Whether in politics or health care, deep thinking skills can help people make evidence-based deci­sions. And the usefulness of those skills extends be­yond those realms into the workplace as well. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine calls critical and analytical thinking a fundamental skill workers need today. In the age of AI, say employment experts, employees with strong “human” skills like critical thinking will become more in demand.

“Going forward, people will still need to know specific bodies of knowledge to be effective in the workplace,” says Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun in his book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “But that alone will not be enough when intelligent machines are doing much of the heavy lifting of information.”

In Search of a New Learning Tool

It was concern about kids encountering misinformation on social media that led to the birth of Research Quest. About a decade ago, members of the Rosenblatt family noticed younger kids were joining Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms. “There was no real approach to teaching them to be critical about the in­formation they were receiving,” says Toby Rosenblatt.

The Rosenblatts—longtime supporters of the U who are dedi­cated to the field of education—turned to the U to start discussions about helping develop and fund a program that would teach kids critical thinking skills. Toby’s niece, Jody Rosenblatt, suggested they approach the Natural History Museum of Utah.

“Initially, we thought that natural history didn’t sound like a very strong connection,” says Toby. “But she persuaded us to talk to them.”

Jody knew the impact an NHMU educational program could have on young minds. She had participated in the museum’s school programs when she was growing up. As the state’s official natural history museum, part of NHMU’s mission is to promote science education and serve as a resource for K-12 teachers throughout Utah. NHMU hosts field trips, of course, but it also brings the museum to the classroom through initiatives like Museum-on-the-Move—a traveling collection of artifacts. NHMU’s programs made such an impact on Jody Rosenblatt that she fell in love with science. Today, she’s a cell biologist.

After meeting with the Rosenblatts, leaders at NHMU were on board with the idea. They put together a team charged with cre­ating a program that would be accessible to a wide number of teachers and students—in Utah and beyond—and would have measurable impact. The Joseph and Evelyn Rosenblatt Charita­ble Fund would support research and development of the program.

The team—which included university research scientists, expert teachers, and curriculum developers, along with profes­sionals from the worlds of digital learning, museums, and game design—began with the question, What is critical thinking?

“There isn’t a ubiquitous definition,” says Madlyn Larson, as­sociate director of education initiatives at NHMU and project director for the development of Research Quest. “So we defined discrete skills we wanted to effect: how to make strong observations and inferences, how to en­gage in analysis, and how to develop arguments based on evidence.”

That requires going beyond the shallow learning of regurgitating facts, says Kirsten Butcher, a professor of educational psycholo­gy at the U. “What works best is if we design investigation contexts where learners are challenged to integrate new information with prior knowledge, generate new ideas, and be critical of their assumptions,” she says.

As director of the U’s Instructional Design and Educational Technology Program, Butcher was brought onto the team to help create an en­gaging web-based program that resulted in meaningful and mea­surable increases in student knowledge. The team put together prototypes that had students investigating scientific mysteries, in­corporating lots of multimedia and interactive games—like Dino Lab—developed by designers in the U's Division of Games (formerly the Entertainment Arts & Engineering program). Data from pre-and post-assessments showed that the students who used the investigations scored significantly better than their control group peers on reasoning with evidence. The successful program was ready to be launched far and wide.

Investigation over Memorization

Back when she went to school, says Rachael Coleman, science was all about memorization. “There were certain students who wanted to be chemists because they loved memorizing the peri­odic table,” says Coleman, a science specialist at Jordan School District. “But when you get to be a chemist, you realize that’s not really what you’re doing.”

Coleman and her district colleague Lynn Gutzwiller say they focus on teaching kids critical thinking because, simply put, that’s what scientists do. And that’s why they find Research Quest so valuable.

“There is a deep, dark void of online virtual investigations that are free, high quality, and help students access critical thinking and deeper learning skills,” says Gutzwiller. Research Quest strikes the right balance of engaging and educational, she asserts. It aligns with rigorous Next Generation Science Standards, “but it isn’t so collegiate that it’s out of the realm of understanding for a sixth grader.”

At the heart of every Research Quest module is a real-world sci­entific mystery. One investigation begins with a video of an NHMU educator in a lodgepole pine forest. Dry branches crack under her feet as she walks through a stand of bare gray trunks. “What is killing all these trees?” she asks. “Something strange is going on.” In another investigation, a paleontologist stands next to fossils discovered at Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. “I’d like you to develop a hypothesis to answer the question, What dinosaur did these bones come from?” she says.

Each investigation involves a set of virtual activities where stu­dents explore digitized museum collections and data to gather their own evidence for the research question at hand. “We give kids the opportunity to collect their own data so they understand where data comes from,” says Larson.

The Cleveland-Lloyd module, for example, has kids studying 3D fossils on the screen, rotating them this way and that for a de­tailed view. After writing down their observations, students watch the paleontologist explain her own findings.

“It shows students that this is the depth of answer we’re look­ing for,” Coleman notes. Instead of just saying, “It looks like a claw,” they’re encouraged to ask deeper questions—what, exact­ly, makes it look like a claw?

“What’s Killing These Trees?” was the first investigation Kris Larsh and his students tried out. “The kids were like, hey, this is really neat,” says Larsh, who teaches middle school science at Stonewall Public Schools in Stonewall, Oklahoma. Larsh found Research Quest while searching Google for a free science resource that wasn’t just another worksheet. The more investigations his students tried, the more Larsh noticed how engrossed they were. “I was trying to get them off their Chromebooks, but they were still playing around with the triceratops.”

What’s more, he says, the kids began to think like scientists.

“I could sit all day and break down the scientific method. But it wasn’t setting in,” says Larsh. “But when they listened to the sci­entists talk in Research Quest, I knew they were starting to really home in on what the scientific method was.” Their science fair projects became about more than just throwing Mentos into a bottle of Coke and seeing it foam up. “The kids started saying, ‘What if I change the variables?’ That’s when I knew magic had happened.”