Not teaching evolution isn't the only problem in America's science classrooms. The evidence for this for this came home today in the form of my third grader's homework. My daughter's third grade class is learning about plant life cycles, from a textbook whose publisher I will, out of mercy, refuse to name. This textbook attempts to teach eager young students about some of the critical thinking skills scientists use, including making predictions, making inferences or drawing conclusions, and making comparisons.

Teaching critical thinking skills - it sounds great, right? The problem though, is that this textbook drums home these key words without making any distinction whatsoever between them.

Here is one homework problem asking kids to make a prediction (the bold words in these quotes are in the original):

Predict whether a seed can germinate without sunlight. Explain your answer.

OK, the kids have just learned about plants, seeds and sunlight - based on what my daughter learned in the chapter, she ought to be able to make a prediction about what will happen when you try to get a seed to germinate without sunlight. So far so good - that's prediction.

Now, we're going to focus on drawing conclusions:

Suppose you removed the petals from a flower. Draw a conclusion about whether the flower could form seeds. Explain your reasoning.

Last time I checked, you draw conclusions from observations - where are the observations in this homework problem? In fact, this question sounds a lot like the previous one - it's asking the student to make a prediction about what will happen when you remove the petals - not draw a conclusion. Tossing around bolded key words does nothing for my kid's education if there is no meaning behind the words.

Another homework question does the same thing, with the concept of inference:

Some trees lose their leaves in cold weather. However, the trees stay alive and grow new leaves when the weather turns warm. Write a statement inferring how trees stay alive in cold weather.

How do you infer anything from the information they give you? In fact, you're not predicting anything here either - the student is really asked here to form a hypothesis about how trees survive the winter. That hypothesis then should generate predictions, which you can test by experiment, using the resulting data to draw conclusions.

But if your student is going to make actual observations to test a hypothesis, she's not going to learn how to do so from meaningless homework questions like these:

You and your friend are going to plant a garden. Each of you has brought five different types of seeds to plant. Compare and contrast your seeds with your friend's seeds.

Apparently the idea is for the student to make up imaginary seeds with imaginary characteristics to compare and contrast - not exactly the most educationally valuable way to go about this.

Creationism is among the least of our problems in public school science classes: while a small minority of teachers are pushing creationism in class, a huge number of teachers are forcing our kids to endure misleading and meaningless exercises from major textbook publishers that should have much higher standards.