Critical Thinking

1. Critical Thinking Dr. John Eigenauer Taft College Taft, CA ‘I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.’ Socrates

3. Critical Thinking • Too much information • “critical thinking”: 2.86 million • “Britney Spears”: 11.5 million • “global warming”: 74.2 million • “bad breath”: 2.89 million

4. The Parts of Critical Thinking • Interpretation • Analysis • Evaluation • Inference • Explanation • Self-regulation

5. The Parts of Critical Thinking • Interpretation: To correctly extract the intended and essential meaning from information. • Analysis: To assess the parts and relationships of communication. • Evaluation: To use intellectual standards to judge the truth, credibility, or logical strength of a statement. • Inference: To draw reasonable meaning, conclusions, or consequences from information, knowledge, or evidence. • Explanation: To “attempt to show why or how something happens” (William Hughes). • Self-regulation: To consistently apply rules of intellectual expertise to one's own arguments.

6. A question:

7. Answer

8. A Sample Passage • “Research suggests that forgiveness works in at least two ways. One is by reducing the stress of the state of unforgiveness…. The other benefit of forgiveness… relates to research showing that people with strong social networks… tend to be healthier…. Someone who nurses grudges and keeps track of every slight is obviously going to shed some relationships over the course of a lifetime. Forgiveness, says Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet… should be incorporated into one’s personality, a way of life, not merely a response to specific insults.”

9. A Sample Response “She’s talking about how we should forgive people and not hold grudges and how people who forgive are like healthier and live longer and stuff.”

10. A Better Answer • The author argues that “forgiveness should be a way of life” because it is good for your health. She supports her claim by saying that forgiveness reduces stress and gives people stronger “social networks.”

11. Question: • Why can’t student do this?

12. Fundamental Student Problems • Understanding an author’s main point. • Understanding an author’s argument. • Distinguishing between what an author is trying to prove and the data he uses to prove it.

13. Fundamental Student Problems • Creating reasonable objections to an author’s argument. • Detecting faulty reasoning. • Detecting missing information. • Assessing the validity of an argument.

14. Fundamental Student Problems • Constructing an argument that is logically and evidentially supported. • Clearly presenting and supporting ideas in prose.

15. Research: The State of Student CT Abilities • “Unfortunately, the results of any number of national and international studies indicate that few high school graduates (or entering college students) are able to apply higher-order thinking skills to problems faced in everyday life (see e.g. NSF, 1996). Controlled studies in psychology and education confirm this finding…. Post-primary education appears to have little impact on students' reasoning about everyday events, and number of years of education is only a borderline significant predictor of reasoning ability.” (Current Issues in Education: http://cie.asu.edu/volume2/number5/)

16. Because: • Forming arguments • Providing evidence • Conceiving of counterarguments • Recognizing bad reasoning • Understanding the role of reasoning in belief formation

17. Rule #1 • If you want your students to become good critical thinkers you must first • eliminate all expectations.

18. Review • Your students arrive to college without good reasoning skills. • They lack these skills because they are human. • Extensive research supports this. • We have a good idea of what constitutes good critical thinking and reasoning skills.

19. Bad News

20. Fundamental Teacher Problems • 89% of college instructors said that critical thinking was “a primary object of their instruction”. • 19% “could give a clear explanation of what critical thinking is.” • 8% “could enumerate ANY intellectual criteria or standards they required of students or could give an intelligible explanation of what those criteria and standards were.”

21. Hieronymus Bosch

22. Hieronymus Busch

23. The Debate • Is it possible to teach students to think critically? • Should colleges teach critical thinking? • How should critical thinking be taught?

24. Questions to be Answered • Why should CT be taught? • What will be accomplished by teaching CT as a separate discipline? • How should CT be taught?

25. Why teach critical thinking? • Strong correlation between trained critical thinking skills and GPA. • Critical thinking improves with correct training. • One critical thinking course is roughly equivalent to four years of undergraduate education.

26. CT improves with training.

27. How Should CT Be Taught? By Doing What Works

28. What Works?

29. What Works?

30. The Doubter “I’ve been skeptical about claims for various approaches to critical thinking, including those for argument maps coming from the University of Melbourne. Indeed, confident in our skepticism, we at Monash Philosophy accepted a challenge to compare our methods with theirs on pre- and post-test gains on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test developed by Peter Facione (1990, 1992). The Monash students did a bit better than theirs on the pre-test, raising our hopes. But when Melbourne University’s post-test results showed far higher performance gains, I thought their method worth a closer look.” Charles Twardy, Monash University Published in Teaching Philosophy

31. What is to be done? Dr. Tim van Gelder • Practice. Practice should be deliberate, exercise-focused. • Guidance. Students need to know what to do next. • Scaffolding. Structures in place to avoid inappropriate or ineffective activity (software). • Graduatedtasks. A graduated increase in complexity. • Feedback. Student should be able to tell whether an activity is successful.

32. Introduction to Argument Mapping “The soul never thinks without a picture.” --Aristotle

33. Map of an Argument • The Yankees will win the pennant. After all, they’re the best team in baseball.

34. Support Reasons with Evidence

35. Practice with Mapping • Map the following statement by breaking it down into a conclusion and a reason: • The US economy is going to continue growing. Unemployment is down, the stock market is up, and consumer sentiment is high, all of which indicate growth.

36. Map with Multiple Reasons

37. Map with Multiple Reasons

38. Practice with Mapping • “Proposition 200’s prescription is impractical on many points. While aiming to reduce the cost of illegal immigrants to the states, it unwisely punishes with fines or jail time state employees who don’t report immigration violations, and burdens them with ID verification, among other things. More important, it probably won’t stem the flow of illegals. If the possibility of dying in the desert won’t stop an alien, a bureaucrat or piece of paper certainly won’t. Congress responded to a similar 1996 ballot initiative in California by restricting access to certain federal help. That, too, has not stemmed the flow. The cry for better border control as heard from Arizona (and other states), as well as keeping out terrorists, requires more substantial immigration reform.” From The Christian Science Monitor, November 3, 2004.

39. Analysis

40. Analysis of an argument

41. Results of Argument Mapping • Students understand what they read. • Students know when they understand and when they don’t understand. • Students analyze. • Students plan their writing.

42. Results of Argument Mapping • Students see what’s missing and what is wrong with arguments. • Students work hard on problems. • Students are engaged in their work. • Students understand complex issues.

43. A Vote for Argument Mapping • “Toward Improving Intelligence Analysis” by Steven Reiber. • The first element in improving the process of improving analysis is to find out what the existing scientific research says. Not all of the existing research on how to improve human judgment is negative. Here are some promising results from this research: • Argument mapping, a technique for visually displaying an argument’s logical structure and evidence, substantially enhances critical thinking abilities.”

45. Software • Rationale • www.austhink.com • CMap • Cmap.ihmc.us/download

46. Literature • “Enhancing and Augmenting Human Reasoning” by Tim van Gelder. • The Skills of Argument by Deanna Kuhn. • “Study of 38 Public Universities and 28 Private Universities to Determine Faculty Emphasis on Critical Thinking In Instruction” by Richard Paul.

47. Literature • “A look across Four Years at the Disposition toward Critical Thinking Among Undergraduate Students” by Carol Ann Giancarlo and Peter Facione. • “Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons from Cognitive Science” by Tim van Gelder.

48. This presentation and more information about Critical Thinking can be found at: http://www.eigenauer.com/criticalthinking Phone: 661.763.7722 Email: jeigenauer@yahoo.com Dr. John Eigenauer