Gdp2 2013 14-9

Teaching for critical thinking

CTWHAT IS IT?

HOW TO TEACH IT? WHAT FOR?

A wide interest, and the multiplication of initiatives

Initiatives on the teaching and assessment of 21st century skills originate in the widely-

held belief shared by several interested groups - teachers, educational researchers,

policy makers, politicians, employers - that the current century will demand a very

different set of skills and competencies from people in order for them to function

effectively at work, as citizens and in their leisure time (e.g. Dede, 2007; Kalantzis and

Cope, 2008).

Initiatives such as the Partnership for 21st skills (www.21stcenturyskills.org) and the

Cisco/Intel/Microsoft assessment and teaching of 21st century skills project

(www.atc21s.org) also point to the importance currently attached to this area not only

by researchers, practitioners and policy makers but also the private sector. Supporters

and advocates of the 21st century skills movement argue for the need for reforms in

schools and education to respond to the social and economic needs of students and

society in the 21st century. (Ananiadou & Claro, 2009)

There is a widespread acceptance of the idea that critical thinking should be an important dimension of science education. Thus, for example, the National Science Education Standards (1996) has as one of its goals the promotion of science as inquiry. Included in this goal are numerous items which focus on critical thinking, for example “identification of assumptions, use of critical and logical thinking, and consideration of alternative explanations (p. 23); “analysis of firsthand events and phenomena a well as critical analysis of secondary sources; testing reliability of knowledge they have generated” (p.33); and “the critical abilities of analyzing an argument by reviewing current scientific understanding, weighing the evidence, and examining the logic so as to decide which explanation and models are best. (Bailin 2002)

No consensus about what is CT, how to teach it, whether it can be learnt

• Resnick 1987 Inevitably, we hear the question: Is there really anything new about schools' trying to teach higher order skills? Haven't schools always hoped to teach students to think critically, to reason, to solve problems, to interpret, to refine ideas and to apply them in creative ways?

Nevertheless, we seem to agree that students do not adequately learn these higher order abilities. Perhaps the fact that our schools have been less than successful at meeting these goals means that we have simply given up the old truths in education. Perhaps if we went back to old- fashioned courses and old-fashioned methods, the problem of teaching higher order skills would be solved without further special attention.

Or, more pessimistically, perhaps we should conclude that decades of trying unsuccessfully to teach higher order skills in school show that such goals are not reachable; perhaps higher order abilities develop elsewhere than in school, and it would be wisest for schools to concentrate on the “basics,” letting higher order abilities emerge later or under other auspices.

• Willingham 2007virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically. In layperson’s terms, critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: That’s what we mean when we refer to “thinking like a scientist” or “thinking like a historian.” This proper and commonsensical goal has very often been translated into calls to teach “critical thinking skills” and “higher-order thinking skills”—and into generic calls for teaching students to make better judgments, reason more logically, and so forth.

Willingham 2007After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught?

Decades of cognitive research point to a dis- appointing answer: not really.

People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge).

Teaching for critical thinking

CTWHAT IS IT?

HOW TO TEACH IT? WHAT FOR?

The problem of the definition

The first difficulties arise with the very question of what is meant by the term “higher order skills.” Many candidate definitions are available. Philosophers promote critical thinking and logical reasoning skills, developmental psychologists point to metacognition, and cognitive scientists study cognitive strategies and heuristics. Educators advocate training in study skills and problem solving.How should we make sense of these many labels? Do critical thinking, metacognition, cognitive strategies, and study skills refer to the same kinds of capabilities? And how are they related to the problem-solving abilities that mathematicians, scientists, and engineers try to teach their students? (Resnick 1987)

• Higher order thinking is nonalgorithmic. That is, the path of action is not fully specified in advance.

• Higher order thinking tends to be complex. The total path is not “visible” (mentally speaking) from any single vantage point.

• Higher order thinking often yields multiple solutions, each with costs and benefits, rather than unique solutions.

• Higher order thinking involves nuanced judgment and interpretation.• Higher order thinking involves the application of multiple criteria, which

sometimes conflict with one another.• Higher order thinking often involves uncertainty. Not everything that bears on

the task at hand is known.• Higher order thinking involves self-regulation of the thinking process. We do

not recognize higher order thinking in an individual when someone else “calls the plays” at every step.

• Higher order thinking involves imposing meaning, finding structure in apparent disorder.

• Higher order thinking is effortful. There is considerable mental work involved in the kinds of elaborations and judgments required. (Resnick 1987 p. 7)

Higher order thinking

Critical thinking can be defined at minima, as the faculty of parting wheat from chaff, of distinguishing good arguments from bad ones (because they are ill-formed) and identifying beliefs that can be given away (because they are not justified).

sKepticism

In search for consensus…

We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. CT is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, CT is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one's personal and civic life. While not synonymous with good thinking, CT is a pervasive and self-rectifying human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit. Thus, educating good critical thinkers means working toward this ideal. It combines developing CT skills with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the basis of a rational and democratic society. (Facione 1990)

Philosophical approach=

normative

CT = Good thinking (in general/within a discipline) Thinking that complies to norms(logical norms & methods to follow)

• Socrate’s elenchus as in Plato’s dialogues

• Aristotle• Classical skepticism• Thomas of Aquinas• Descartes: Rules for the direction

of the mind• …

• Francis Bacon: The advancement of learning

• Robert Boyle: Sceptical Chymist• Galileo Galilei• …

Definitions of critical thinking emerging from the philosophical tradition include “the propensity and skill to engage in an activity with reflective skepticism” (McPeck, 1981, p. 8); “reflective and reasonable thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Ennis, 1985, p. 45); “skillful, responsible thinking that facilitates good judgment because it 1) relies upon criteria, 2) is self-correcting, and 3) is sensitive to context” (Lipman, 1988, p. 39); “purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or conceptual considerations upon which that judgment is based” (Facione, 1990, p. 3); “disciplined, self-directed thinking that exemplifies the perfections of thinking appropriate to a particular mode or domain of thought” (Paul, 1992, p. 9); thinking that is goal-directed and purposive, “thinking aimed at forming a judgment,” where the thinking itself meets standards of adequacy and accuracy (Bailin et al., 1999b, p. 287); and “judging in a reflective way what to do or what to believe” (Facione, 2000, p. 61). (Lai 2011)

Psychological approach=

descriptive

CT = skills & dispositions for- thinking, thinking about thinking - in general or within a certain domain + why thinking is hard

• Research on reasoning, and its limits

• Research on judgment• Research on decision-making• Research on problem-solving

• Research on meta-cognition• Research on expertise• Research on strategies…

cognitive scientists do not study critical thinking much, at least not as a topic in its own right. This is partly because the topic is too broad and open-ended to be captured by the cognitive scientist’s tightly focuses techniques. Partly, it is also because critical thinking in general is a neglected topic, despite its importance and broad relevance. Nevertheless, cognitive scientists have some contributions to make. They have developed some very general insights into how we think and how we learn, and these can be carried over to critical thinking. They also have studied many phenomena that are particular aspects or dimensions of critical thinking. (van Gelder 2005)

humans are not naturally critical. Indeed, like ballet, critical thinking is a highly contrived activity. Running is natural; nightclub dancing is less so; but ballet is something people can only do well with many years of painful, expensive, dedicated training. Evolution did not intend us to walk on the ends of our toes, and whatever Aristotle might have said, we were not designed to be at all that critical either. Evolution foes not waste effort making things better than they need to be, and homo sapiens evolved to be just logical enough to survive, while competitors such as Neanderthals and mastodons died out. (van Gelder 2005)

the mental activities that are typically called critical thinking are actually a subset of three types of thinking: reasoning, making judgments and decisions, and problem solving. I say that critical thinking is a subset of these because we think in these ways all the time, but only sometimes in a critical way. Deciding to read this article, for example, is not critical thinking. But carefully weighing the evidence it presents in order to decide whether or not to believe what it says is. Critical reasoning, decision making, and problem solving—which, for brevity’s sake, I will refer to as critical thinking—have three key features: effectiveness, novelty, and self-direction. Critical thinking is effective in that it avoids common pitfalls, such as seeing only one side of an issue, discounting new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning from passion rather than logic, failing to support statements with evidence, and so on. Critical thinking is novel in that you don’t simply remember a solution or situation that is similar enough to guide you. For example, solving a complex but familiar physics problem by applying a multi-step algorithm isn’t critical thinking because you are really drawing on memory to solve the problem. But devising a new algorithm is critical thinking. Critical thinking is self-directed in that the thinker must be calling the shots: We wouldn’t give a student much credit for critical thinking if the teacher were prompting each step he took. (Willingham 2007)

Teaching for critical thinking

CTWHAT IS IT?

HOW TO TEACH IT? WHAT FOR?

«Dreams, the position of the stars, the lines of the hand, may be regarded as valuable signs, and the fall of cards as an inevitable omen, while natural events of the most crucial significance go disregarded. Beliefs in portents of various kinds, now mere nook and cranny superstitions, were once universal. A long discipline of exact science was required for their conquest. » (Dewey, 1910, p. 21)

« The whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical disposition » (Dewey, 1910, p. 57).

• formal teaching, e.g. working on some form of brain gym, such as chess

• theoretical instruction, i.e. by learning the theory

• situated cognition, from the extreme of denying general critical thinking skills to the idea of acquiring critical thinking skills through engaging in domain-specific activities

• practice, e.g. applying the skills to several domains, that vary

• evolutionary psychology, i.e. consolidating skills we are naturally endowed with.

• Stand alone: domain-general, content-free

• Integrated: domain-specific, content-rich

• Mixed: domains + generalization

Ways of teaching CT

Stand-alone • DeBono’s CoRT• Productive Thinking Program – both based on planning

and meta-cognitive skills• reading and studying from texts• improvement of general intelligence, roblem-solving

techniques, memory strategies, informal • Lipman’s Harry Stottlemeyer - activities for enhancing

argumentation skills and logics

some programs focus largely on identifying and correctly variety of practice and labeling reasoning fallacies; others concentrate more on developing skills of argumentation in extended discourse, without extensive formal analysis. An important debate in the field exactly parallels psychologists' discussions of whether general cognitive skills or specific knowledge is most central to intellectual competence. (Renick 1987)

Most informal logic philosophers believe that general reasoning capacity can be shaped and that it transcends specific knowledge domains (e.g., Ennis, 1980, 1985). In an even stronger claim, Paul (1982, in press) argues that we should seek to develop in students a broadly rational personality rather than any set of technical reasoning skills.This view usually, but not always, supports calls for independent critical thinking courses. However, a competing view, most strongly stated by McPeck (1981), argues that no general reasoning skill is possible and that all instruction in thinking should be situated in particular disciplines.

Integrated • Lilienfeld, Lohr and Morier (2001) have underlined the importance of introducing specific teachings of science and pseudo-science in the cursus of psychological studies, where myths abound.

• Reif et al 1974 for physics; the work of Frederick Reif is extensive and he has dedicated as much attention to physics as to cognitive science and developing thinking skills in physics

• EMB shares many common aims and tools with the idea of teaching and learning to think critically, including the aim of developing a critical appraisal of evidence and ideas received from tradition and authority.

Mixed While teaching critical thinking in one discipline, one can • provide explicit instruction about rules and promote the use

of metacognitive attitudes towards learning:• anchor instruction on concrete cases, and propose

variations (same inner structure, different superficial content), so as to favor flexibility

• do not bound instruction to implicit learning, but explicit both acquired knowledge and its contexts of application

• explicit the processes that have produced knowledge acquisition, difficulties, strategies, that is: explicitly use and train metacognitive skills.

• Resnick 1987 Thinking and problem-solving programs within the academic disciplines seem to meet their internal goals and perhaps even boost performance more generally. It seems possible to raise reading competence by a variety of methods, ranging from study skill training through the reciprocal teaching methods of Brown and Palincsar to the discussions of philosophical texts in Lipman's program. On the other hand, general improvements in problem-solving, rhetoric, or other general thinking abilities have rarely been demonstrated, perhaps because few evaluators have included convincing assessments of these abilities in their studies.

CT & other higher skills teaching programs

Limits of teaching CT

• Willingham 2007 How well do these programs work? Many researchers have tried to answer that question, but their studies tend to have methodological problems. Four limitations of these studies are especially typical, and they make any effects suspect :1) students are evaluated just once after the program, so it’s not known whether any observed effects are enduring; 2) there is not a control group, leaving it unclear whether gains are due to the thinking program, to other aspects of schooling, or to experiences outside the classroom; 3) the control group does not have a comparison intervention, so any positive effects found may be due, for example, to the teacher’s enthusiasm for something new, not the program itself; and 4) there is no measure of whether or not students can transfer their new thinking ability to materials that differ from those used in the program. In addition, only a small fraction of the studies have undergone peer review (meaning that they have been impartially evaluated by independent experts).

The problem with evaluations

• 1. content knowledge boosts performances, e.g. because it affects texts comprehension or because it helps recasting problems in more solvable configurations;

• 2. the application of general procedures to specific knowledge might require adjustments, or even just raise the problem of understanding that that certain procedure applies

• 3. specific knowledge might trigger specific naïve ideas, biases and heuristics that hinder a good solution to the problem

• 4. Even metacognitive skills are not as general as they might seem: even metacognitive skills are enhanced by domain knowledge, and domain knowledge favors the skilled use of metacognitive capacities within the perimeter

CT & The problem with content

Difficulties with teaching CT

CT & The problem of transfer and generalization

students can learn metacognitive strategies that help them look past the surface structure of a problem and identify its deep structure, thereby get- ting them a step closer to figuring out a solution. Essentially the same thing can happen with scientific thinking. Students can learn certain metacognitive strategies that will cue them to think scientifically. But, as with problem solving, the metacognitive strategies only tell the students what they should do—they do not provide the knowledge that students need to actually do it. The good news is that within a content area like science, students have more context cues to help them figure out which metacognitive strategy to use, and teachers have a clearer idea of what domain knowledge they must teach to enable students to do what the strategy calls for. (Willingham 2005)

• Resnick 1987Over the decades, educators have espoused a recurring belief that certain school subject matters “discipline the mind” and therefore should be taught not so much for their inherent value as for their efficacy in facilitating other learning. Latin was defended for many years in these terms; mathematics and logic are often so defended today. Most recently, computer programming has been proposed as a way to develop general problem-solving and reasoning abilities (e.g., Papert, 1980). The view that we can expect strong transfer from learning in one area to improvements across the board has never been well supported empirically.

CT & The modular mind

Tooby & Cosmides 1997: Modularims in the framework of the evolved mind

"General intelligence" -- a hypothetical faculty composed of simple reasoning circuits that are few in number, content-independent, and general purpose -- was thought to be the engine that generates solutions to reasoning problems. The flexibility of human reasoning -- that is, our ability to solve many different kinds of problems -- was thought to be evidence for the generality of the circuits that generate it.An evolutionary perspective suggests otherwise (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Biological machines are calibrated to the environments in which they evolved, and they embody information about the stably recurring properties of these ancestral worlds. is also content-independent. It can be applied indiscriminately to medical diagnosis, card games, hunting success, or any other subject matter. It contains no domain-specific knowledge, so it cannot support inferences that would apply to mate choice, for example, but not to hunting. (That is the price of content-independence.)

Evolved problem-solvers, however, are equipped with crib sheets: they come to a problem already "knowing" a lot about it. Without these privileged hypotheses -- about faces, objects, physical causality, other minds, word meanings, and so on -- a developing child could learn very little about its environment. This suggests that many evolved computational mechanisms will be domain-specific: they will be activated in some domains but not others. Some of these will embody rational methods, but others will have special purpose inference procedures that respond not to logical form but to content-types -- procedures that work well within the stable ecological structure of a particular domain, even though they might lead to false or contradictory inferences if they were activated outside of that domain.The more crib sheets a system has, the more problems it can solve. A brain equipped with a multiplicity of specialized inference engines will be able to generate sophisticated behavior that is sensitively tuned to its environment.

This discipline-embedded approach has several advantages. First, it provides a natural knowledge base and environment in which to practice and develop higher order skills. As we have shown earlier, cognitive research has established the very important role of knowledge in reasoning and thinking. One cannot reason in the abstract; one must reason about something. Second, embedding higher order skill training within school disciplines provides criteria for what constitutes good thinking and reasoning within the disciplinary tradition. Each discipline has characteristic ways of reasoning, and a complete higher order education would seek to expose students to all of these. Reasoning and problem solving in the physical sciences, for example, are shaped by particular combinations of inductive and deductive reasoning, by appeal to mathematical tests, and by an extensive body of agreed upon fact for which new theories must account. Finally, teaching higher order skills within the disciplines will ensure that something worthwhile will have been learned even if wide transfer proves unattainable. This point is profoundly important. It amounts to saying that no special, separate brief for teaching higher order skills need be made. Rather, it proposes that if a subject matter is worth teaching in school it is worth teaching at a high level—to everyone.

Resnick 1987

Discipline-embedded approach

Science & CT: a privileged relationship?

Apparent de-correlation between CT and • science education• the diffusion of scientific literacy has not defeated pseudo-scientific

beliefs by and large (see Gallup Poll, Pew Survey, …)• the study of science, at least as science is taught today, does not make the

difference in terms of pseudo-scientific beliefs

Science education

How then are we to reconcile having the most scientifically trained society in history with the persistence of irrationality? Why do we not see a significant drop of irrationality corresponding to the significant increase in the levels of general science education in the last fifty years? (Ede 2000)

• Pierre Curie, physics (Eusapia Palladino)• Ivar Giaever, physics (global warming denier)• Louis J. Ignarro, physiology or medicine (Herbalife Niteworks)• Brian Josephson, physics (psi)• Philipp Lenard, physics (Nazi ideology)• Luc Montagnier, medicine (autism)• Kary Mullis, chemistry (supports astrology, denies anthropogenic climate

change, denies HIV causes AIDS)• Linus Pauling, chemistry (vitamin C)• Charles Richet, physiology (ectoplasm/mediums/telepathy)• William Shockley, physics (race & IQ)• John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, physics (president Society for

Psychical Research)• Nikolaas Tinbergen, physiology or medicine (autism)• James Watson, physiology or medicine (race & IQ)

THE NOBEL DISEASE

Teaching for critical thinking

CTWHAT IS IT?

HOW TO TEACH IT? WHAT FOR?

Some have stressed the idea that the mastery of intellectual resources is still insufficient for critical thinking, in the absence of a commitment of rational inquiry and the habits of mind that apparently go with it.

Further difficulties with teaching CT

CT & The problem with motivation

Edward Glaser (1941) has defined the mastery of critical thinking in terms of: a. an attitude, that is: being disposed to consider problems reflexively; b. a form of knowledge, that is: knowing the principles of investigation and good reasoning; c. a skill, that is: being able to apply the principles.

Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities-the side of human nature that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason . . . we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising “true” belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action . . . Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism-and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. (Gabennesh 2006)

A worldview: Irrational minds, with intuitions that cannot be trusted

… Imagine a juror in the trial of a defendant accused of murdering a child. The juror listens to the prosecution’s case, which is accompanied by grisly photos, testimony from a detective who becomes visibly shaken when describing the crime scene, and audible sobs from the victim’s family. Then, roiled by emotions ranging from grief to outrage, she is called upon to do something remarkable: listen to the defense just as receptively as she did to the prosecution.To do her job well, she will need more than good reasoning skills and the sturdy skepticism that is appropriate when listening to dueling lawyers. She will also need a certain set of values that will motivate her to do the difficult things necessary to reach an honest verdict. (Gabennesh 2006)

Values

NO miracle

• CT is not a skill, but a domain-specific aptitude and attitude– CT requires domain knowledge– CT depends on values and a worldview– CT is hardly trasferred from one domain

& context to another

• Thinking is hard to teach, even within a discipline (e.g. science)