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"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
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @08:38PM
TFA is either really poor, or was intended as a joke. Where are the author's examples of an inability of citizens to think critically, so we at least can tell WTF he's talking about? Instead, he gives us multiple colored sidebars and irrelevant anecdotes about logic puzzles given to students which may or may not be applicable to what he considers critical thinking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2015, @01:49AM
An associate of mine also teaches an engineering elective at the local State U. For a second level course (which a few of his better students were interested in), he ran a small seminar. The homework included selecting any mechanical engineering research paper of interest (ASME, SAE, etc) and reading it critically -- then write up a review of the paper. The reviews were discussed in class -- does the paper have a good abstract/goal/approach/conclusions (add other criteria here).
After a few rounds of rinse and repeat, his students were starting to see through a lot of the BS that is often presented in engineering papers (for a simple example, many are thinly disguised pitches, marketing material). To me, this seems like one good piece of the pie that makes up critical thinking.
He'll never get tenure, but his students love him. On those "grade your professor" websites he always gets top marks.