Rissing, who manages ASU's Hughes Program, is especially proud of the workshops. A specialist in science teaching methods, Lawson has long promoted teaching science as science is practiced. Lawson and scholars at other institutions nationwide have administered science-reasoning tests to students at various grade levels for years. They have found that even students at the college level have difficulty reasoning scientifically. We have students here at ASU who aren't where they ought to be, and that's not unusual.
Most universities are like that.
The elementary and high schools often fail to teach science in a way that helps to develop scientific thinking skills, but the problems go deeper than that, according to Lawson. What happens in the home might also not be very conducive to developing higher thinking skills. This approach emphasizes understanding scientific methods at the expense of memorizing extensive lists of terms and definitions. I don't think that is a problem because those details are found in textbooks. If you know where to look, you can find them in a hurry.