“With all the controversy over the college curriculum, it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education......Ironically, the fact that college faculties rarely stop to consider what a full-blown commitment to critical thinking would entail may help to explain why they have been so quick to agree on its importance to the undergraduate program.”
Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges (p.109).
We hope that undergraduates will learn many things during their years at the college or university. Some of this new knowledge is related to subject matter, some to moral development, some to psychosocial change. All of this is important, to be sure, but I must admit that near the top of my priority list come cognitive skills such as critical thinking and postformal reasoning. Without those skills, I am not sure exactly what students carry away with them. In that light, it is pretty depressing to look at the data on how well we in higher education do in helping our students develop those skills.
Pascarella and Terenzini in their monumental review of learning research published since 1990, How College Affects Students, V.2, report that measurements of critical thinking “focus on an individual’s capability to do some or all of the following: identify central issues and assumptions in an argument, recognize important relationships, make correct references from the data, deduce conclusions from information or data provided, interpret whether conclusions are warranted based on given data, evaluate evidence or authority, make self-corrections, and solve problems.”(p156) Although the data on how colleges affect critical thinking are not so robust as one would like, Pascarella and Terenzini conclude that students show a gain in critical thinking of only about ½ of a standard deviation during the four years of college. More precisely, the average senior (defined as having been at the 50th percentile of his freshman class in critical thinking level) has moved up after four years only to the entering critical thinking level of the freshman who was at the 69th percentile of their entering class. Not much of an effect for four years! And there seems to be no data that tells us how much would have occurred without the college experience, simply because of maturation. As Pascarella and Terenzini so delicately state, “Not all students develop as critical thinkers during college.”(p.158)
Postformal reasoning moves a step forward to ill-structured problems. Here, there is no “correct” answer, because “ there is likely to be conflicting or incomplete information, unspecifiable problem parameters, and a number of plausible solutions, none of which may be verifiably correct.” (p160) Like most of the important problems in life. Students must move through several stages in postformal reasoning. “At the lowest stages (prereflective thinking), knowledge is gained either by direct, personal observation or through the word of authority and is absolute and certain. Reasoning at the middle stages (quasi-reflective thinking) recognizes that knowledge claims about ill-structured problems contain elements of uncertainty.....At the highest stages (reflective thinking), it is understood that knowledge useful in addressing ill-structured problems must be actively constructed. Beliefs are justifiable to the extent that they are based on a rational process involving appropriate forms of inquiry and use of evidence.” (p160) The good news, bad news studies show that students do improve in postformal reasoning, but not to the degree one might hope. “Results...are quite consistent in indicating that the typical change in reflective judgement between the freshman and senior years is a movement of about half a stage....from the end of pre-reflective thinking to ..the beginning of quasi-reflective thinking.” (p.162) Studies using several types of instruments lead to consistent results. Or, as Bok observes in Our Underachieving Colleges ,”Only a small minority of seniors emerge convinced that ill-structured problems are susceptible to reasoned arguments based on evidence and that some answers are sounder than others.” (p.114)
Pascarella and Terenzini describe what the research says needs to be done to improve the situation. For example “critical thinking was enhanced by curricular experiences that require integration of ideas and themes across courses and disciplines”, and “an interdisciplinary or integrated core curriculum that emphasized making explicit connections across courses, and among ideas and disciplines positively influenced growth in measures of postformal reasoning.” (p.207) They also find that "service learning experiences (have) a unique,positive impact on dimensions of general cognitive development such as critical thinking, analytical competencies, and thinking complexity....The most effective service learning experiences ... integrate service experiences with course content, provide for reflection about the service experience, and permit the student to apply subject matter learning to the service experience and vice versa." (p.209)The actions suggested are neither radical nor illogical, just very difficult to make happen in the fragmented world of higher education instruction.
Similarly, Bok makes a number of suggestions regarding guiding principles to be followed by individual instructors in order to best teach critical thinking. For example, he suggests beginning “not by deciding what material they ought to cover but by concentrating on what it is they want their students to learn - what reasoning skills they ought to master and what knowledge they need to absorb to deal with problems posed in the course.” (p.119) A good teacher will work to motivate her students by awakening their interest in the subject. She will actively uncover misconceptions students bring to the course, and work to overcome those misconceptions. Collaborative projects, class discussion and other forms of active learning should be used to model and reinforce habits of creative thinking. And, of course, timely feedback based on questions and activities that actually reflect critical thinking is imperative.
Many of the points discussed above were also made in the NRC report How People Learn (see How people learn, May 1, 2006 ) and in the articles discussed in A D- in science education, April 14, 2006. We certainly don’t know everything we would like to know about how to teach these extremely important cognitive skills, but the research shows that we know a lot that we are not really putting into practice. And we really need more broadly based, good data about how we really are doing.
In my opinion, the forces demanding “accountability” from higher education would do well to look carefully at the way in which individual institutions “add value” in the teaching of cognitive skills. Surely, high added value in this area must become one of the key differentiators in the future between those educational institutions that are excellent, and those that are not (see A preliminary report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, June 27, 2006).
Although I have focused here on cognitive skills, both Our Underachieving Colleges and How College Affects Students look at the whole college experience in a very informative way. I highly recommend both books.
Hello,
What is the difference between critical thinking and post formalthinking?
How do you teach reflection and critical thinking?
How do you encourage faculty to do reflection?
Posted by: Swaran Lata Jain | November 11, 2010 at 01:52 PM