If you have students who cannot answer the question “What’s your favourite food?” I would suggest that the problem is significant mental retardation.
If they are foreigners, I suspect they are trying to find a way to get around answering the question because they don’t believe the “there is no wrong answer” bit. There are conceivably societies in which there are wrong answers, but you don’t find that out until you’ve answered.
Seriously, you think these people don’t watch TV? Right.
First, I’d include “logical thinking”, as already said, as a subset of a learned skill into the larger “critical thinking”. Which means broadly knowing that sources can have false info despite intentions, that you have to evaluate the truth of sources; that you have to think farther ahead of possible consequences than the tip of your nose (as Nava said, your exam is not the place to be smartass, because it will hurt you more than the instructors); and most important, acknowledging that you don’t and can’t know everything, and can be wrong in your opinion, as well as make mistakes. (so you should be ready to evaluate your opinion when new evidence comes in, and ready to apologize and make amends if you screwed up).
Of course, like the blind spot of the human eye, the human psyche has blind spots, too, so everybody is to some degree guilty of being uncritical. However, there’s a difference to somebody who doesn’t notice his screwups for 99.99% of the time = dumb, and somebody who has blind spots (and works on them by asking friends or a therapist for feedback to get a different viewpoint).
I don’t know how old your students are, but given that 80% of the adults (based both on personal experience and on other metrics, like what newspapers get bought and what kind of TV appeals to the masses) are apparently unable of any critical thinking, I’m not surprised. Look at most people, they don’t WANT to face that they can make mistakes, that information can be wrong, or that because of the multilevels complicated nature of reality, any oversimplification amounts to half a lie. Most people don’t want to deal with a world in shades of grey, or look at meaning beyond the obvious. Authoriatarian mindset/ personality.
Which also explains why TPTB don’t want schools to teach children critical thinking - if people start questioning authority and demanding explanations instead of “I said so”, and if people think not only of their own mistakes, but also of others, then they are much harder to rule than obedient, authority-trained people. Plus it suits people, too, to have the burden of responsibility of making choices and evaluating them afterwards removed from their shoulders: if they don’t have to decide, just believe and parrot, they can’t make mistakes, so they are Great. And because they don’t look at consequences and reality, good intentions are enough, not what really happend. It’s a nice comfortable world for little children, not the hard world of grown-ups.
I’m not so sure that question is the smoking gun.
I think many people would answer as though the question were “Name a food that you really like”. If you take it at face value and try to think of what’s #1, it’s tough; I can’t think of what’s #1 for me.
People who don’t watch movies or TV are still living in a culture in which those forms of entertainment are ubiquitous and widely-discussed by others who DO watch movies and TV. I find it (let’s be generous) difficult to accept that a person in developed countries (assuming that Superhal is teaching in one) couldn’t name a single movie or TV that they’d heard about even if they never watched a single movie or TV show in their entire life (which I also find difficult to accept).
Pfft. Favorites games are silly anyway - I don’t have a “favorite” food because there are so many foods that I love and what I want at a particular moment could depend on mood etc. So maybe they just had a hard time choosing one, which is totally reasonable.
I think that’s laziness, because if I want to answer that, I’ll explain that I don’t have one favourite food, but like several and then list them. (I generally dislike ordering things by first, second, etc. because most things seem to go in clouds or levels rather - super-best, middle, low, instead of deciding what’s the superbestest of all, I just call this group the best.)
I think it’s understood that questions like this don’t require a 100 percent accurate answer. At least in our society, especially when they are asked as part of a class.
Well… if someone tells me they don’t watch TV, and I don’t know anything else about them, then I tend to think they don’t watch TV.
I’ve known people who don’t watch TV, so I know it’s not impossible.
It’s strange, of course. But I’m not sure what else to think. If SuperHal asked “What’s your favorite TV show” and the response was “I don’t watch TV” there’s nothing about that exchange that makes me think the responder is somehow misunderstanding or unable to perform some kind of task or something. It’s a simple exchange. The natural explanation is the responder doesn’t watch TV.
I’d have to know more about the situation to think the cause of the response was something else.
Look, this thread has gone weird.
Superhal, the responses you’ve listed, given in response to the questions you’ve listed, seem to me to be almost inexplicable. There’s no sign here of a lack of “critical thinking” or a lack of any cognitive skill at all–because there’s no sign of anything. The responses are simply absurd.
All I can figure is one of the following may be the case:
You’re teaching people who don’t speak English.
You’re teaching robots which can only simulate English conversation in the narrowest of fields.
You’re scaring your students.
You’re teaching students who don’t watch TV or movies.
Notice that “You’re teaching students with no critical thinking skills” isn’t on that list. This is because it doesn’t take “critical thinking” to be able to remember simple facts.
Notice also that “You’re teaching idiots” isn’t on that list either. This is because the lack of intelligence required not to be able to recall simple facts goes beyond the colloquial meaning of “idiot” and takes us into the “mentally disabled and unable to care for oneself” range. That does not appear to me to be a possibility, so I didn’t put it on the list.
My point was that on hearing the question “What is your favourite food?”, most people re-interpret the question, because picking a #1 is hard.
You’ve just reiterated my point. You’re reinterpreting the question as “What are your favourite foods?”
I’m lost. How is naming a TV show you like or a favorite food critical thinking? I suppose you could argue that it involves weighing the pros and cons of one show/food against all the others, but I doubt much thought goes into most people’s choices. Now, expressing why they’re your favorites, on the other hand, would be more analytical.
I’ve met a lot of people who are extremely resistant to naming their favorite anything and who would/have given the same sort of answers as the OP’s students to avoid volunteering a choice, but I wouldn’t say they lack critical thinking skills based just on that.
I have to run, but it may be helpful to look at a table or chart of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Thinking to understand what I’m talking about.
I’m not talking about the upper levels, I’m talking about the lower levels.
“Cognitive” != “Critical”
This whole thread is bothering me because so few of the examples have anything to do with critical thinking (which is the evaluation of arguments, probabilities, and likelihood of truth), but we keep using the words “critical thinking” when we actually seem to mean something like “basic memory retrieval.”
But under the exceedingly loose definition of critical thinking we seem to be using here – no, it’s not possible to be unable to do it and still function in society (if you can’t select from a mental list of foods, you’ll starve to death). But it’s quite possible, and perhaps culturally common, to be unwilling to perform many of these feats in a social setting.
Also, I think the OP is highly underestimating the number of folks, especially non-Americans, who don’t watch TV or movies. But even given that, “name the main character of a show you just watched” is a feat I could probably do less than half the time unless I’d seen the show before; I’m bad with names and they rarely carry relevance with fictional characters. I could give a description, sure – but name them? I’ve watched certain series for years and couldn’t name most of the secondary characters.
I still don’t know Doctor Who’s real name, and I’ve watched it for three decades. 
Even if you don’t watch TV, surely you can name one. I don’t watch most TV shows, and I can name hundreds.
I’d be reluctant to give my favorite current TV show because all I watch these days is reality TV but that’s another story.
Yeah, but I suspect that’s cultural, too. I hear hundreds of conversations a year about sports teams, for example, but most men would be stunned at my ignorance of the topic despite being “immersed” in it. And remember that the OP wasn’t asking them to “name any Movie or TV show,” but rather one that was either a favorite (I have no favorite sports team, and in fact probably couldn’t name any significant fraction of my local teams - and I’m including “state” in “local”) or related to a movie they’d just seen ( I couldn’t answer “name a football team with a better record than the Jazz”, either). For many people, TV/Movies just aren’t part of their worldview. Although I’ll freely grant that that’s probably a smaller percentage than those that just aren’t comfortable committing to decisions in public – especially those from consensus cultures, where you just don’t HAVE favorites unless your group does.
Consider the alternative people here seem to be proposing: That there exist large numbers of people who are capable of functioning in society, but nevertheless don’t have the cognitive capability to remember some small fraction of an arbitrarily large list and choose an item from it at random. Are we seriously proposing that? How could a person with such a deficient intellect survive crossing the street or walking down stairs?
Somewhat off topic, but here is an example of “people are stupid”. Someone bought some ground seeds rather than the whole seeds the recipe called for. They wanted to know how much of the ground seed they should use in place of the whole. A great question that I was happy to answer. I look at the packages, which are sold by volume, to see how much the seeds weighed. Turns out that 1/2 cup of the whole seeds were 1 oz and 1/2 cup of the ground seeds weighed the same. I told her she can just use the same amount as the same volume of each weighed the same. She did not understand and said “but I’m not measuring by weight, it’s in teaspoons”. I could see how she could be confused, so I said that a teaspoon of each weighed the same so she could just use the same measurement as in the recipe. “No”, she insisted, “I’m not doing it by weight”. At that point I just gave up. Note that this was not about how ground seeds might have more flavor, as we had already discussed that.
She seemed perfectly intelligent and had mentioned how she thought whole seeds wouldn’t pack as densely as ground (my first thought as well). But she could not grasp that if a teaspoon of each weighed the same they had the same amount of “stuff”.
Some people may be ‘wired’ to think according to simple rules. If they believe something to be true, they may not have any way to analyze the results of it being false. Sometimes the rules don’t even seem to be fixed. Tell them something is true today, and they will act as if it is. Tell them the opposite tomorrow and they will act based on that.
None of this addresses the impossibility of learning critical thinking though. It may be that any ability to learn, i.e., use the results of previous information to predict a result, involves critical thinking. In that sense a flatworm exhibits critical thinking. So you must be looking at the ability to imagine circumstances to conclude a result instead of using experience alone. That may be something that people have at differing levels, and maybe some have so little of it that it would appear to be impossible to teach them how to do it.
I agree with those who’ve said that the OP’s questions don’t come anywhere close to measuring critical thinking as the phrase is normally used. “I don’t know/remember” could easily be the response of an indifferent or lazy person, not a stupid one. Or someone who is sheltered or unimaginative.
People who can’t think critically aren’t necessarily going to be the ones who can’t name a favorite food (shit, maybe they’re anorexic and hate food). An important red flag is someone who is unable to defend a particular position logically, without resorting to circular arguments. But even before you get to that point, you have to be able to explain a position; failure to do this is another sign that someone is a weak thinker.
So instead of asking students questions like “Who is the main character of this story?”, it would probably make more sense for you to ask to them to explain the main storyline or basic conflict of the movie. To further separate the wheat from the chaff, you should then ask them to critique the hero’s actions. Did he do the right thing? Should he have behaved diffferently?
I’d be more inclined to think students who answered “He was right because he was fighting against the bad guy” or “He was wrong because it’s against the law to kill someone” were lower level thinkers than students who answered “His actions were justified because if he’d acquiesed to the antagonist’s demands, he’d be in a lose-lose position; killing the guy was a practical and ethically defensible way to undo the quandary he was stuck with.”