Researchers in the field of education emphasise that it is crucial that children and young people develop stable attitudes toward learning, not only in school but throughout their lives. They should look at how they think and reason, make informed choices and confirm information sources. They should also know how to relate one piece of information with another, look at the data from a critical perspective, generalise and transpose reasoning schemes and actions from one field to another (e.g. grammar rules from the language class to coding), as well as from one problem to another (e.g. in planning experiments, surveys or social campaigns). Developing such self-regulating mechanisms in children and young people requires a specific working scheme, however.
Instead of simply providing ready data, the teacher should focus on building skills that help looking for such data, falsifying information, seeking answers, separating useful information from unimportant data, and communicated with the use of an appropriate register and terminology (e.g. physics, biology). This requires meta-reasoning skills, conceptual maps and simple, but rarely posed questions, such as: What do we already know on the subject? How do we know this? How to prove it? What don’t we know and how to check it? What mistakes did we make and how to correct them? How did other do it and how are our respective results different? What conclusions can we draw from this experience? What is the best way of showing this to others? What have we learned today? What do we have to practise or study more? Where can we find more information and guidelines? How to get to experts in the field?
