Articles
Critical Thinking
Applying the Science of Learning: Using the Principles of Cognitive Psychology To Enhance Teaching and Learning
Thank you for inviting me to join you in your deliberations about ways to apply principles from the science of learning to enhance teaching and learning. I am delighted and honored to be here. Unfortunately, you gave me an almost impossible assignment—in about five minutes, I am supposed to provide a useful summary of what we know about human learning and cognition with suggestions for future research. In the short time allocated, I plan to share some of my excitement about advancements in the learning sciences with you and suggest some ways to translate our knowledge of human cognition into meaningful school reform with the hope that you will continue to explore the findings and ideas at some later time.
Cognitive Aspects Of Learning And Teaching Science
In this chapter I argue that, in addition to needing the ingredients mentioned above in a successful reform movement, two other factors should loom large in the development of new instructional materials in science and in the design of new instructional strategies. The first is cognitive research findings on teaching, learning, and problem solving. The need to have cognitive research findings guide curriculum development would seem obvious. If we were given the task of developing a faster computer, we would start by studying the newest, best available technology and then investigate how his new technology could be incorporated into making computers achieve faster computing speeds. We would not set about this task by resorting to simplistic approaches such as using thicker wires, or adding more of the same kinds of chips that are currently inside computers, or painting the computer casing in brighter, shinier colors. Yet, the latter is the approach of choice in developing commercial educational materials today. Textbook publishers and textbook writers largely ignore cognitive research findings and continue to clone new textbooks from best-selling existing textbooks or “improve” existing textbooks by adding color, changing the type size, or making similar cosmetic changes. Market considerations, more than learning considerations, drive the commercial publishing establishment.
Critical Thinking About Authority
One of RIT's specialties is critical thinking about authority. Though certain political groups may promote resistance to political authority and other groups, such as skeptics, ask you to question many areas of popular thought, we know of no other group that is pursuing, as a major objective, critical thinking about authority per se from a nonpartisan, psychological perspective. Toward this end, we are developing resources to be placed on this new page within our web site. Watch for frequent new arrivals.
Critical Thinking And The Scientific Method
"We all expect our students to come away from our classes knowing some of the facts; but more importantly we want our students to come away knowing how to think critically. Less clear is how to teach the process, perhaps because few of us learned it explicitly , perhaps because for those of us who make it to the level of teacher, critical thinking was in some sense intuitive and automatic. This is not the case for the majority of students. The good news is that because the scientific method is a formalization of critical thinking, it can be used as a simple model that removes critical thinking from the realm of the intuitive and puts it at the center of a straightforward, easily implemented, teaching strategy."
Critical Thinking: What It Is And Why It Counts
Have you heard business executives, civic leaders, and educators talking about critical thinking and found yourself asking such reasonable questions as, "What is ‘critical thinking’?" and "Why is it so important?" So have we. This essay looks at these questions.
Do Teachers Care About Truth?
This essay attempts to set out some ideas about the nature of our knowledge and to make a few suggestions about what they might mean for teachers. In the context of the series in which it appears, it is intended to survey general issues in the theory of knowledge that might have implications for education. This task is made somewhat awkward by the need to explain and defend the claims about truth and knowledge that are made, while still keeping space for their possible pedagogical implications. Since I think the main implication concerns getting the status of our knowledge right, I have devoted most of my space to trying to explain the philosophical issues. But of course a great deal had to be left unsaid or undefended. The theory of knowledge and its specialities such as the philosophy of science are extremely large areas of philosophical inquiry. I have had to choose topics that seem to me to be relevant to at least some teachers, but many of their questions will here go unanswered.
Effective Thinking: An Active-Learning Course In Critical Thinking
This article describes a college course in critical thinking. Offered in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University, this active-learning course provides instruction in how to apply principles of (scientific) methodological reasoning and optimum decision making to problems faced in everyday-life situations. Students learn to evaluate statistical and scientific evidence, clarify personal and societal values, and anticipate the consequences of their actions in dealing with personally significant issues. Crime and punishment, societal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, alcohol abuse, and racial stereotypes comprise a partial list of topics addressed in the class. Using Internet links to recorded classroom discussions archived on the World Wide Web, the article provides qualitative support for a three-level model of critical thinking. This model attempts to account for the progression of methodological reasoning skills and related dispositions that takes place over the course of the semester.
A Field Guide to Critical Thinking
I've developed an elective course called "Anthropology and the Paranormal." The course examines the complete range of paranormal beliefs in contemporary American culture, from precognition and psychokinesis to channeling and cryptozoology and everything between and beyond, including astrology, UFOs, and creationism. I teach the students very little about anthropological theories and even less about anthropological terminology. Instead, I try to communicate the essence of the anthropological perspective, by teaching them, indirectly, what the scientific method is all about. I do so by teaching them how to evaluate evidence. I give them six simple rules to follow when considering any claim, and then show them how to apply those six rules to the examination of any paranormal claim.
How to Keep Your Students Thinking
When students engage actively with material, they generally understand it better and remember it longer. Student participation often results in covering less material during a semester. Yet it also can mean that students learn more information than when the material is simply "covered" because they actively use it and have more chances to clear up confusion. Large numbers of students in class do not preclude interaction. The following techniques to open up lectures to student participation have been used in classes of up to 1200 students, as well as with smaller groups.
How to Study Weird Things
Many students are asking to study unconventional topics. There are strategies for working with these students that increase their critical aptitude and analytical reasoning without disenchanting them with science and traditional disciplines.
An Introduction To Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is an important and vital topic in modern education. All educators are interested in teaching critical thinking to their students. Many academic departments hope that its professors and instructors will become informed about the strategy of teaching critical thinking skills, identify areas in one's courses as the proper place to emphasize and teach critical thinking, and develop and use some problems in exams that test students' critical thinking skills. This critical thinking manual has been prepared to inform and aid you to accomplish these things, and it has been kept brief and straightforward so that all faculty members will have the time and opportunity to read it and follow the suggestions it contains.
The Laws Of Nature: A Skeptic's Guide
Awareness of the fundamental laws of nature is essential to any skeptical endeavor. These principles are presented so they can be understood, and explained to others, without assuming specialized prior knowledge.
My View of the Nature of a Liberal Arts Education
A liberal education should transform the student. As Brand Blanshard says, "to educate human mind is not merely to add something to it. It is to transform it at a vital point, the point where its secret ends reside." What is central to such an education is not that the student comes to acquire specific bits of information (certain basic units of cultural literacy, for example), but rather that a habit of reasonableness and critical thinking becomes inculcated.
Planting a Seed of Doubt
Skeptics should forego any thought of convincing the unconvinced that we hold the torch of truth illuminating the darkness. A more modest, realistic, and achievable goal is to encourage the idea that one may be mistaken. Doubt is humbling and constructive; it leads to rational thought in weighing alternatives and fully reexamining options, and it opens unlimited vistas.
The Physics Behind Four Amazing Demonstrations
Here is the physics theory behind four dramatic demonstrations-walking on broken glass, dipping one's fingers in molten lead, breaking a concrete block over someone lying between beds of nails, and picking up an orange-hot piece of silica tile.
Psychology Of Intelligence Analysis
This volume pulls together and republishes, with some editing, updating, and additions, articles written during 1978-86 for internal use within the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. Four of the articles also appeared in the Intelligence Community journal Studies in Intelligence during that time frame. The information is relatively timeless and still relevant to the never-ending quest for better analysis.The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. I selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. I then translated the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face.
Reasoning
The following are ideas about what reasoning is and about what it is to be reasonable. It also offers some conjectures about why many people don't seem to have good reasoning skills or to be very reasonable. It is offered here for students whose teachers do not seem to think very highly of their work, but who themselves do not make very clear what they think is wrong with it. In some cases students and professors may have very different ideas about what it is to show good reasoning in a paper or class or to present a case in a reasonable manner.
Science vs. the Paranormal: An Instructional Kit
The goal of these materials, and others in development, is to introduce paranormal topics in a critical manner. Popular media, movies, books, as well as general childhood and adolescent play (for example, the telling of "ghost stories") tend to reinforce belief in paranormal happenings. While CSICOP acknowledges the importance of fantasy, imagination, and creativity in the growing mind, we also hope to combine those qualities with an inquiring and critical investigative mind. With this kit, students will have the opportunity to study an interesting, "un-academic" topic and develop essential critical thinking skills at the same time. Through this effort, we think students will naturally want to continue to investigate and debate the plausibility of such phenomena as UFOs, psychic powers, astrology, and ghosts.
The Teaching of Courses in the Science and Pseudoscience of Psychology: Useful Resources
Several authors have increasingly recognized the problem of pseudoscience as a major threat confronting psychology and allied disciplines. We discuss the importance of courses in science and pseudoscience to undergraduate education in psychology and provide (a) a model syllabus for courses in the science and pseudoscience of psychology, (b) a list and description of suggested primary and supplemental texts for such courses, (c) a list of useful educational videos on science and pseudoscience, and (d) suggested Web sites that offer critical evaluations of pseudoscientific claims. Finally, we briefly review the literature concerning the efficacy of courses in the science and pseudoscience of psychology and offer suggestions for future research in this area.
Teaching Psychology Students to Distinguish Science from Pseudoscience:
Pitfalls and Rewards
One of our principal goals as educators is to imbue our students with an understanding and appreciation of critical thinking. But what is critical thinking, anyway? A precise answer remains elusive. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that much, if not all, of critical thinking as applied to psychology is nothing other than scientific thinking. Scientific thinking, in turn, is thinking that counteracts cognitive biases, such as confirmatory bias and hindsight bias, which can lead us to draw subjectively compelling but erroneous conclusions. That is, critical (scientific) thinking is an armamentarium of skills that help prevent us from fooling ourselves. As the Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman (1985) reminded us, science forces us to bend over backwards to prove ourselves wrong. Although far from perfect, science is the best mechanism humans have developed for filtering out errors in thinking. The essence of science is self-correction.
Why be Critical? (or Rational, or Moral?): On the Justification of Critical Thinking
Since critical thinking is evidently more difficult, more troublesome, than ordinary, garden-variety thinking, the question that naturally arises is, why bother. Why not just say, “Forget it…I’ll think (and do, and be) what I want?” This kind of question is not anything new — Plato, for instance, has Socrates raise a similar question in the Republic, namely, “Why be just?” In this paper I will consider several issues that I take to be related to the justification of critical thinking. The first issue is whether or not the common conceptualization of critical thinking as a dispositional trait possessed and displayed by the critical thinker is correct. The second issue is whether there is indeed some value to the critical thinker in thinking critically, and if so, what sort of value. The third issue is whether there is a relationship between critical thinking, rationality, and morality, and if so, what that might be.
|
