SoylentNews

A Successful Strategy to Get College Students Thinking Critically

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:01PM   
from the think-about-it dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"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

---

Original Submission

• Re:"Critical Thinking" is pretty random Re:"Critical Thinking" is pretty random (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:20PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:20PM (#225061)

  But the point you completely skipped is the most important one: Scepticism.

  This advocacy of training for "critical thinking" is pretty useless, isn't it?

  Parent

• Re:"Critical Thinking" is pretty random Re:"Critical Thinking" is pretty random (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:58PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:58PM (#225084)

  Depends on what you consider "useless". I enjoyed the discussion, so it was not useless to me. I hope at least some of the other readers here (including you) also enjoyed it, so it wasn't useless to them either. And of course if I had not done it, I would not have gotten your answers, which also have been useful for me; despite not agreeing, the very fact that I had to understand them and then think again about my position in order to answer them means I slightly improved myself. I assume the same the other way round is true for you.

  However I don't have any illusions about the greater impact my comments here have, so in the great picture, they are indeed pretty useless.

  Parent

  • Re:"Critical Thinking" is pretty random (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:22PM (#225136)

    btw "useless" was intended as a joke.

    Parent