Thursday
Jan202011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Universities and critical thinking
Jan 20, 2011 Education Much good fun to be had at Donald Clark's blog, which concentrates on education and in particular, e-learning. Today he's looking at a survey of what students actually get up to at universities and whether they are actually learning critical thinking.
Do universities really teach critical thinking? This huge CLA longitudinal study on 2,322 students for four years from 2005 to 2009 across broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, suggests not. Richard Arum of New York University found that they were woeful at critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication. 36% showed no significant gains in "higher order" thinking skill. 45% made no significant improvement in critical thinking.
Ouch.
Reader Comments (33)
I know a woman professor in a town in Pennsylvania who claims to teach critical thinking. When I told her "An Inconvenient Truth" was propaganda, she disagreed vehemently. She clearly doesn't even know the meaning of propaganda! She's evidently teaching her students to believe what she believes, and considers that "critical thinking."
Critical thinking needs "discussion"...
As a child growing up in the 70's we had one TV and one (quality) newspaper. Despite the inconvenience to me of not seeing the Goodies/Monty Python etc. (BBC2 9pm) my parents watched BBC1 news religiously. It used to drive me crazy, yet at aged 10, I was the only kid in the school who understood (even probably knew of) Watergate (a fact remarked on by my teacher 15 years later.)
Critical thinking requires participation of more than one, and with a TV in every room, mostly showing crap, they do not learn their questioning skills.
When my 12 year old is often confronted by the question, "So why do you think that is?". And he is beginning to understand not to take things at face value. Even simple things like "What the **** has David Beckham actually done to achieve all this fame?"
I wonder if this could help account for the rise of western religious fundamentalism and the new religion of Climate change (or whatever the latest iteration is).
Had this study included faculty then we could probably guarantee that the University of Virginia would be among the worst performers...
How do they measure critical thinking? The only thing I can think of in my 1970's education was verbal reasoning type stuff, or those fast intelligence tests where they show a 3D stack of cubes etc.
I pretty much accepted what I was told by authority until the first time I realised the Gov lied, I was age 17. They increased the price of a full driving licence to £10 and said it was a one off cost for the new licence, we would never have to pay for another one. I exchanged around 20 letters with the DVLA when they charged me for a replacement. The Gov actually lie, who woulda thunk it!
I suppose (in my defence) up until that point I hadn't really listened to anything the Gov had said. After a stint in the forces I really got a handle on political integrity <lol>
Agree TV dumbs people down, I stopped watching it about 8yrs back, I can't see me ever being a "regular viewer" ever again, 90% mind numbing drivel, 8% propaganda, 2% other.
The key to good grades in most colleges is to repeat the professor's prejudices back to him. Do not show your critical thinking by questioning the premises of authority. In fact, in your entire relationship with the world you will find that authority is mostly living on its power over you, not on any case based on morality or intellectual superiority. However, you don't need to go to college to learn that, and IMHO if you are not by nature a critical thinker you will not learn it there.
It is the same old generational grumpiness in which the young get blamed for not being like their elders. Believe me, given another 30 years, they will be.
Students at university get taught to believe what they are taught, and not to criticise what they are taught. How can students behave otherwise.
To claim that "in my day when I was student" is an actual arguement is nonsense.
I can only remark that "nostalgia ain't what it used to be."
@mac, on a design engineering degree we were actively encouraged to think for ourselves. To question whether solutions were valid, especially in the final year. Of course we knew naff all 'bout nuttin'... but engineering is all about being critical/rational.
The study controlled for "Parental Class", a list which includes "Petty Bourgeoisie". Does anybody really say that any more?
@Rich... yes they do, certainly in Europe... basically it means a Metropolitan "peasant" :)
Well can't speak for the USA, but in the UK it is surely evident that a "University" education is not what was.
There are now more University lecturers in the UK, than there were University students in the 1960's. It isn't any surprise that "Critical Thinking" isn't encouraged. If you send 45% to University, then the only way to square that round is by having both lecturers and students who are of a lower quality.
I make the comment, not with an elitist view (I am not a graduate), but from the point of view of simple common-sense.
I went last year to a Royal Society event and was appalled by the silence and complacency of the audience, while lefty professorhood and lordism gave away the worst available in prejudicial non-science.
"no , we are not certain , we say from now on are only 90% certain" kinda cool updated stuff.
The most vocal student with plenty of questions was Chinese.
Most participants were silent nannystaters from institutes on a relaxed day trip out, of course. Another tax bloodletting event.
The archetypical campus is helplessly leftwing and dissent is honed away, since Vietnam. What is left are students hoping to improve themselves while passing through this obstacle. So after 12 years of skool the aspiration is then to get and study through this obstace as well with soulace in the far future. This is not the way to educate people. the living is now. Not the eternal moving post set by nannystate pampered lordship idiots.
retired Dave
I agree, however the subsidised club med (all in , wine at dinner, "reading", led by hand) style university should have been abolished long time ago.
You want club med you pay club med.
You want to fly you pay for learning to fly.
You want to fly people? You CERTIFY for flying people=> that's where the state tentatively should peek in: In the certification.
there is not enough people certified for flying people? => pay them more( and not: haul them in from Zimbabwe, with their whole village )
In my time at university the best available texts to learn from were not available to us, we had to rely on what the professor nannystater had in mind for us. And what a fiasco that was with most of them.
This has changed with Wikipedia
It makes the billions a year costing higher education work force looking rather silly.
I would not pay a cent for them , if there were to be a financial penury..oh wait we exactly have that.
"Lecture - A method of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the students without passing through the heads of either."
Sorry, don't know the source.
Retired Dave: "I make the comment, not with an elitist view (I am not a graduate), but from the point of view of simple common-sense."
Oh, the irony, but I think you are 100% correct.
I have come to the conclusion that reading a subject at university (as I did(!)) makes a person some what odd; several years of Maths, Latin, Medicine or any other subject is bound to make you a little diffferent to the rest of the population. It's why people make the effort to study. It's what universities were for!
However, 'some intelligence' is required because the concentrated knowledge gained needs to pondered upon and reconnected with common sense before it can be put to good use.
Without the pondering and without a subject that does not connect to common sense, well, you can see the results!
Unfortunately, common sense has never been that common, and the number of subjects that are not connected to common sense is increasing. No wonder the situation is getting worse!
The world need more Euclid.
=====================
Obviously, I don't know how things are taught at university any longer.
Then, our lecturers taught us to be extremely self-critical regarding our observations.
Another hugely important thing we learned was that a failed experiment did not mean failure provided we could critically assess and report why the experiment failed.
Simple questions such as 'why do you think this is?', 'what have you really seen (as opposed to what you imagined?', and the best and most useful :'... .... - if not, why not?'
I would hazard the guess that students are not taught any longer to be self-critical to start with. If through school and college you're told, implicitly or explicitly, that you're the bee's knees, then it follows that everybody else also is the bee's knees, and mustn't be criticised.
The results are now here for all to see.
The importance of stupidity in scientific research : Martin A. Schwartz
http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/121/11/1771
In our School/Campus workshops there were very experienced and skilled machinists.Nice guys but you could not tell them anything new about how to manufacture things...
And they would either get to like you or not. Usually based on your ability to listen. Like the relationship between a platoon ergeant and a newly assigned 2nd Lieutenant.
So, you would either have made what you actually needed, or if you knew it all, you would have made exactly, to the nearest thou, precisely what you asked for, then of course it would be scrapped ;)
"Despite the inconvenience to me of not seeing the Goodies/Monty Python etc. "
Jan 20, 2011 at 9:08 AM | Unregistered CommenterJiminy Cricket
Spitting Image helped, especially Norman Tebbit with the skinhead haircut and the leather jacket! ;-)
"our lecturers taught us to be extremely self-critical regarding our observations.
The results are now here for all to see."
Jan 20, 2011 at 12:11 PM | Unregistered CommenterViv Evans
Sadly Viv, a lecturer now arrives, gives his lecture and heads for the...pub. The student then has to go work it out for his/her self! I believe they call it F.O and F.O. Makes me weep for the dedicated people that dragged me, screaming and shouting through my education!
I reckon science in particular has always been badly taught, in schools at least.
I did my O-Levels between 1978 and 1980, and my A-Levels in 1981. In maths, although we were taught integration and differentiation, we were never taught why they were so called or what they were for. I was vaguely aware that you could use them to calculate the area under a curve, but I had no idea of why you'd need to do that. It wasn't like "I've never had to find X so I don't need equations" - it was simply that I was being shown something complex and expected to absorb it by rote, but not to understand it. It was well over 20 years later that I understood the sgnificance of calculus to probability distributions, for example.
Chemistry lessons were a notable farce, because you would be given a bunch of chemicals and told to do a certain experiment. Whatever the result you got, you wrote up the result you were supposed to get. If adding X to Y was supposed to produce a yellow precipitate, and you got a load of foaming black goo, "yellow precipitate" was what you wrote up. You lied to your notebook.
In physics, similarly, mixing red, blue and green light did not produce white light, but you wrote up that it did. I used to ask "stupid" questions regularly. When presented with an electrical circuit diagram in which there was a bulb located at a dead end, you would be told it did not light up when connected to a battery. I would point out that surely it must light up momentarily, because the electrons don't know it's at a dead end, and will reach it and then stop? I never got a coherent answer to this at school. At university a colleague explained to me that in fact it's like switching on a water pump and circulating through pipes the water that is already there. Thus explained, I understood why the bulb could not light up - having already dropped sciences because nobody could explain this.
So the purpose of much science was ignored, questions were ignored, anomalies were explained away and you wrote up the result you had been told you would get rather than what you actually did get. Scientists of that generation trained in that way are now in charge of climate science.
There's something very wrong with the idea that critical thinking can be taught.
It is actually very difficult to teach students to think critically. They want to be spoonfed and given all the answers ("What do I need to learn to pass the exam?").
When faced with a question they have not seen before that requires thought, most will say they don't know how to start it and ask for it to be explained to them.
Lecturers who give the students everything they ask for get high scores on student rating systems, which ultimately feeds through into league table data. Those who leave gaps, and require students to think it through and reason, get low scores.
This effect is only going to get worse with the huge hike in tuition fees.
I was in charge of a continuing education program in my specialty for many years. One thing was clear from analyses conducted by my peers: Retention from audiovisual programs is virtually zip; no learning techniques compare to either hands-on exercises or self-study via textbooks.
Another way to get at this might be to suppose that the capability to think critically is innate and likely rare. The only contribution an educational institution might then make is not to suppress it as so many do, but possibly allow the possessors of this talent to discover that they have it.
J ferguson states:
But I have to differ. Later he adds:
Which I partly agree with in the sense that intelligence (required for effective critical thinking) is demonstrably heritable but cannot be taught, only exercised and developed.
So while you cannot teach a brick to critique energy policy or Milton, you can take an averagely intelligent human and teach them how to think analytically and logically (synonyms here for critically).
Although I did not realise it at the time, my father (a working scientist) spent the first 18 years of my life trying to teach me to think critically (or analytically, logically or scientifically if you prefer). School to a limited extent and later university built on the foundation he provided.
He died when I was in my twenties and before I realised quite how much I owed him, or thank him for what he had done.
So, perhaps the first and greatest responsibility lies with parents. By the time a child has become a young adult attending university, it is a bit late to start trying to teach disciplined thinking.
BBD,
Good thoughts, yours. My insight on this subject was developed through years of sitting in classes where critical thought was encouraged and yet infrequently seen. It isn't critical thought if it means coming around to a different point of view - it's how the new view is arrived at - but you know that.
Bishop's is certainly a good place to see the products of critical thought - your's frequently among them. And that does seem to be a shortcoming of some of the trolls who surface for air from time to time - no evidence whatever of thought critical or otherwise.
There was one, though, was it PaulM? I had hoped he would become a regular. I continue to imagine I could be wrong about all this (the awful universal heating), just haven't seen the argument that I would find compelling .... yet.
Mac,
You demonstrated a great example of what poor critical thinking skills are.
the problem is real and is not purely one of style of instruction: many professors believe they are teaching critical thinking. However, they are largely teaching the student body what to think, and not how to think for themselves and compound the problem by confusing "criticism" (especially of the politically correct variety) with "critical thinking".
I don't think it's ever too late to get someone to think. Start them on a steady diet of truth and individual responsibility. There may be some obstacles to overcome - but I know it can be done because it happened to me. ;)
Andrew
In high school English class, ca. 1969, our teacher led us through an exercise in critical thinking. He showed photos, e.g. people sitting around a food-covered table, along with captions that described what was going on, and we students were asked whether the captions were true, and why we thought so.
Something like, "The Smith family has just sat down to Sunday dinner."
And of course it turned out that every "fact" in the captions was arguable. How do we know they're named Smith and not Fotheringay-Phipps? That they're a family and not members of a cult? That they've just sat down instead of being nailed to the chairs for months? That it's Sunday and not Shrove Tuesday? That it's dinner and not plastic replicas of food?
Naturally I'm giving silly alternative explanations, having forgotten the details of the class's discussion. But by the end of the period we were all pretty skilled at recognizing unsubstantiated claims.
Amazing that I remember it more than 40 years later; it must have made an impression!
Well, it's not too late to learn or to help someone else learn critical thinking. I found this game back in the '60s, and it's still available. It's called "Propaganda."
http://wffnproof.com/inc/sdetail/127