2017), with “about half of all work activities globally have the technical potential to be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies” (p. 27).

With such a major change happening in the workplace, it is more important for our learners at school to master 21st century skills (Kay, 2010), which include critical thinking. This skill is necessary for life-long learners who are expected to gain new knowledge after their formal education. This is because knowledge and information are readily available online in the information age but in an unfiltered way, so life-long learners must have a critical mind to perform the filtering themselves (Eisenberg, 2008, p. 41).

Apart from getting our learners ready for their future workplace, critical thinking skill also prepares them to discuss and make decision on ever changing and complicated social issues, as part of the normal democratic process (Nussbaum, 2006, p. 388). Therefore, critical thinking skill is an essence of democratic citizenship.

Many, like Hameed (1997), Adam and Manson (2014), Lack and Rousseau (2016), and Tiruneh, De Cock, Weldeslassie, Elen, and Janssen (2017), have suggested ways of developing students’ critical thinking dispositions within the science classrooms. However, Byrne and Brodie (2011) found the purpose of critical thinking enhancement is best achieved by cross-curricular collaborations. In his word, “The issue of critical reflection is best seen in teaching controversial issues which can be an extremely valuable cross-curricular approach” (p. 33). A discussion of controversial issues develops students’ critical thinking by challenging their pre-hold beliefs on the issues, and stereotype of thinking science as a black-and-white subject.

On the other hand, many discussions of controversial social issues involve statistical literacy, the ability to explain or debate statistical ideas and to identify misleading statistics in an argument (Rumsey, 2002). As a result, cross-curricular collaboration between science and statistics is in a good position to teach social-scientific issues. In the example social-scientific issue we will look at, the collaboration will be between statistical experiment and nuclear physics.