Critical Thinking and Technology

(More Than About Technology) by Ken Bain

How do we get students to think critically? How do we get them to take an interest in our
disciplines, to move beyond a concern with "just making the grade" or merely preparing for some
standardized test that guards the gates to graduate and professional schools? How do we arouse
their curiosity? How can we make a sustained difference in the way they think and act? How can
we help students to become active intellects, human beings who are able to understand important
ideas, to analyze and evaluate the arguments and evidence that support those ideas, to collect and
use evidence in reaching their own conclusions, and logically and consistently to examine
conflicting claims?

In short, what can we do to help and encourage more students to become like the best ones, and
how can technology help us accomplish that goal? Before we consider technology and its
applications, however, we must, first, determine how and why people learn?

Intrinsic Motivations
At least a partial answer might come from the investigators who have studied intrinsic
motivations. Two fairly simple theories have emerged from the research. First, human beings are
naturally curious animals. Anyone who has spent much time with a five year old might echo this
claim. Second, human beings are both rational and emotional creatures. We must appeal to the
whole person, the attitudes and emotions as well as the ability to understand. In other words,
people learn naturally while trying to solve problems that concern them. They develop an
intrinsic interest that guides their quest for knowledge, and an intrinsic interest--and here's the
rub--that can actually diminish in the face of extrinsic rewards that appear to manipulate that
interest.

So what must we do as teachers? One big key may be very simple: We must pose questions that
intrigue and fascinate, fundamental questions, "big" questions, questions that lie at the heart of
our disciplines. Often scholars debate questions that are significant only because of some earlier
question, which in turn, is significant because of some still earlier question, which derived its own
significance from some still earlier question, and so forth. We often live our scholarly lives
focused on questions that lie several layers beneath the surface of questions that first intrigued us.
In teaching, we must be willing to dig back toward the surface and to meet our students there, to
recapture the significance of our inquiries, and to help students understand why our current
deliberations capture our attention. We cannot simply call out from our position deep within the
groud and ask our students to join our subterranean mining expeditions. We must, instead, meet
our students on the surface and help them understand the value and the location of the ores we

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pursue. We must help them understand why anyone might want to solve this problem or answer
this question. We must remind them of the connection between today's smaller question and the
larger issues.

We must also recognize that students are most likely to become intellectually excited and
motivated to work if we appeal to their emotions, if we show some concern for them and some
faith in their ability to succeed, if we ask about their attitudes and their values as well as about
their ability to understand, if we act excited, and if we ask them both to understand abstract
concepts and to see the relevance of those concepts to people's lives. We must appeal directly to
their curiosity.

Learning Specific Abstract Reasoning Abilities

Another part of the answer to our original question may come from the so-called critical thinking
movement. That crusade has argued, among other points, that we should help students develop
and refine specific abstract reasoning abilities. In other words, rather than thinking in terms of
teaching history, biology, chemistry, or other topics, we should think in terms of teaching
students to understand, analyze, synthesize, evaluate evidence, and so forth. While one cannot
learn to reason without something to reason about, knowledge comes not through rote
memorization, but from the ability to understand, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate evidence. To
learn is to acquire the ability to reason, that is, the ability to draw conclusions on the basis of
reasons. Thus, to help our students acquire knowledge (learn), we must deliberately help them
acquire specific abstract reasoning capacities. We must teach them the logics of our disciplines
and not just dictate information to them. We should spend our time teaching students how to learn
(that is, how to read the text actively and analytically and to think in the same manner) rather than
using the classes to dictate information. We should do less telling and more asking.
All of this sounds simple enough, but we know it doesn't always work. What goes wrong? And
how does this relate to computers? Again, before we turn specifically to technology, we must find
out more about human learning. Stick with me.

Overcoming Students' Preconceptions

The research on what happens when students listen to our explanations may tell us a great deal.
We often act as if students' minds are blank slates, waiting for our imprint. We want to think that
what we say to our students travels as a seamless entity from our mouths (or computer
presentations) to the brains of students--as if they are like computers. In fact, students bring
models of knowledge with them to our classes, preconceptions that have a profound influence on
what they think they learn and how they react to what we tell them. As Mark Twain said, "It's not
what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that ain't so!"

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In the mid 1980's two physicists at Arizona State University provided dramatic evidence to
support Twain's remark. They tried to determine whether a traditional lecture-based introductory
physics course really changed the way students thought about the way the physical universe
operates. They suspected that even the best students learned to plug in the numbers but continued
to think in pre-Newtonian terms. The researchers, Ibrahim Abou Halloun and David Hestenes,
devised and validated an examination to determine how students think about motion. They
administered the test to the students of four different physics professors, all of whom received
good marks on their teaching from both peers and students. The students took the test both before
and after taking either a calculus-based or non calculus-based introductory physics course.
Did the course change student thinking? The pre-test revealed that students entered the course
with a common sense theory (a cross between Aristotelian and 14th century impetus ideas) about
the physical world, "which the student [used] to interpret" everything, "including what" they
heard in the physics course. They emerged with "comparatively small" changes in the way they
thought.

Responding to All Learning Personalities

Part of the answer to our question about what goes wrong may come from thinking about learning
personalities. In general the brain loves diversity. People like different kinds of input, not the
same kind all of the time. Relatively few people have fixed styles of learning in which they can
learn from only one kind of experience, but many people do have learning personalities in which
they often express preference for one approach or another. Some people like visual information
(pictures, diagrams, flow charts, time lines, films, demonstration); others, auditory input (speech
or visual symbols of auditory information--written words and mathematical notations). Most
people prefer to talk things out, to interact with other humans; some, to reflect independently. A
majority try to organize information inductively; a minority, deductively. Some like to learn
sequentially, a piece at a time; others, globally, suddenly gaining insights. Some like facts, data,
and experimentation (sensors); others prefer to work from principles and theories (intuitors).
Sensors like solving problems by standard methods and dislike surprises; intuitors like innovation
and dislike repetition. Sensors show patience with details but hate complications; intuitors
become bored with details but welcome complications. Sensors are good at memorizing facts;
intuitors are good at grasping new concepts. Sensors are careful but may be slow (do not work
well with timed tests); intuitors are quick but may be careless.
So what does all that mean about providing good learning environments. Just keep in mind that
the brain loves diversity. If we provide that diversity, we can speak to different personalities
while encouraging everyone to expand their preferences, and to consider the joys of learning in
new ways.

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Challenge versus Stress
Still another part of the answer may come from research on learning and stress. Fear, worry,
excessive anxiety and tension, all reduce the human capacity to think. At the same time, a healthy
challenge can motivate. We must help our students to feel comfortable, to believe in their
capacity to learn. But we must also promote a kind of uneasiness, the tension that stems from
intellectual excitement, curiosity, challenge, and intense concern with a particular question, the
tension that emerges primarily from the questions that we ask, the challenges that we issue, and
the wonderful promises that we make about what students will be able to achieve if they are
willing to join us enthusiastically in our expedition "up the mountain in search of the truth."

Technology and Learning

Finally, we can ask how technology can help us address these issues effectively? Let me suggest
two important potential contributions.

I. Promoting Higher Order Intellectual Abilities

We can use computers to help students learn the higher order cognitive skills of analysis,
synthesis, and evaluation rather than using technology (as we have often done in the past) to drill
for memory or to shine light on a screen?

In his recent book on the teaching of physics, the late Arnold Arons, a longtime University of
Washington physicist, offered a specific example of how that might be done.
One outcome of research and observation over a wide range of students and introductory
courses is that many students do not break through a full command of a particular concept or
line of reasoning unless they can be reached in one-on-one Socratic dialogue. . . . [But] the
necessary one-on-one dialog with a single student can easily take as long as 20 to 30
minuets or more. . .. Personal computer[s] with graphic capability [offer] the prospect of
making one-on-one dialogues practicable in spite of numbers. The problem becomes one of
writing effective dialogues that pull students over the early, most severe obstacles, and help
them on the way to further learning, with decreasing dependence on Socratic assistance. . . .
Yet for a really effective computer dialogue, the most important (and most difficult)
provisions an author must make are the ones that lead a student to rectify incorrect
responses. . . .Socratic rectification of misconceptions and incorrect reasoning can be
achieved only if the author has prior knowledge [of]. . . the actual incorrect responses likely
to be made. This is why authors must be well versed in the research results if they are to
write good material.

Ideally, computers can help us foster the accomplishment of the highest learning objectives we
have for our students: the ability to think critically and creatively, to reason, to use our

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disciplinary approaches to information, to learn and to want to learn independently of any
informal instruction, and to work collaboratively in solving important problems.

II.Giving the Brain a Good Diet of Visual Learning and Provocative Thought
My second suggestion involves a more traditional use of computers in the classroom, but with
some special qualifications. We know many people like visual learning as opposed to auditory
learning. They like to see pictures, diagrams, flow charts, time lines, films, demonstrations, and
so forth. This does not mean that such people must see everything they learn, or that they cannot
learn abstract concepts. It means that we probably cant reach some people educationally unless
we at least begin with visuals. It may also mean everyone may benefit from such visual input.
But not just any visuals, and not just an endless stream of visuals.

Three important points here:

1. Visual representations of auditory information (words and mathematical symbols written

on a screen, for example) do not provide a rich diet of visuals. We must provide
pictures, diagrams, charts, and so forth. Computers can, of course, help us create pictorial
representations of things for which we have no pictures (future models, ancient sites, and
tiny places, among others), can make items appear to move, and can help us assemble and
easily use visuals from a variety of sources.

2. Visuals used in long, seamless presentations make fewer contributions to learning than do
visuals used in short pieces to stimulate or contribute to a discussion, in preparation
for laboratories, discussions, or in other interactive environments. Indeed, studies that
have looked at the results of students' performances after exposure to "visual lectures" (with
little or no interaction) and compared those outcomes with performances after exposure to
conventional lectures have found that such visual-based instruction makes little difference.
One literature review that looked at 74 different studies on the college level, for example,
drew such conclusions. Moreover, when the same professor taught both types of classes in
the comparisons, the differences were especially small.

3. Use visuals to help students learn, not to help you get through the material faster. I had a
colleague who adopted Powerpoint in a math course because he could put whole problems
on the board with a click of the mouse, and, thereby, cover more material. He failed to
remember that while he was going faster, his students were grasping less. Dont think about
covering the material. Think about uncovering it so your students can better understand it.

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Opportunities with Technology
The growing use of computers in instruction offers us one of those moments--as we move from
one medium to another--when we can most productively stop and reexamine our objectives and
methods. Such reexamination will not take place automatically, however; nor will it necessarily
lead to the most productive use of our new technology. Rather than asking ourselves how will we
use this particular technology, we should begin with questions about what we want our students
to learn and whether certain technologies can help them achieve that.

From the betterteachersinstitute.org

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