NELIG Spring Meeting
March 16, 2012
Keene State College
Elizabeth Dolinger welcomed the group and introduced the Co-chairs for next year, Sondra VanderPloeg and Rachel Pusateri. NELIG is looking for volunteers to be Co-chair Elects for next year. Email NELIG if you are interested.
Elizabeth’s introduction
“Thanks so much for coming. Before we start today’s program and I introduce Mike Caulfield, I want to share with you why Laura and I decided to ask Mike to run this workshop on Critical Thinking. Those of you who know me know that I believe that information literacy is not about the library, that information literacy is within every discipline’s standards, and can be recognized within almost every higher ed institution’s mission as something like developing life-long learners.
What I have found, and I’m sure many of you have found this as well, is that when I think of what I do as an Information Literacy Librarian, in the framework of developing critical thinking, and when I encourage the librarians I work with to think about information literacy through the lens of critical thinking, that many revolutions begin to occur:
- The language of information literacy becomes familiar to the discipline faculty we work with.
- Rather than seeking out information literacy or research in courses,we seek out the courses where faculty are working to develop critical thinking which greatly expands our opportunities with students.
- Instruction becomes about designing experiences where students must critically think to solve problems with information rather than about delivering how to use X tool.
- And most importantly, I think for our profession as a whole, the message about what librarians teach, and the value of our expertise as information professionals, begins to change from being about the library and teaching library research to designing experiences that develop critical thinking about information and life-long learners.
So the workshop today, in a sense, is a call to my fellow colleagues and librarians to recognize the unique value we bring to academic curricula, in light of higher ed’s increasingly loud call for developing critical thinkers. To make more clear what our expertise is in designing experiences where students develop critical thinking skills ABOUT THE USE OF INFORMATION.
I’m very excited about today’s program because I hope that through our conversations today we will leave here with more ways to better develop critical thinking in our classrooms and more readily recognizing how information literacy and critical thinking are not only closely related, but reliant on each other.
I have the pleasure of getting to work with Mike Caulfield, Keene State’s Instructional Designer, on a frequent basis through our Center for Engagement Learning and Teaching (CELT) and I feel very lucky to have learned much from him during the short time I’ve been here at Keene State.
Mike has been working with educational technology since 1997. In the late 90s he built award-winning courseware for Columbia University, Harvard Business School, and Fortune 500 companies. He worked for MIT as part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a non-profit designed to promote the production and use of freely licensed course materials. In his current position at Keene State he has been working with faculty to design courses for the Integrative Studies program, applying educational psychology and cognitive theory to the design of instructional modules.
Outside of academia he is known for his work in online community building.”
Mike Caulfield ~ Critical thinking: Why it is so hard to teach and what we can do about it
Theme in presentation: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they ar making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform with out thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. ” Alfred whitehead.
Critical thinking – what we are doing, what we’re not doing. Understanding what students lack in skills if they need to be critical thinkers and information literate.
Take away #1
We are not doing what we think we are doing when we think critically. We have an idea of what it feels like and what it is, but it’s not right.
Ask yourself two questions:
- Are we doing what we think we are doing when we apply IL skills? After we answer this question…
- What is it our students are doing differently than us when they do IL?
Lesson #1: One thing that blocks us from achieving a new understanding is that we already have some conceptual model of thinking. Your model is getting in the way of determining the correct answer.
**Unless we feel that our current models are failing us, we are unlikely to adopt a new model. This will prevent us from reaching out to develop a new model. To teach students to think differently, we need to get at what they think their model is and how they think it works for them. Then identify how it doesn’t work for them. Show them a question like this and then help them unravel their model (like trying to explain a dream).
System 1&2 (Kahneman in Thinking fast & slow)
- After perception there two systems of thinking: intuition &reasoning
- System 1 (intuition) – Fast, parallel automatic, effortless, associative, slow-learning, emotional, how we react to things. It’s quick and can do parallel processing.
- System 2 (reasoning) – We almost always rely on intuition. Our success is mostly related to system 1 behavior. Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”. We can’t change the way intiution works, but we can develop conceptual models that helps us assess a situation. Whatever doesn’t work here gets kicked up to reasoning.
Seeking Alternatives
- We don’t seek alternatives (previous conceptual knowledge)
- We seek to prove we’re right, not to check if we are wrong. (affects how students seek information)
- And we generalize from far too small a dataset (overgeneralize).
Intuition feeds us the paperwork already filled out and tells our critical thought “okay you do the rest.”
Critical Thinking
- Leans on conceptual knowledge as much as possible.
- Considers negative evidence.
- Plays with alternatives.
- Likes the concrete.
Transfer – last piece of the puzzle.
- Previous conceptual knowledge & role of intuition.
- Transfer is at the heart of instructional design and one of its biggest problems.
- Training the brain was a dominant view through the 19th century. Do a lot of abstract problems and you’ll get better at it. Memorization – the more you try to remember the better you get at it. Drill & rote memorization. If the memory is good at this it can be good at anything.
- Thorndike tested this. He found this believe to be false. You can memorize all the dates you want but it doesn’t improve your memory on anything else.
- Problem with transfer is that what we learn to do in one specific domain doesn’t make us smarter in other domains.
- We teach students how to do a thing, but then they can’t do it because they can’t transfer the skills.
Example:
Comparing charts, one from whitehouse.gov and one from Drudge report – number of jobs added vs. the unemployment rate. Which is correct when they look like they are saying different things? Stock vs. flow. From the flow perspective (general trend) things look better. From a stock perspective (what’s actually happening) things are not getting better.
Example:
At $500 Billion is Apple worth more than Poland. Apple’s valuation is higher than the domestic product of Poland, Belgium, Sweeden, Saudi Arabia, or Taiwan. Why is this statement wrong? Apple doesn’t have a gross domestic product. And valuation is a measure of stock, how much you are worth. GDP is how much money the country is producing each year. Would need to compare a flow to a flow or a stock to a stock. Everything in Poland versus Apple, or GDP of Poland to Apple’s actual profit. Can’t compare a stock to a flow.
Example:
The world population will top 10 billion by 2100. From 2012 to 2050 7 to 9.3 billion. From 2050 – 2100 from 9.3 to 10.1. From stock perspective the population is going up, but from flow perspective the rate of growth is slowing down (almost cut in half which is good news).
This is the transfer problem. When you build expertise in a domain you have a high transfer problem. When students see charts like these, they don’t see stock vs. flow. They see something about the jobless rate, something about Apple or Poland, and something about world population. They are not seeing how the knowledge in one area transfers to the other areas.
Lesson #2: Teach for transfer, which requires that:
- students are taught in contexts.
- students are taught same skills in a wide range of contexts. Otherwise they think they’re just learning about unemployment.
- abstract knowledge is explicitly called up in each context.
Take away #2
Raw experience is a lousy teacher. Move students toward authentic environments to practice their skill. But when they are learning there needs to be some sort of artificial component to ensure that they are actually learning the skill first. Only after they have learned the skill should they then practice the skills.
Example:
- Conceptual misunderstanding: students do not take into account base rates.
e.g. eating bacon increases risk of bowel cancer by 20%. The misconception is that they seek 20% out of a 100%. 20 is a big number. But that’s not what it’s really saying about increased risk.
If bowel cancer is 0.5% => 1 out of 1000
If bowel cancer is 5% => 1 out of 100
If bowel cancer is 20% => 4 out of 100
Steps to an authentic environment:
- Identify misconception (out of 100).
- Come up with task where misconception interferes with getting something right and does so in an obvious way so that their current misconception fails.
- Develop prototypical examples to facilitate transfer.
- Habit of mind / alternatives. It’s not about asking students to think harder. It’s more about finding the right question that kicks their thinking from intuition to reasoning.
Example: Only 4% of college students are black males. The question is, how under-represented are black males in college?
What is this headline saying? What would this number have to read to shock me or state that all is well in the world (equality or parity).
Baseline statistics: In the US, 12% of the population is black, and 12% is Hispanic. Assuming half is male and half is female then the total number of black men in the US is 6% of the population. For equal representation the headline would read “6% of college students are black males.” There is a bit of underrepresentation, but not as much as the headline indicates.
Lesson #4: Need a baseline understanding to think critically.
Need to come up with targeted tasks that will ensure that if the student has the wrong model that they will in fact fail the task.
If this headline is supposed to shock me, what would make it not shocking? Embed these questions so that the right question gets kicked up to critical capacity. What would be a normal percentage not what is the correct percentage?
The second half of the session consisted of a workshop where Mike Caufield led the attendees through a series of exercises. The results of the activity may be viewed on Flickr.
Exercise 1
Librarians assembled in groups of 4-5 to evaluate a list of websites from Google. Just the results list, not the sites themselves. They were asked to answer these questions and brainstorm a list of ideas.
- Determine what you do to decide what links to click.
- How do you decide which is better and which is worse?
- Which will be most productive for you?
When evaluating a list of Google results, librarians look at:
- Textual clues -> snippets of text that give us ideas of what the source is about.
- Does the URL appear to be biased?
- Does the site have original material or aggregation?
- Language of title (link).
- Obvious point of view.
Exercise 2
What do you think the students do to make this decision?
What librarians think that students think/do:
- Utility -> does it have all the words in the title.
- Order of results -> first is best.
- Familiarity.
- Looking for keywords in title.
- Agrees with my thesis.
- Reinforce opinion.
- Language that matches.
Comparison
What is our underlying conceptual model that we are doing, versus what is the model that the students are using?
- We have a higher degree of suspicion.
- We have more context.
- Students more impatient -> want things fast.
- Librarians look at who put out the info, students look at what is being said.
- We assume that all information is not created equal.
- We are not stressed out when we are searching.
Overall: Librarians look at BIAS and GENRE, whereas students look at MATCH and FAMILIARITY.
Example:
When we look at the NYT we are looking at bias. When students choose it they are looking at familiarity. When we do this in class, students think that they are looking at bias, but they are not. It’s not that they have no strategy. They have a strategy that to some extent does work. Familiarity can drive them to better resources. But we need to breakdown their conceptual model, explicitly, and create activities that demonstrate that if they use their conceptual model they will fail, and when they use our conceptual model they will succeed. We need to make our tasks a little more narrow so that they can’t use as a crutch what they do and be able to get by.
Exercise 3
In groups, think of how we can design activities that draw students away from using their basic conceptual models and push them to do what we do (or rather be more critical). How do we make their existing model inadequate so that they are in the market for our model.
Activities:
- CRAP test. Do this in a way that has less information. Give students small, directed tasks to use the crap test on something more limited.
- Students don’t look at genre or texture. Take sources covering the same topic and strip out the information they use as a crutch. Ask them to look at what’s left and make decisions about the differences.
- Have students read a journal article in another language. If you can’t read the language, what else do you rely on to make a judgement?
- Bring best or worse sources they’ve found. Trade off and talk about what they discovered.
- Track a popular source to a scholarly study. How do you know one from the other?
- Set them up to fail. Create situations where students require a new conceptual model. As long as an old model works there is no impulse to change. They’ll not understand why what they are doing is any different from what you are doing or why they need to change.
Q&A
Question: How do we really know what their incorrect conceptual models really are.
Answer: We have been making assumptions here. Create an activity that students respond to that is designed in a way that demonstrates their conceptual model. E.g. the 4% of black students in college example. Based on their answer you know how they are thinking. Activities should confirm or disconfirm your hypothesis of what students should know. It’s possible that they will disconfirm your assumptions about where the conceptual gap is. Be open to be surprised and be wrong. And then fill the gaps that you discover.
Ask students to tell you what criteria they use to give a baseline of what you need to break down and build back up.
