thinking critically about critical thinking alicia juarrero, phd professor of philosophy prince...

Thinking Critically about

Critical ThinkingAlicia Juarrero, PhD

Professor of PhilosophyPrince George’s Community College

Largo, Maryland 20774

ajuarrero@pgcc.edu

Association of American Colleges and UniversitiesConference on Pedagogies of Engagement

April 15, 2005

Historical Background

• 499-370 BC Socrates • 340-310 BC Aristotle• 1561-1626 Francis Bacon• 1596-1650 Rene Descartes• 1859-1952 John Dewey

• Scientific Method

Formal and Informal Logic

• Formal logic = deduction• Induction• Informal logic

1940’s Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Assessment

(CTA)

• Drawing Inferences• Recognizing Assumptions• Argument Evaluation• Deductive Reasoning• Logical Interpretation

From Why Johnny Can’t Readto

Critical Thinking• 1976 (paperback edition)

– Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read

• 1983 Why Johnny Still Can’t Read

National Institute of Education Study

• “The Standardized Test Scores of College Graduates 1964-1982” (Released in January 1983) -- Cliff Adelman, Report Author

• Prompted by overall decline in college students’ scores on the major tests used for admission to graduate and professional schools

• NIE Study consisted of: 550,000 students who took LSAT, GMAT, GRE (both verbal and quantitative)

• “Students who major in a field characterized by formal thought, structural relationships, abstract models, symbolic language, and deductive reasoning consistently outperform others on these examinations.” (LSAT, GMAT, GRE)– Cliff Adelman, “The Standardized Test Scores of

College Graduates, 1964-1982” (ED248-827)– Complete report available through ERIC Document

Reproduction Service

Professional/occupational disciplines do not “require the

rigorous exercise of analysis and synthesis that is so often reflected

on the tests.”

– Cliff Adelman, “The Standardized Test Scores of College Graduates, 1964-1982” (ED248-827)

– Complete report available through ERIC Document Reproduction Service

AND THEY’RE OFF!!!!

1940’s Watson-Glaser CTA Test

• Drawing Inferences• Recognizing Assumptions• Argument Evaluation• Deductive Reasoning• Logical Interpretation

Post 2000 “Definitions” of Critical Thinking

• Is open-minded and mindful of alternatives• Tries to be well informed• Cares “to get it right”• Cares to present a position honestly and clearly• Cares about the dignity and worth of every

person• Has the ability to focus on a question

from www.criticalthinking.com

More characteristics of “Critical Thinking” (so-called)

• Includes “lateral” – creative thinking• “Critico-creative” thinking

– Imagining and evaluating alternative scenarios

– Looking at issues from different points of view

Efficacy of Undergraduate Critical Thinking Courses

• Tim van Gelder’s (Melbourne, Australia) 2000 work-in-progress

• Conclusions: – Difficult to make a convincing case that these

one-semester CTA courses (versus a traditional formal logic course)make an appreciable difference

– Serious need for more and better research on this issue

K-12 Science & Math Education

• Conventional wisdom on teaching Science:– Best way to give K-12 a deep and enduring

understanding of science is through “discovery learning” (as opposed to “direct instruction”)

• 7th grade Math– “Visual math”: imagine squares and cubes of

different sizes the better to grasp number systems not based on 10

Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2004

Lack of controlled (“clinical”) studies

• David Klahr of Carnegie Mellon University on “discovery-based learning”:– “Studies” showing that students in active, discovery-

based learning classes “do better than” kids in a drill-and-memorize class do not include controls

– Teachers assigned to discovery-based classes are usually creative and very knowledgeable. If you had the same teacher do traditional instruction, might the students do just as well? NO STUDIES DONE!

• Needed: An educational FDA!WSJ Dec 17, 2004

Neurological research & learning

Initially research was mostly about learning disorders, or brain development in general

US Congress declares 1990’s “The Decade of the Brain”

1996 – Conference co-sponsored by the Charles A. Dana Foundation and Education Commission of the States:

http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/11/98/1198.htm“There is a chasm between what scientists accept

as proven fact and what the public, teachers and administrators believe.”

1997 National Research Council Report

• Mainly focused on math & science education• US Spends $400 billion a year on K-12 education

but• “Education does not rest on a strong research

base”• “In no other field are personal experience and

ideology so frequently relied on to make policy choices, and in no other field is the research base so inadequate and little used.”

Quote from Sharon Begley’s column Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2004

Neurological Research on Memory

• Procedural Learning – at the basis of skills and habits --

• Declarative Memory – hippocampus and entorhinal and perirhinal cortices implicated– Hippocampus combines information coming

from all sensory modalities

Short vs long-term memory

• Working memory – over tens of seconds – prefrontal cortex involved– Central executive + visual buffer &

phonological loop for language• Long-term memory – converts chemical

memory to structural memory

“When an axon of cell 1 is near enough to excite a cell 2 and repeatedly and

persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes

place in one or both cells such that 1's efficacy, as one of the cells firing 2, is

increased.”

“Cells that fire together wire together”

Donald Hebb (1949)

More on Neurology

• It’s not just the cortex – emotions play a crucial role (thalamus and hypothalamus)– Antonio Damasio Descartes’s Error (1994)

• Role of emotional arousal and attention (information has to be perceived as something that matters)

Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky

• Reasoning involving risk – very different when it involves losses than when it involves gains

• Neuroeconomics – Caudate Nucleus (where trust is located)– Nucleus Accumbens (where error prediction

is)

Walter Freeman’sHow Brains Make up their

Minds (2001)

• Neurological encoding of the meaning of the stimulus incorporates both the history of learner and his/her previous experience with the stimulus

Pseudoscience: What you don’t want

• Neurological studies taken out of context– “Right brain/left brain” – Emotional Intelligence– “Brain-based” learning– “Blink”

• Still too early

Cognitive Science

• National Science Foundation Initiatives:• Integrative Cognitive Science – launched

Oct 2, 2003– Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Science

• Centers for Learning Research – Interdisciplinary

Neil Postman’s 1985Amusing Ourselves to Death

• Focused on impact of television on public discourse

• Main point applies to the effect of image-based culture on critical thinking

The Trouble with Information Technology

• Written texts come with habits of critical readership built in to centuries of civilization -versus:

• Rules of the programmed world, which are clearcut, offering constrained choices.

“How Computers Change the Way we Think” Sherry Turkle

• “Ideas being carried from information technology are not ideas from computer science like procedural thinking, but more likely to be embedded in productivity tools like Power Point presentations”

“Central project for higher education should be creating programs in information-technology literacy, with the goal of teaching students to interrogate stimulations in much the same spirit, challenging their built-in assumptions”

Sherry Turkle “How Computers change the way we

Think” Chronicle of Higher Education Jan 30, 2004

Problems with Power Point!

• “The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

– Edward Tufte (Yale)“The Cognitive Style of Power Point”

“The truth is that we know very little about reasoning and how to teach it. The one thing we

thought we knew—namely, that formal discipline is an illusion—seems clearly wrong. Just how wrong, and therefore just how much we can improve reasoning by instruction, is now a

completely open question.”

Lehman, D.R., Lempert, R.O., & Nisbet, R.E. (1988) The effects of graduate training in reasoning: Formal

discipline and thinking about everyday-life events. American Psychologist 431-442.