"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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:25PM
Because most people don't actually use their minds ;). Most people haven't learned to think critically and logically. For example many will not think and immediately go "NO YOU ARE WRONG!" to claims like "babies are less important than a fertile pair of parents, saving the parents is usually better for the species than saving their babies".
Winning the argument and not converting the person to your side is often pointless.
The ability to win arguments through logic becomes more valuable if we can teach more and more people to think well and logically. Perhaps we will make more progress with studies like these.