Thinking Critically about
Critical ThinkingAlicia Juarrero, PhD
Professor of PhilosophyPrince George’s Community College
Largo, Maryland 20774
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.
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