I’m creating a scoring rubric for critical thinking based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognition and I feel that some of my past students were born with a birth defect or had some sort of head trauma that rendered them incapable of doing even the lowest levels of critical thinking.
Is there a recognized medical or psychological condition that causes a person to be unable to, for example, give an example of a horror movie, or understand the logic of a basic argument?
In my experience, students in college who did not have minimally decent gradeschool educations have a really difficult time with a lot of this kind of thing. Gradeschools don’t typically have “critical thinking” classes, and I don’t know to what extent individual subjects in gradeschool have explicit “critical thinking” components, but it looks to me as though just the practice of daily having to answer questions e.g. about what texts say and how to do math and so on gives students a kind of instinct for answering questions like the ones you’re thinking of.
But if they didn’t get that kind of practice in gradeschool, then now that they’re adults, their brains seems sort of “solidified” in a way that, unfortunately, does not include critical thinking. This is not to say they can’t learn it, but it does seem difficult.
I have many, many students who will go all semester, having taken the class seriously, having really really tried, having practiced, even having seemed to “get it” in moments only to “lose it” an hour later, who will, at the end of that semester, be unable to fill in the blanks of the following to make the sentence false: “No ______ are _______”
The problem isn’t actually completely trivial. I still find myself occasionally accidentally making the sentence true. But I recognize the mistake and correct it when it happens. Many of my students never get to the “recognizing the mistake” part. And it’s not laziness. The skill just seems to be fundamentally difficult to acquire for them. But I don’t think it’s “genetic” or indicates a “brain defect” because my impression is that there’s a correlation between difficulty of acquiring this skill, and probable quality of gradeschool education. (Based on my knowledge of students’ backgrounds given the school I’m teaching at at the time, self-disclosures, and so on.) A minimally decent gradeschool education will have included lots of “fill in the blank” questions and lots of practice with distinguishing between true and false statements. It may be hard to believe, but these are skills that have to be acquired. They don’t come naturally–kids have to learn it. And some didn’t get to learn this as a kid. They have to learn it as adults. And with the above kind of problem, I’m asking them to do both at the same time.
Sorry, no studies to cite. Just my impressions having taught a few courses.
Ditto what Frylock said.
I think it’s like learning a second language: if you are not exposed to a second language while young it’s very difficult to acquire one later in life.
Whereas those that learn a second language while young not only do so relatively easily, but they also find it easier to learn further languages.
To answer the OP more directly, while there are disorders that could preferentially affect critical thinking, I don’t think there are any that have a high enough incidence among the young to account for what you’ve noticed.
I think it’s good that you’re testing critical thinking as I think part of the problem is that education systems neglect the importance of this.
When I was at school, the scientific method meant practice writing a hypothesis, conclusion etc. What it didn’t mean was understanding the essential philosophy behind all this, and why we should have confidence in scientific theories even though science does not claim Truth.
Hmm, maybe I need to clarify a little bit. In the rubric I have, the levels of critical thinking would result in a series of questions like this:
Remembering: Define X.
Understanding: Give examples of X.
Applying: Is X the same or different in another country?
Analyzing: How would you change part of X to get a better result or lessen negative effects?
Evaluating: Defend or refute this argument: X is the best choice only because the other options are worse.
Creating: Create an original experiment that proves X is false.
I know that anything after Understanding is difficult even for college students. However, I have had students unable to do Remembering and Understanding as well. For example, whatever gains they make by Friday are lost by Monday. I consistently have students that tell me they are unable to make examples of even the most simplistic ideas (e.g. horror movies, books they read, movies they have watched, their favorite foods, etc.)
I’ve never seen this as a regular occurence, so I’m not sure what’s going on with your students.
I have had students on occasion seem to be unable to come up with examples of simple concepts like the ones you listed–and on those occasions, it has seemed to me that what was happening was that the question was so simple that the student felt almost as though there must be a trick or something. Or (this has happened with a couple of adult learners in my experience, but just very early in the course) the student seemed to think that by answering such a simple inquiry with a simple answer, she’d be in some sense presumptiuously talking down to her professor, and she wanted to avoid that.
You’re teaching children, not adults, right? Is it at all possible that something is happening like the first possibility I mentioned–the students are in a sense dumbfounded by how simple the question is, expecting (and looking for) some deeper, harder question behind it?
I don’t have much hope that’s what’s happening if it’s a serious, regular occurence, esp. if the same students do it over and over again even after several rounds of practice allowing them to see there’s no trick…
But other than that, I’ve got nothin’.
Also, are you sure that they completely understand the question?
That is, that their english is up to scratch and that they’re paying attention?
w.r.t. disorders: assuming these students perform badly at these tasks only, and not at, say, maths, then things like dyslexia, asperger’s and aphasia spring to mind. If any of your students have epilepsy then this increases the likelihood that the student has had a head trauma or developmental defect.
Of course, you wouldn’t expect these pathologies to affect a significant proportion of students in an average classroom.
Is it possible that your communication style is a factor here?
Because of the way in which you wrote this sentence, I would not be able to answer the question because I can’t understand what you are trying to say. What does “Make an example of a horror movie” mean? I can’t figure out what you are asking students to do, based solely upon the way you’ve worded this, so perhaps the students don’t really understand what you are asking them to do either.
If you are trying to say that your students cannot simply recall a horror movie they saw, that’s just recall and has little to do with critical thinking. If you are trying to say that students can watch a horror movie and then not be able to analyze where the protagonist made his first mistake before the zombies ate his brains, then that would be critical thinking. But to simply say, “Make an example of a horror movie,” doesn’t really tell me very clearly what information you want me to spit back out.
Or perhaps it’s just me. I have trouble with language because I work with it all day long, trying to help people make their communication more clear and precise (so the rest of us know what the fuck you’re talking about). Sometimes a simple sentence confuses me because I’m so keenly aware of all the subtle nuances in meaning for all the words in the sentence and perhaps the speaker didn’t think of all that. So I often ask a lot of questions that make people go :rolleyes: because what was clear to you and most everyone else isn’t necessarily clear to me because I can think of ten other ways to make the language more precise so you’re saying what you mean.
P.S. “Do” is the weakest verb in the English language. There is almost always a stronger, more descriptive, more accurate verb. In the case of the thread title, a more precise way to write it could be “Is it possible to be unable to think critically?” That you chose a weak verb like “do” makes me question how you are communicating the questions you are asking your students.
I find, working with public library patrons, that sometimes people are just stupid. Not ignorant, but dumb. Yes, these people cannot think critically because they barely think at all. It does not occur to them to try thinking for a change. They have unlively minds. It sounds cruel, but it’s true and if you want to be able to help them accomplish whatever they came to the library to do you have got to accept that and figure out how to give them what they need.
Overlapping, but not the same, are literacy issues. I have people who are taking college classes online (seriously) who honestly read at maybe a third grade level. If that. They have trouble with words like “images”. I had a patron who needed me to explain a very clearly written assignment by dumbing it into even smaller words - essentially, all she needed to do was draw pictures of various theories about juvenile delinquency. That’s it. Her literacy issues made it difficult for her to understand the assignment, but her general dullness made it essentially impossible - she found it very difficult to grasp that she had to make up the pictures.
I doubt your students are on this level, because I doubt the worst examples made it very far in school at all, but yes - for whatever reason, nature or nurture, there are people who either can’t or don’t think critically. But, some people just look like they can’t or don’t because they can’t (or don’t!) read so good.
A couple of points IME.
In teaching I’ve met many college students who came from school programs that explicitly taught critical thinking skills. IME they’ve been even worse off than the schools that taught regular subjects well. You don’t teach grade schoolers or even high schoolers to think-- you teach them structured facts and yes, even memorization of the same. They’ll think once they get to college, and probably not until they get grad school. (Yes, this is an extreme generalization… but let me continue)
Instead, I see kids who were taught all these critical thinking skills, sat in circles in class, discussed how the felt about history and wrote about their iPods and guess what? The kids who memorized the names of U.S. presidents and learned how to diagram sentences always, ALWAYS blow them out of the water when it comes to common sense thinking.
It’s taught me that teaching children is like baking a cake. You don’t put a cake in the oven before you’ve mixed the ingredients, you don’t spend/waste your time teaching college-level concepts to 8th graders.
Anyway, my opinion, others are valid, etc.
Oh, and to echo Zsofia-- there is such a thing as a bell curve distribution in life. Not every kid, or adult, is smart. There’s an average, and there are people below it. Doesn’t make them any less of a person, and I refuse to condescend to anyone, but just as there are many people smarter than me, there are people who aren’t as smart as I am, and won’t grasp what I grasp no matter how patiently I explain it. But they may be better at music, or art, or beer pong… takes all kinds, such is life.
I’ve had this discussion with my husband more than once; I think a particular way, and I have historically expected other people to think that way, too, because what you know is what you expect. He has given me a lot of insight into how other people think, and I think it’s true to say that some people either don’t or can’t think critically (the difference is moot for me, but I’m not trying to teach them). I’m not sure what role intelligence plays in this; I suspect that lower intelligence people don’t get very far up your rubric, Superhal.
nay, I can tell thee more… 
anyway, some people don’t just do zero “critical thinking”. Some people have poor reading comprehension as such. If you are too dumb to understand the text, it’s hard to be critically thinking about it in any sense of the word.
Being encouraged to discuss what you feel about history, or to write about your iPod, is not being taught critical thinking. That sort of thing is trying to teach them to express themselves (or something like that). Talking about your feelings about something is almost the diametric opposite of critical thinking, in which you need to be able to put your feelings aside, and focus on facts and logical relations. Whether or not it is of any educational value in itself, it is irrelevant to the question of whether there is any value in trying to teach critical thinking skills to young children.
I think you might be on to something there.
Doing logical thinking is an acquired skill. Even if it’s as logically obvious as the following:
If A is true, then B is true,
If B is true, then C is true.
A is true.
it’s not going to be obvious to someone not trained that you can deduce that C is true. Logical thinking is not inborn. It’s a skill that one doesn’t acquire until well into elementary school, at the earliest. Harder parts of critical thinking aren’t acquired until even later. It’s no accident that critical thinking courses with long lists of logical fallacies to be avoided aren’t taught until high school or college age. Most people aren’t ready till then.
For that matter, counting is an acquired skill. There have been studies recently of certain Amazonian tribes that don’t count. Yes, they literally never use counting. It’s simply not of any use to them. They never go beyond the level that all other groups reach at about age 5. They can tell that a group of objects is larger than another group, but they don’t bother to count the two groups. Most people in most societies acquire the ability to count between ages 5 and 7. They also learn to add the numbers. This is not an inborn skill. It’s one that is taught by repetition during that age period.
Echoing that trying to teach “critical thinking” on its lonesome, like trying to teach “teamwork” out of context, isn’t something that works well or makes a lot of sense. They are skills you learn while doing something else. And, depending on both nature and nurture factors, some people just don’t.
My sister in law is an example of someone who hadn’t learned critical thinking until she was well into adulthood; therefore, an example of someone for whom the problem was clearly lack of nurture. Her father was an authoritary, self-centered bastard who despised her for the sin of being female; any critical thinking in his presence (and specially any critical speaking) would have had bad consequences, so not-thinking-critically was a necessary survival skill. If her teachers were like mine, there was a mixture of those who wanted to see what they wanted to see and that was it (not very good at teaching critical thinking), and those who liked critical thinking and who tried to teach their students both how to do it and when not to overdo it (your University Entrance ESL exam is not a particularly good place to be giving smartass answers: doing so would actually be a failure on your critical thinking). The second kind, at least for me, didn’t try to kick into gear those students who were happy not performing critical thinking, and I don’t see any reason they should have done it.
Isn’t critical thinking in an educational context just the academic/intellectual extension of an everyday skill that ought to be covered by the theory of mind of even a primary school student: to deal with information of varying reliability - of true, biased, mistaken, self-serving or even mendacious statements of fact or opinion, from familiar and unfamiliar sources, even from authority figures?
In this every day context some people are extremely credulous (so, by extension, would be incapable of critical thinking), and all of us do not engage critical thinking sometimes out of laziness.
BTW I once had one example of a critical thinking problem in a test where I disagreed with the official solution, so was found deficient in critical thinking:
Q: “A lot of people believe in life after death” - choose True, False, Unknown
A (official): True (the question is not whether there is life after death but whether people believe in it)
A (mine): Unknown (the question is indeed about whether people believe in it, but I cannot know what they believe - I can only know what they say they believe).
I would argue that there is plenty of other evidence that a lot of people believe in life after death, over and above what they say. For instance, religious behaviour, rituals observed when burying the dead, and so on.
If I were evaluating the test, any person answering as you did would either have failed that question, or failed 90% of the rest.
By the standard that you used to respond to that statement, you would also have had to answer unknown to statements such as “Paris is the largest city in France” or “On average, doctors earn more than waiters”. It is impossible for you to know that Paris is the largest cityin France, or that Doctors earn more than waiters, you can only know that people tell you those things.
The evaluator did you a favour for only failing you on that one question, rather than applying that standard universally to all the questions you answered. Critical thinking isn’t primarily about getting an answer that is true to the nth degree. It is about applying a consistent standard of thought that you believe will produce the right answer most consistently. If, in your case, that means that you consider all hearsay from all sources as “unknown”, that is acceptable critical thought. What is not acceptable is if you apply that standard to what God people profess to believe in, but not to what city they profess to live in, or what salary they profess to earn. Unless you could show me that you have actually visited the homes of everybody in France or vetted the bank accounts of all doctors and waiters, then you haven’t applied your own standard consistently.
Most of our facts come from self-reporting, whether about religious belief or income or the results of a double blind trial. We almost never see the actual basis for those reports. While it’s fine to say that all such self-reports are unknown, it’s not fine to say that some aren’t and some are.
Just an anecdote, but I’ve observed in college that there were some students that seemed to learn by memorization. They seemed ‘smart’ in the sense that they were patient and determined enough to study the material to the point that they remembered the correct answer on the test.
But when they were grouped with me in a class that involved writing a children’s book, and assigned the illustrators, this is what happened-
“What should be draw?”
“Its a children’s book, so we have a lot of leeway on the illustrations. Go nuts!”
“Yeah but what should we draw”
“Anything you think best follows the story, I’ll give you total creative control”
“I don’t know what to draw because the teacher didn’t say what the illustrations are supposed to look like. I don’t want to get an F on this for doing it wrong”
:smack:
You might be on to something here.
Yes, but I think this is a reading issue rather than a critical thinking issue. But, in my experience, I deal with content in one of two ways: drawing on the student’s experience or the question deals with something the student was told to study, both cases would allow the student to do critical thinking in spite of being too dumb to understand the text.
For example, I give the students a reading which summarizes a particular film, a film where the title isn’t the name of the main character, and there aren’t too man characters to confuse the student, let’s say a hero, his girlfriend, and the villain. I also show the film, lecture about the story, and have group discussion talking about the main points. Also, I know that this film is summarized on Wikipedia, and there is also a link on the same page leading to the same information in the student’s first language.
Question 1: Who was the main character in the film?
Question 2: Name a similar film you have seen.
Here’s typical answers I might receive from someone who is critical thinking deficient.
Answer to 1: I don’t remember./I don’t know.
Answer to 2: I don’t like to watch movies.
I have also received similar answers when dealing with TV shows. When asked for an example of a TV show, the students will answer, “I’ve never watched TV.”
On my scale, remembering is a relatively low level of critical thinking. However, I have had students who can’t even do that. I think it’s normal for students to be in a range where they are better or worse at different types of critical thinking, but to have absolutely no ability at any level is the point of this thread.
I’m really leaning towards “dropped on their head as a baby,” but that’s kind of insulting to head-dropped babies who were successful.
Or maybe they don’t like to watch movies and they’ve never watched TV?
I’m confused.