The Critical Thinker

DNA Academy, January 15, 2008
Everyday we make decisions and act on the information that comes in, and what we already know. But making a decision without weighing the facts could mislead us. A critical thinkers makes productive decision without any misconception

Critical thinking refers to a collection of overlapping mental activities of intuiting, clarifying, reflecting, connecting, inferring, judging, and so on. It brings these activities together to evaluate the credibility; quality impact, significance, usefulness or desirability of an entity on the basis of an implicit or explicit value system and a set of criteria of evaluation. Students are unaware that they have in mind an explanatory hypothesis and that before accepting it as true; they ought to compare it with others.

A CASE STUDY

Students hold intuitive but wicorrect conceptions even after they are given specific information designed to address certain misconceptions. For instance. Educational Initiatives, an organisation run by group of 1IMA Alumni, around 4000 students of class 4 across the country were asked the question on evaporation. 22 per cent students selected the correct answer (Option B) but interestingly half of the 78 per cent who could not select all the correct examples of evaporation think the answer should be Option A. Water changing into water vapour from oceans and rivei-s. These students think that water changing from a glass kept in open cannot be termed as evaporation. 39 per cent of the students thought that only water changing to water vapour from the oceans and rivers is an example of evaporation.

A common misconception was ‘Evaporation is a process that happens only in the presence of sunlight. Some students.also thought that evaporation happens only outdoors while drying can happen anywhere.

ANALYSIS
There are various concepts like evaporation that children learn but are unable to relate them to their day-to-day experiences. A higher order concept like ‘evaporation’ is very well communicated as a phase change process but is explained only with reference to the water cycle. It is important to realise that concepts could be well internalised if seen in the light of several meaningful and practical situations. Drying and evaporation are the same. So what really happens when water evaporates? Water turns into a gaseous state when the molecules acquire a certain amount of energy, sufficient enough to overcome the intermolecular forces. Molecules of water, while moving randomly , collide and in the process, impart energy to other molecules. If the energy of a molecule on the surface is enough to change its physical state it will escape from the surface. This is evaporation.

Students constantly build their own models of various processes based on the simplest logic that convinces them. These models may be scientifically incorrect. And hence it’s important to correct them. On the other hand. It’s important to correct them. On the other hand, it’s not very easy to break their incorrect models unless the illustration given generates a strong conflict with their reasoning. Real life illustrations can help catalyse this process and channelize it in the right direction.

In one of the video series, college students were handed pieces of wood and asked to describe the elemental composition of trees. One by one these “best and brightest” declare that the elements embodied in trees come from water and nutrients in the soil. Not one mentions carbon or the process of photosynthesis, even when pressed, although all have taken at least on biology course in college.

SKILL TRAINING
Faculty aware of the common misconceptions in their fields can use techniques that force students to confront their misconceptions. For instance, they can ask questions and pose problems that entrap students in particular misconceptions and then ask students to apply what they have learned to a new situation. He then applies his new realisation to the correct understanding of the process of photosynthesis. As can be seen from such examples, it illustrates a typical failure to think critically

Almost everyone agrees that one of the main goals of education, at whatever level, is to help develop general thinking skills, particularly critical thinking skills. But students do not acquire these skills as much as they could and should. The difficult part is knowing what to do about it. Apparently, we need to change our style of teaching. But in what ways? What enhancements would best promote the development of critical thinking skills1′

The first, and perhaps most important lesson is that critical thinking is hard. Although it can seem quite basic, it iti-n tally is a complicated process, and most people are just’not very good at it. The key is hidden behind the little word “skill” Everyone knows that mastering a skill takes practice, and lots of it.

THE CHALLENGES
One of the biggest challenges in learning new skills, particularly general skills such as critical thinking, is t he problem of transfer, in a nutshell, the problem is that an insight or skill picked up in one situation is not, or cannot he. applied in another situation. For example, if someone has just learned how to calculate the per-kilogram price for packaged nuts, they should then be able to calculate the per-kilogram prtce for packaged chips; if they cannot, we would say that the learning has failed to transfer from nuts to chips.
THE IDEAL CRITICAL THINKER
- Puta extra effort into searching for and attending to evidence that contradicts what he/she currently believes.
- When”weighing up” the arguments for and against, gives some “extra credit” for those arguments that go against her position.
- Cultivates a willingness to change her mind when the evidence starts mounting against her.
source:College Teaching

With critical thinking, as with so many other things, the whole is definitely more than the mere aggregate of its parts. Think about tennis, which is a higher-order skill. To be able to play tennis, you must be able to do things like run. hit a forehand, hit a backhand, and watch your opponent,. But mastering each of these things, separately is not enough. You must be able to combine them into the coherent, fluid assemblies that make up a whole point. Likewise, critical thinking involves skillfully exercising various lower-level cognitive capacities in integrated wholes.