Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills • Hacker News Board

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#281

Post by _saturnine » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

MaxGabriel wrote: post #249

ergothus wrote: post #245

I remember the moment I unlocked the critical thinking I do have. It was 7th grade, and I was in a home-ec-like class. The day before we had learned how to order from mail order catalogues (showing my age there). This day the teacher passed out magazines, told us to pick an ad, and then find 5 ways it was misleading. Easy, right? Sex, money, Fame, these associations are in a bunch of ads, and everyone knows about the…

Side story about the 4/5 recommendation, this one for toothpaste: apparently Colgate would just ask dentists to list every type of toothpaste they recommended, and 80% of those doctors wrote down Colgate as an option, thus the "four out of five dentists recommend Colgate" ads. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-...

There is/was a whitening toothpaste called Rembrandt. In a competitor's ad they made the claim, "Even Rembrandt can't beat it!". They wanted you to hear that it was better than Rembrandt, but they were actually saying it was equivalent.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#282

Post by colomon » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #257

jdmichal wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often thought that a lot of the high-brow analysis put into art was junk. Just people taking dots and connecting them with shreds of evidence existent in the art. Confirmation bias masquerading as analysis. It's nice to see an artist agreeing with that viewpoint. I should clarify that I don't mind when the context of a piece is explained. I like knowing about where the artist was when a work was created; what wa…

Ha! I don't know if you've ever seen Ocean's 13, but there's a line in that movie that cracks me up along the same "high brow" analysis lines. > Matt Damon - "Do you have any wine back there? > Lady - "Château d'Yquem?" > Matt Damon - "As long as it's not '73..." Just makes me chuckle every time because he's a con artist in such a broad field almost nobody can actually identify all of the good and bad varieties from…

Haven't seen the movie, so it's hard to directly comment, but for what it's worth, Château d'Yquem is a very famous wine. Exactly the (rare) sort where the popular wine magazines will routinely every few years have an article reviewing how the different historic vintages are holding up -- should you drink that 1975 d'Yquem now or hold it a few more years?

It also would be a very dangerous wine to BS about if you didn't know anything about it. 1973 apparently was a lesser year. (Still, it would run you something like $500 a bottle today.) 1975 and 1976 were classic years, name those as something to skip and people will be questioning your taste. And they didn't release a wine at all for the 1972 and 1974 vintages, because they didn't think the grapes were up to snuff.

I had to look those details up because I haven't paid much attention to wine in 20 years. (Wife doesn't like it, so it's hard to justify buying even $20 bottle. Not that I ever could have afforded a Château d'Yquem.) But I still remembered the mid-70s produced a couple of really good vintages. Someone who was actively into wine could probably have given you all those details without any research.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#283

Post by antisthenes » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #280

MaxGabriel wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side story about the 4/5 recommendation, this one for toothpaste: apparently Colgate would just ask dentists to list every type of toothpaste they recommended, and 80% of those doctors wrote down Colgate as an option, thus the "four out of five dentists recommend Colgate" ads. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-...

Now I'm very interested why 20% wouldn't write down Colgate. Did they know something the others didn't?

They probably just forgot about it.

If someone asked you to write all the brands of X that you've ever used, can you remember all of them, especially if they were nearly equivalent in quality and use case?

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#284

Post by msluyter » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

davidf18 wrote: post #195

Why wait for college to teach critical thinking skills? My father is a prof at a major university and we grew up discussing ideas, but high schools can teach critical thinking skills and problem solving. My high school was owned by the university and we did a lot of critical thinking. Jewish religious schools (Yeshivas) teach critical thinking skills by studying the Talmud [1]. A number of Yeshiva students take the L…

The best introduction to logic and critical thinking I ever experienced was in a high school english class. In particular, understanding the various informal fallacies (hasty generalization, post hoc ergo propter hoc, argumentum ad populum, etc...) was extremely influential in turning me into a young rationalist.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#285

Post by blorsh » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #34

jseliger wrote: post #2

I've taught college. This study is wildly unsurprising. I've written about this in various places (e.g. https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... ), but most colleges have evolved majors and paths that are designed to move students through the system, collect their tuition money, and graduate them. In re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, bu…

"Paying for the party" is amusing. "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" covers much the same material. The importance of drinking didn't happen by accident. The alcohol industry promoted it heavily.[1] Two out of five students in the colleges studied are now binge drinkers. I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs fo…

Fox and Breitbart have both lost key leaders due to death. (and other causes) They are both rapidly transitioning to the views of typical reporters (journalism majors), which will soon put them on the left. Breitbart has even started firing people who are strongly toward the right.

One America News Network is still on the right. It probably isn't moving... yet.

It's rather hard to operate a non-left media outlet when nearly all potential employees are far left. It's like standing in a stream, trying to push the water back upward with a rake. Good luck with that.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#286

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #143

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #102

i have several questions here: - how does one measure critical thinking in a survey? The article doesn't say so. - The humanities/liberal arts are supposed to encourage critical thinking, how do the Humanities compare vs exact sciences/engineering in terms of critical thinking? - Do employers really value critical thinking, or does too much critical thinking inhibit your career prospects in an organisation?

This is the test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiate_Learning_Assessment There are a lot of studies about what is critical thinking, how to test and teach it: eg. http://windsor.scholarsportal.info/ojs/leddy/index.php/infor... Here's a PDF about the CLA itself: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUSE/SEAL/Reports_Papers/highe... > liberal arts ... Yes, good insight, it'd be good to have access to the data. > employe…

Thanks, I wonder about the nature of the jobs that have a requirement for critical thinking: these might be analysts, or managerial posts, how prevalent is this requirement?

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#287

Post by rotexo » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 6:38 PM UTC

I don't think I was forced to develop critical thinking in a systematic way until my PhD, where I actually had to produce ideas that would withstand scrutiny by both professional scientists and experiments. I went to a magnet high school and then a liberal arts college and the emphasis seemed largely on preparing for tests at both places. It is probably true that I could have developed my thinking more at an earlier stage if I had been more self-motivated. Needless to say, the PhD was a painful experience.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#288

Post by wccrawford » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

gagege wrote: post #164

wccrawford wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about what you've done to "develop critical thinking skills". I learned that kind of thing really young and I've always enjoyed puzzles and thinking, so it's not something I've had to work on. And when I've seen others have problems with it, I've never seen them improve. I've watched them learn facts and processes, but never seen them actually learn how to think about new things that weren't given to them…

My wife, for one, did not grow up in an environment that encouraged critical thinking. In school she did the work and got 'A's, but admits that she never really questioned anything. And apparently her parents never tried to get her to ask deeper questions about the world. She wasn't really interested in science, literature, math, or history. She wasn't really interested in anything having to do with education. It was…

"just let all the information wash over you" is one of the things that I think is required of someone that thinks well. I find that too many people either accept or (worse) reject information immediately without considering it. In that state, you either can't think critically about new information, or your old information, depending. I think the inability to look at "facts" and consider them unreliable is one thing that keeps people from being able to think well.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone learned something 20 years ago and absolutely refuses to accept that it might be wrong, simply because someone in authority taught it to them.

Authority means nothing in the end, and memories fail.

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#289

Post by rotexo » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 6:41 PM UTC

Banthum wrote: post #36

Lots of reasons for this. Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill. So rare that I think it'd be damn difficult to find faculty who could even start teaching it. I don't think most faculty come close to being solid critical thinkers. Whereas most beliefs are life-long emotional self-indulgence parties (my tribe good! their tribe bad!) critical thinking is a life-long strugg…

I definitely agree that developing critical thinking is a life-long struggle. (Lack of thought: the original sin of the rationalist?)

Re: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

#290

Post by blorsh » Tue, Jun 06, 2017, 6:45 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #11

The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually learning the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of "testing" whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and deve…

If "learning and developing new skills" isn't the exact same thing as test preparation, then the test needs to be fixed.

Good tests matter. Teaching to the test is the same thing as teaching the material needed, given that the test is decent.

Direct any complaints toward poor-quality tests.