
A successful strategy to get college students thinking critically - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/a-successful-strategy-to-get-college-students-thinking-critically/
======
unabst
Here is a simple definition of critical thinking: Be critical of what is being
said until it can be validated tangibly. It only has two requirements. The
courage to question what is in front of you, and the tools to test and
validate statements objectively.

What people trip on is often the "thinking" part. It plays on the myth that
thought and logic is what solves problems, but in reality we need to be able
to refer to something tangible -- such as evidence. If you don't have enough
information, stop thinking and do your research (or experiments). Most
evidence is rather obvious once found.

Anecdotally, fear and anti-science are the enemy of critical thought, and
those who claim moral authority and depend on spin to achieve their goals have
used these weapons time and time again.

"They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking."[0]

\-- George Carlin

Amen.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ)

~~~
andrewflnr
The most important part of that process, though, is noticing that you don't
have enough information. That's a thought process.

~~~
unabst
The most important process is acquiring evidence. You either have evidence or
you don't. It's an observation more than anything.

Though if observing what you know counts as thought, then sure (but I'd still
rather reserve the term "thought process" for more difficult problems).

~~~
dragonwriter
> The most important process is acquiring evidence.

Neither evidence nor thought are useful without the other. But people are more
likely to be deficient in a manner correctable by training at _processing_
sense data to produce useful and correct conclusions (thought) than they are
to be at merely receiving sense data (acquiring evidence as distinct from the
thought process of determining what it is -- and is not -- evidence _of_.)

> Though if observing what you know counts as thought, then sure

Determing what you can reasonably conclude (and what you cannot reasonably
conclude) from evidence is not "observing" anything, it is reasoning --
thought.

~~~
unabst
Yes, and Yes (hence the "sure").

But what is misleading is that we're often led to believe that what we think
or believe is somehow relevant or even important in light of valid objective
statements and observations. It's important but it's separate, and it's truly
only important to us (the importance of our own thoughts are personal).
Evidence, once internalized, is analyzed through introspection, and hence
internally maintaining the subjective-objective distinction requires
discipline and practice. Without this distinction, it turns out we can quite
effortlessly reason our way to most conclusions given any evidence, and this
activity is mainly driven by our intentions and emotions. Herein lies the
dangers of putting too much un-founded weight on thought. But when we let
evidence determine the weight distribution of thoughts, we avoid this problem.
It also turns out that good evidence is obvious, making it easy to remember
and requiring little thought.

Sherlock Holmes is my favorite example. His breakthroughs come primarily from
observations and connecting dots (insight) [0], and not from deep questioning
or deductive logic. Though important, those aren't actually that hard or
productive or entertaining.

Evidence is the originator, and the tangible of the two. Our imagination may
take us anywhere (Einstein), but without evidence we'd get nowhere (scientific
method).

[0] Holmesian deduction consists primarily of observation-based inferences.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Holmesian_dedu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Holmesian_deduction)

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stcredzero
A friend of mine was attending Xavier, and one of his professors was also an
old-school Jesuit priest. My friend told me that he this professor started to
tell outrageous lies, just so he could stop the class and ask why no one was
questioning him. Really, the purpose of that lecture was to set the stage so
he could talk about critical thinking and telling truth to power.

There's a Doonesbury about a college-prof character that's something like
this. (Except the moral of the story never gets across to the students.)

~~~
epalmer
N.G. Holmes participated in this study as a doctoral candidate. His thesis for
partial fulfillment of the PhD program was on this topic. Note tl;dr
[https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/51363/ubc_2015_f...](https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/51363/ubc_2015_february_holmes_natasha.pdf?sequence=1)

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dsfyu404ed
(here's my $0.02 in no particular order)

"Interestingly, the researchers tracked the same students into the sophomore
physics course that a third of the freshmen had advanced into. Even there,
they still saw improvements, despite the fact that none of the critical
thinking instructions were repeated in that course."

I think "Interestingly" should have been "predictably."

A mechanical engineer, lawyer, physicist and EMT encounter a dilapidated
stairwell railing and all have very different thoughts about it. People
everything through the lens of the intelligence they've acquired throughout
their lives.

"Critical thinking" just makes a better buzzword than "applying stuff that's
been learned in different contexts".

Physics to physics is a pretty low hanging fruit for studying this kind of
effect (which isn't a bad thing). Math to physics or economics to history
would be a more interesting point to study. For example, the history of North
America from 1600-1700 is much more interesting to study if you know about the
economics of Europe at the time which itself is much more interesting if you
know that chunk of European history. Knowing physics makes studying basic
calculus much more interesting and beneficial and vise-versa .

~~~
tbabb
"Critical thinking" is a term with more specific meaning than just "apply what
you know".

Critical thinking means asking yourself _how_ you know what you think you
know, mistrusting casual intuition, and examining how your own thinking
process could lead you to a wrong conclusion.

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peter_l_downs
My highschool physics class was set up like this. Every two or three weeks we
had to perform a lab (with real, physical tools) and take measurements, then
write up our findings. This meant including full derivations of the physics
behind the lab, as well as analysis of the data itself. Most essentially, our
teacher (if you're reading this, hi Mr. Schwartz!) graded harshly, and forced
us to consider all potential reasons our data might have deviated from the
theoretical outcome. Needless to say we all learned a lot, and everyone I
still talk to who took that class in highschool has only positive things to
say about its effect on their approach to learning. It was strange re-taking
the course in college without having to perform any of the experiments; if I
hadn't covered most of the material already I'm not sure I would have been
able to pass.

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ergothus
My primary complaint with the article is that it makes the implicit connection
that "critical thinking" is something that tied to science.

Good science needs critical thinking, true. Dealing with life ALSO needs
critical thinking, and I suspect that's a more direct impact to the average
person. (Witness your most/least favorite political discussion, see any bit of
TV news, heck, the recent Amazon brouhaha, and see what people not having
enough critical thinking does to life)

College is quite late to try and teach* the skill, but better late than never.

I can think of only one class I ever had that I felt covered critical
thinking. It was a junior high school home ec class, and for one single class
period, they passed out magazines, had us pick out ads, and then list at least
5 ways these ads manipulated us. Turns out 5 is a significant number: to say
wealth, sex, and happiness feature in the ads is easy...but 4 & 5? That
requires thought. Thought about how we are being misled, how there is
something non-obvious but true. To this day one of the lessons sticks in my
mind. "Bayer: 4 out of 5 doctors recommend" But who picks the 5 doctors? It
was mind-blowing to young me, and I think it filters in to how I consider
information I'm getting to this day.

*Teaching critical thinking isn't really teaching, so much as repeatedly providing the opportunity and motivation and hoping for the lights to turn on. It's the best system we've got, and we don't do it enough, but I'll acknowledge that it is harder than teaching a more passive, observable skill.

~~~
dublinben
Media literacy is one of the most underappreciated subjects in school these
days. I remember only one or two classes ever teaching this kind of critical
thinking. Put up against the $50b advertising industry, is it any wonder why
young people make such bad economic decisions?

~~~
seansmccullough
And financial literacy!

I think the bottom line is that you need to take almost everything everyone
says with a grain of salt.

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angdis
I really like this idea, but honestly, isn't it basically a reformulation of
the Socratic method? A really good teacher will naturally use dialectical
techniques to engage their students. Is this just some way to structure that
in a way that can be measured?

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ajuc
I've got 2 years of physic & electronic exercises on CS university course
(they had too much physic teachers and too few CS teachers :) so why not). It
was fun, but the thing that stuck with me the most was how rarely the results
agreed with theory.

Usually it was off by orders of magnitude (and we had access to the laboratory
for 45 mintues each week so once you've done your experiments you had to stick
to the data you've got). Usually it turned out at home that the data makes no
sense.

I don't think it was useful for my job, but it certainly made me appreciate
practical physics more.

~~~
jschwartzi
When I did my lower division physics coursework our instructor relentlessly
browbeat us about our data, and whether or not it was good. This was to the
point that he taught us a separate data and error analysis course at the same
time.

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charlieflowers
That description of what the teachers did differently has to be one of the
most vague descriptions I have ever read. Can anybody do a decent job of
articulating what they actually did that worked so well?

