"We aren't teaching students how to think critically!" So goes the exasperated lament you have probably heard and possibly uttered. The thing is, that's a crazy hard thing to do. It may seem like a logic class should teach you to think in a more disciplined way, for example, but the sad fact is that those mental habits are very unlikely to transfer [PDF] beyond the walls of the logic course. There are many different styles and contexts of critical thinking, and there is no magic subroutine that we could insert into our mental programming that covers them all.
But despair is not the only option. Effective coursework can build important and useful critical thinking skills. Doug Bonn at the University of British Columbia and Stanford's N.G. Holmes and Carl Wieman focused on good scientific, quantitative thinking when teaching a group of first-year physics students. And like good critically thinking educators, they put their strategy to the test and published the results so they can be evaluated by others.
Original article from Ars Technica .
[Related]: How to improve students' critical thinking about scientific evidence
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:37PM
The first link is to an article in the American Educator where Sherlock Holmes is used as a prime example of someone who mastered Critical Thinking.
Then, we get this PNAS paper authored by...right.. Natasha Holmes.
Coincidence?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:52PM
Someone named Holmes is more likely to show interest in the character.