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Thinking Critically
about
Critical Thinking
Alicia Juarrero, PhD
Professor of Philosophy
Prince George’s Community College
Largo, Maryland 20774
[email protected]
Association of American Colleges and Universities
Conference on Pedagogies of Engagement
April 15, 2005
Historical Background
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499-370 BC
340-310 BC
1561-1626
1596-1650
1859-1952
• Scientific Method
Socrates
Aristotle
Francis Bacon
Rene Descartes
John Dewey
Formal and Informal Logic
• Formal logic = deduction
• Induction
• Informal logic
1940’s Watson-Glaser
Critical Thinking Assessment
(CTA)
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Drawing Inferences
Recognizing Assumptions
Argument Evaluation
Deductive Reasoning
Logical Interpretation
From Why Johnny Can’t Read
to
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
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Drawing Inferences
Recognizing Assumptions
Argument Evaluation
Deductive Reasoning
Logical Interpretation
Post 2000 “Definitions” of
Critical Thinking
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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, discoverybased 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’s
How 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
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“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 1985
Amusing Ourselves to Death
• Focused on impact of television on public
discourse
• Main point applies to the effect of imagebased 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.