INSIDE DOUGLAS COLLEGE / DECEMBER 19, 1989

 

Teaching

Excellence

TOWARD THE BEST IN THE ACADEMY

Distributed courtesy of:

CENTRE FOR CURRICULUM AND

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Fifth Floor, 1483 Douglas Street

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada V8W 3K4

Fall 1989

 

 

Critical Thinking by Design

Students frequently complain
when professors require them to
think critically about course con-
cepts. Professors, in turn, are often
surprised or even offended by these
complaints. Yet when we consider
the intellectual demands of critical
thinking, and the virtual absence of
instruction students receive in how
to use knowledge, we can see why
thinking critically about an unfamil-
iar subject might be challenging—
even threatening—to many students.

Critical thinking is often thought
to be a general ability that students
either possess or lack, but much of
what critical thinking entails is spe-
cific to particular fields and can be
learned (see Kurfiss, 1988, for a re-
view). However, learning to think
rarely enters the educational scene
when “covering” a fixed quantity of
“content” occupies center stage in
teaching. Mustacquisition of knowl-
edge precede thinking, as many
educators seem to believe?

Cnitical thinking is the mental
work involved when we investigate
complex questions. The quality of
the outcome depends upon many
factors, including:

@ How much we know about the
subject and how easily we can re-
trieve relevant information;

m™@ What we know about how to
conduct inquiry in a particular sub-
ject (which includes the kinds of
questions we ask and how we at-
tempt to answer them);

M@ How well we organize our inquiry
(for example, the goals we set and

the ways we monitor and revise
them);

@ Our assumption that knowledge
is constructed through human in-
quiry and must be judged according
to criteria of adequacy rather than
standards of ultimate truth (a view
shared by academics but generally
not by undergraduates), and

@ How much wecare about the work
(Kurfiss, 1988).

When courses are designed to
emphasize knowledge acquisition,
only the first of these facets of critical
thinking comes into play. The rest
are left toa hypothetical future which
materializes, if at all, in graduate
school. So when we ask students to
think about course content, we
should not be surprised if they ob-
ject. They have not been taught how
to think about the subject, and they
may have no intrinsic reason to
pursue it.

If we believe students cannot
think until they “know” a lot, and if
teaching for informationcrowds out
learning to think, how and when
will critical thinking abilities de-
velop? To escape this impasse, let's
explore an alternative proposition:
students’ abilityand willingness to think
critically are most likely to develop when
knowledge acquisition and thinking
about content are intertwined rather
than sequential.

I have said that critical thinking
is the mental work involved in for-
mulating and pursuing complex
questions. Questions are powerful
motivators of inquiry; what fron-

tiers of knowledge have ever been
pushed back without them? Yet
questions are disturbingly absent
from college classrooms. Less than
4% of class time is spent in question-
ing, and fewer than one-third of
professors’ questions invite complex
thinking. Students’ questions are
rarely heard in classrooms (Barnes,
1983).

The absence of questions is the
direct consequence of our faith in
the content coverage myth. When
our goal is to “cover” the content,
efficiency and accuracy in delivery
of information become measures of
“effectiveness.” If we ask questions,
we may have to “waste” time cor-
recting inaccuracies in students’
responses. If we permit students to
ask questions, we may fail to reach
our content goals. Yet students’
“inaccurate” answers to our ques-
tions, and their “irrelevant” ques-
tions to us, reveal the true “effective-
ness” of our “delivery system.”

In contrast, when courses are
designed to get students to ask and
answer questions about the subject,
our students can practice thinking
while they acquire knowledge. Courses
organized around intriguing open-
ended questions arouse curiosity
about the subject from the first day
of class. Students will try to answer
them if their questions connect the
topic to something they know, and if
they believe their answers will be
taken seriously. Of course their ini-
tial attempts to answer these ques-

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