In this Future Frontiers Occasional Paper,
Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) says there is no disagreement about
the importance of teaching critical thinking skills. “In free societies,” he
says, “the ability to think critically is viewed as a cornerstone of individual
civic engagement and economic success. We may disagree about which content
students should learn, but we at least agree that, whatever they end up
learning, students ought to think critically about it.”
But what
exactly is critical thinking? It’s
what people need when they play chess, plan strategy for a field hockey game,
or design a product, says Willingham. Each situation is fluid and challenging,
and there aren’t any routine, reusable solutions – hence the need to deploy
critical thinking. He offers a “commonsensical” definition of what it looks
like for an individual student:
-
The
thinking is original in the moment, not carried over from a previous situation.
-
The
thinking is self-directed, not following instructions from another person.
-
The
thinking respects conventions that make it more likely to yield useful
conclusions – for example, Consider both
sides of an issue and Offer evidence
of claims made.
Willingham notes that another
aspect of critical thinking is choosing to think that way when others might not
– for example, noticing a way to get a better bargain in a store when most
people would just pick up an item and pay. But the main focus of this paper is successful critical thinking. “Of course
we want students to choose to think,” says Willingham, “but we won’t be
satisfied if their thinking is illogical, scattered, and ultimately fails.”
Can critical thinking be taught? Willingham believes it’s
not something people just pick up; explicit instruction can improve skill in
this area. The question is whether students can transfer critical thinking skills to new situations. For example,
if students are taught how to evaluate the arguments in a series of newspaper
editorials, will they be able to apply what they learn to a different medium of
persuasion; or if they learn Latin or computer programming, will they think
logically in other contexts? Research findings on this are “decidedly mixed,”
he says.
What about explicitly teaching critical thinking skills
in schools – for example, giving students five hours on this subject a week, as
some schools are doing? Willingham reports that follow-up studies show very
little gain, and there isn’t good research on whether the skills transfer to
other situations. While we wait for better studies, he believes there’s a
problem we can see right now: the unrealistic expectation that teaching
students to “analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information will improve use of
those skills across the board.” This leads Willingham to his major conclusion:
critical thinking looks different in each subject area, and we should teach it
within each subject without expecting that students’ gains will necessarily
transfer.
“But wait,” he says. “Surely there are some principles of
thinking that apply across fields of study.” For example:
-
“A” and
“not A” cannot both be true, whether in mathematics or history.
-
Strawperson
arguments are always weak.
-
Having a
conflict of interest makes your case suspect.
-
Looking
at many instances gives you a more accurate picture of what’s going on than
looking at only one or two.
True, says Willingham.
“The problem is that people who learn these broadly applicable principles in
one situation often fail to apply them in a new situation.” There’s a
“surprising failure to deploy useful knowledge.” For example, people may have been
taught the fourth insight on the list above (looking at lots of instances
improves accuracy) but still jump to a conclusion about a person’s friendliness
based on a single action. One study found that students needed to be told
explicitly about the link between two different situations to transfer a skill
to a new scenario.
Looking more closely at the failure of transfer,
Willingham found that the similarities between disparate situations are at the
“deep structure” level, but people tend to look at the surface characteristics.
Yes, we understand the principle that lots of data yield a more-accurate
analysis, but when we see a person being rude, we conclude that this is a rude
person. Surface versus deep structure. Why do we do this? “Probably because the
surface structure is explicit, obvious,” says Willingham. “And just as
obviously, the deep structure is not explicit.”
So why not teach deep structure? We can, but it’s
abstract and difficult for students to grasp. If taught the principle of large
data sets, they naturally ask for examples, which takes the teacher back to
surface structures.
The good news, says Willingham, is that students (and
adults) can make the connection between deep and surface structures if (a)
they’ve learned a lot about the subject, and (b) they see several examples
linking deep and surface structure (Oh,
this is that sort of problem). One technique: ask students to compare two
solved problems with the same deep structure but different surface structures.
He says that “extensive stores of knowledge” about a
subject are very helpful to critical thinking in open-ended problems. Here’s
how:
-
First, knowledge
of parts of similar situations can be “snapped together” when solving complex
problems. For example, experienced chess players remember patterns and can
quickly see the strengths and weaknesses of their positions and their opponents’.
-
Recognizing
clumps of information allows working memory to handle more, freeing up mental bandwidth
for higher cognition. An experienced chess player sees a king, a castle, and
three pawns in a corner and clumps them as one defensive unit.
-
Knowing
more about a topic makes it easier to deploy thinking strategies; students are
more likely to remember something like being sure the experimental and control
groups are comparable if they’ve read several articles on the subject and gone
through the same process.
What does all this mean for teachers? Willingham says that while
teaching generalizable critical thinking skills is very iffy, he’s confident
about the usefulness of teaching critical thinking within each subject area.
Here’s his four-step plan:
• First, identify what critical thinking looks like in
each domain – history, mathematics, literature, science, art – and practice
using it. In history, it’s not enough to teach students to “think like a
historian.” They need to learn, for example, to interpret documents in light of
their sources, corroborating them, and putting them in historical context.
Learning to read like a scientist is quite different, since scientific documents
are written in a consistent format.
• Second, identify the content knowledge students must
know in each domain. This knowledge is “a crucial driver of thinking skills,”
says Willingham. Knowing the details of a historical era is crucial to doing a
critical analysis of an original source.
• Third, decide on the sequence in which students learn
factual knowledge and skills. “We interpret new information in light of what we
already know,” says Willingham “The right preparation makes new learning
easier.”
• Fourth, decide what skills need to be revisited across
K-12, because students will forget a lot. Skills should be practiced with
different content, and their repetition must be assured and planned.
Cross-grade coordination will greatly improve students’ learning of critical
thinking skills.
Willingham closes with these assertions: (a) Even in the
absence of a comprehensive K-12 plan, individual teachers can still make
important contributions to their students’ critical thinking; (b) Students can
learn these skills at a young age; Piaget’s theory about a rigid sequence of
thinking capabilities has been proven wrong, says Willingham; (c) All students
should be taught critical thinking skills, avoiding the trap of believing that
lower-achieving students need the basics first; (d) Assessing critical thinking
is expensive and time-consuming because to get accurate information, well-trained
assessors need to listen to students thinking aloud while answering challenging
questions.
“This means that designers and administrators of a
program to improve critical thinking among students must take the long view,”
concludes Willingham, “both in the time frame over which the program operates,
and especially the speed with which one expects to see results. Patience will
be a key ingredient in any program that succeeds.”
(Please Note: The summary above is reprinted with permission from issue #795 of
The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.)
No comments:
Post a Comment