Spring, 2013 at the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching.
CommentsEB 08/21/2013 2:39pm
Great presentation. And, I hope, helpful in re-framing the "critical thinking" agenda for K-8 students. At that level, I think that critical thinking is limited to some very basic skills -- recognizing truly ridiculous statements, making comparisons based on very basic knowledge, and (I'm not a fan of this) learning to support opinions with facts, no matter how limited. Douglas Hainline 08/21/2013 3:34pm
The presentation's conclusion reminds me of work done by Alan Schoenfeld in the 1980s, trying to get his undergraduate mathematics students to apply George Polya's heuristics for mathematical problem-solving. He found that simply reviewing these heuristics, getting the students to 'know' them, made little difference in their problem-solving abilities. But they could be taught. A summary of his conclusions : "Successful solution of mathematics problems depends up on a combination of resource knowledge, heuristics, control processes and belief, all of which must be learned and taught." 08/22/2013 5:16pm
Interesting to see the parallels between what is needed in higher ed and in K-12 to develop critical thinking skills: a curriculum that sequentially builds domain-specific knowledge. Comments are closed. | Subscribe to this blog
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