Evaluation of an attempt to teach scientific inquiry and criticism in a working class high school

A group of 15 low SES 14‐year‐olds, who had not yet reached Piaget's stage of “formal operations”, were taught to design controlled experiments and to criticize poorly controlled experiments. As judged by performance on a nonstandardized text, they learned to do this well, and significantly outperformed matched controls. ( p <.001). The results were interpreted with reference to Inhelder and Piaget's work on the origins of scientific thinking.