Critical thinking is an important and vital topic in modern education.  All educators are interested in teaching critical thinking to their students and many academic departments hope that its instructors will become informed about the strategy of teaching critical thinking skills, identify areas in one’s courses as the proper place to emphasize and teach critical thinking, and develop and use some problems in exams that test students’ critical thinking skills (Shafersman, 1991).

Unfortunately, in today’s age of ”scantron” and computer delivered assessment and grading the importance of a student’s ability to think critically is being forsaken in favor of efforts to make a course of instruction, face-to-face, hybrid or online, run with minimal instructor intervention.   “Autopilot” courseware seems to be the goal.

Ask yourself…

Do your mid-term and final exams consist of nothing but multiple-choice questions copied from other quizzes delivered in your course?

Do you deliver a “computerized” proctored final exam of multiple-choice and true/false questions?

Is your course designed so that the student is a passive recipient of knowlege (Nosich, 2001)?

Is the primary role of the student in your course to regurgitate information (Nosich, 2001)?

Is your role in the course to dispense knowledge as evidenced by your having  uploading PowerPoints, manuscripts of your lectures, as well as reading assignments only from the course textbook?

Are questions on your exams taken only from what has been covered in class?

Do the problems you assign to students in your course have only one clear solution?

Do you carefully write instructions for your assessments so as to narrow a student’s “focus” to a specific answer?

If you answered “yes” to any of the previous questions, it’s time to take a serious look at whether you are truly teaching anything, concentrating on producing statistics that look great on a spreadsheet, or striving to lessen your personal workload.  In any case, the disservice you are doing your student’s cannot be understated.

“If I include research papers in the course then I will have over 25 papers to grade!” - Anonymous College Instructor

Students today want to be able to flex their intellectual “muscles.”  They want to dig into a subject to find those obscure facts and fascinating stories “behind” the topic.  however, they want to do it in a way they understand and are comfortable with.

Students today feel nothing but frustration when required to memorize obscure facts from a textbook or the ramblings provided in a lecture.  They want to take a topic, “Google” it, and find more references and resources then you ever though imaginable.  They want to deliver a thought-provoking report to you that not only demonstrates their conceptual understanding of a subject but may go so far as to teach you something you didn’t know.

If you want your students to think critically, you have to give them the opportunity.  Though you may find yourself investing more time managing your course, that time will be more than offset in the sense of satisfaction you will gain from knowing you’ve actually taught something.

Trust it will be an experience neither you nor your students will ever forget…

References

Schafersman, December 26, 2007 (1991). An Introduction to Critical Thinking. from Free Inquiry Web site: http://www.freeinquiry.com/critical-thinking.html

Nosich, G. M. (2001). Learning to Think Things Through. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.