[bolding mine]WTF?
This reminded me of people who for various reasons, don’t respond well to questions in the school environment, and other similar circumstances. It may not be an indicator of their ability to think at all.
The difference may be negligible for small seeds.
Yes, it is true that if a 1/2 cup of each weighed the same then a teaspoon each weighs the same as well. Maybe your confusion is that I used two different measurements of volume? The package was 1/2 cup which is why I used it the first time, and when she mentioned teaspoons I used that instead because it was clear she had not grasped that if two different items of the same volume weigh the same then a teaspoon of each would have the same amount of “stuff”.
It turns out I just can’t fucking read.:o
It gets worse. I couldn’t explain to one person that if the sour cream is sold by the pound, and the recipe called for 1 cup, they just had to use a measuring cup to get the right amount. He insisted that wouldn’t work right for something sold by weight. Not only that, he was sure that the container he was looking at contained about one cup, but it still wouldn’t work because of the weight on the label.
How is “define X” a test of critical thought? Memorization, which 99.999% of vocabulary skills is comprised of, is not critical thought. Also, “give examples of X” is not a valid test of critical thought either unless you can assert with substantial authority that the testee has measurable knowledge of X in the first place. Regardless of what X is, that is still not a test of critical thinking, it is a test of experience and knowledge (i.e., storage of facts and/or information).
Critical thought is the ability to perform logical manipulation of ideas, both abstract and concrete, and to create reasonable conclusions based on those logical manipulations of ideas. I don’t see any question before the “Analyzing” level that touches on critical thought at all. And the last one, “creating”, is definitely not a valid measurement of critical thinking ability (keyword there is “original” which in common usage means ‘has not been created before’). I would hope that you don’t actually mean ‘original’ but simply mean that the experiment (logical process) you want the student to cough up is one which the student has not previously memorized and can in fact be logically deduced from first principles. The answer (experiment to prove or disprove X) does not in any way have to be “original” (i.e., never before created), just logical, in order to be valid.
Based on what you’ve provided, I think the defect, if any, lies in your processes, and not in the students (regardless of how stupid they may be 
).
I agree, but didn’t make it clear with my overly rhetorical response.
I don’t understand the OP, either. How can you have a classroom of children who cannot name a favourite food, unless they’re all children with extremely severe mental disabilities? Since that doesn’t seem to be the case, I don’t believe the OP is giving us a clear picture of what the hell is going on in his classroom. Nobody on the planetwith an IQ above, say, 60, would really be unable to name a food they liked. And that’s not “critical thinking,” anyway.
you with the face, your examples best illustrate questions that test critical thinking.
I always liked to teach the short story “The Lady or the Tiger” because almost all of my students had opinions on which one came from behind the door. And they were sometimes passionate in backing up their thinking.
Even small children can be taught critical thinking skills on subjects that are relevant to them. But the questions must be clear to the person who is asked – no matter what the age.
Everyone is born incapable of doing even the lowest level of critical thinking.
I can think of two (overlapping) possibilities:
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The students are disaffected. They aren’t interested in learning, don’t want to be part of the lesson and know that the less they engage with the teacher the sooner he will give up and let them go back to sleep.
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The students view the classroom environment as hostile and are going into “yessir nossir” defensive mode. This may not be the teacher’s fault - the students may be afraid of getting a hard time from their classmates if they admit to liking an uncool food or movie or TV programme.
I’ve known student teachers complain of exactly the same problem as the OP - a simple question like “What do you like for breakfast?” gets a null answer “I don’t know” “We don’t eat breakfast”. This has nothing to do with intelligence or critical thinking and everything to do with the children either not wanting to engage with the teacher or fearing that actually answering the question will get them stigmatised.
This is why I would end up saying “I don’t know” and to questions.
From the examples that Superhal gave, it seems like he’s trying to teach by making the lessons relate to the students’ lives. But sometimes the students’ lives simply aren’t relevant to the lesson. When a student (who knows his life better than the teacher knows it) runs across that kind of situation, he may answer non-responsively. If the student only watches Sunday & Monday Night Football, comparing that to a scripted tv show doesn’t really work. It isn’t a lack of critical thinking skills, it’s that the question doesn’t make sense.
There’s also that the students are asked to put their lives on display and having their life judged. While the teacher is supposed to evaluate the student’s ability to compare, sometimes teachers (and oftentimes classmates) end up judging the students choices. A student who has the wrong favorites and likes the wrong foods, programs, movies, etc. can end up with a lower grade and social ostracism. “I dunno” and “I don’t have a favorite food” is a far safer answer than the truth and easier than trying to work out the details involved in a specific lie.
I don’t think asking about populations of cities or average earnings is the same as asking about religious belief. The former are manifest measures, theoretically calculable. If by “largest” one means “the most people,” then it is theoretically possible to count the people in each city in France and order them from largest to smallest. Censuses attempt to count people, and although they cannot be 100% correct, there is a theoretical “true” number of people in Paris and in the other cities in France. That number is an integer, and integers can be ordered.
The same goes for the average earnings of doctors versus waiters. As long as we are sufficiently precise about what constitutes a doctor and a waiter and a host of other situational variables, the fact that there is a theoretical “true” average earnings for waiters and doctors is tenable; frequentist statisticians always try to estimate parameters. The paradigm is to condition on the parameters being true and contemplating the data as varying.
From a Bayesian standpoint, maybe it is unreasonable to talk of true averages or true counts, but that is certainly not the only defensible position from a critical thinking standpoint.
Now, why is religious belief different? I would classify religious belief as a latent (unobservable) variable that dwells entirely within a person’s head. I can try to elicit measurements of belief through questionnaires, but answers to these are only indications of “religious belief.” At its heart, it is not quantifiable; show me a unit of religious belief. Contrast this with populations and averages. Populations have a natural measurement in the integers, and averages in the real numbers. No such natural measurement exists for things like “belief,” or “attitude,” or “intention,” or any other psychometric variable.
Hmmm… I’ll just assume you missed my previous post. My understanding is that the lower levels have more to do with basic recall than critical thinking.
To wit: here’s a quote from some of the material I work on that includes a discussion of Bloom’s work with cognitive complexity. In fact, my employer abandoned Bloom several years ago because
What follows is a discussion of Webb’s DOK levels (bolding mine):
Based upon my understanding of both Bloom’s and Webb’s work with cognitive complexity, critical thinking skills don’t even come into play until you get to higher order cognition.
So, to reiterate my previous query: Is it possible that your students are having trouble answering your questions because of your communication or writing style? Are you 100% sure that your wording is crystal clear and is grade-level appropriate? Or are you trying to force critical thinking into Bloom’s lower cognitive complexity levels?
I so like this post … I have been in such a postion so many times in my educational career (16 years thank you very much). Some questions put forth by teachers – whether asked verbally or written on a friggin test paper – are irrelevant and nonsensical based on the context. For example, any question which requests a comparison between A and B but fails to allow for the response that neither is better (let alone desirable) is bogus. Questions like “Which sport team do you like better?” … ummmmm … how about I think both are equally worthless because I hate that particular sport? Bet you never see that response available on a multiple answer test. Happened to me more times than I can count.
Another common flaw in educational circles is asking about comparative value. Value is subjective unless the test explicitly posits a given value … but so many test questions, especially in language-oriented (i.e., non-scientific) classes, involving valuation are left open and unframed, so you either have to assume a ‘generally acceptable value’ to test or you’re stuck being unable to answer. If I’ve never owned object X, let alone purchased it at retail, how the flak am I supposed to judge it’s supposed value? Happened to me more times than I can count.
I am somewhat reserved, and simply choose not to share my life story with every man+dog on the street, and I hated … even despised … teachers that tried to make lessons “relevant” by asking personal questions. Happened to me more times than I can count.
I hated the students in class that would always try to relate a question to some personal experience which any reasonably intelligent human could see well before the long winded expository gush ended had absolutely no relevance whatosever to the lesson at hand. But of course the teacher would always fawn over the student about how wonderful it was that he/she related so much of their personal life story (that nobody in class wanted to hear in the first place) to whatever they thought they were talking about, and so I hated both the teacher for being stupid, and then I hated the student for making all us normal people appear to be putzes in the eyes of the teach because we were not interested in engaging in time wasting verbal diarea. Happened to me more times than I can count.
So … just to circle back to the original theme of the thread … hell yeah it’s possible for some people to be unable to do critical thinking … in my experience those people are generally Liberal Arts majors and often end up as teachers. :eek:
Yes, but the point is that you didn’t do that. Somebody told you that Paris is the largest city, and you believed them. Yet you just claimed that if the only source of information is hearsay, that makes the answer unknowable.
I would have no problem with you evaluating “Paris is the largest city” as a fact if you also claimed to have ascertained that physically, but you didn’t. You simply accpeted that as fact because somebody told you.
Quote from Dogzilla: Bloom’s Taxonomy is difficult to use because it requires an inference about the skill, knowledge, and background of the students responding to the item. Beginning in 2004, the DOE implemented a new cognitive classification system based upon Dr. Norman L. Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) levels. The rationale for classifying an item by its DOK level of complexity focuses on the expectations made of the item, not on the ability of the student. When classifying an item’s demands on thinking (i.e., what the item requires the student to recall, understand, analyze, and do), it is assumed that the student is familiar with the basic concepts of the task.
Can someone give me an example to clarify the difference between Bloom and DOK as contrasted above?
I work as a baker and start work at 2am I find that I have extreme difficulty thinking critically when I arrive at work and for a couple hours afterwards. It’s probably a combination of the odd time to be awake, mild sleep deprivation, and the strait jacket of the routine I have to follow.
I’m pretty sure that certain types of life stress really interfere with critical thinking. If your students are experiencing this kind of stress they may not do well on critical thinking tests.
I’m parsing it this way: Certain answers, like “What is the largest city in France?” or “Who was the first President of Russia?”, are entirely knowable (given defined terms) in principle. They rely on facts that are not in dispute among anyone worth listening to. If you accept the notion of consensus reality as real, they are questions purely about real things.
Questions like “Do the majority of people believe in an afterlife?” do not. It is entirely possible to make the statements “Everyone believes in an afterlife.” and “Nobody believes in an afterlife.” without possibility of being gainsaid, because it is impossible to objectively measure belief. Beliefs are in the realm of purely mental constructs and neurology isn’t up to the task of picking such things out of objectively measured brain activity.
(I was just thinking about Bell’s Inequality last night. Recast the above in terms of hidden variables if you need to.)
As far as I can tell, Derleth thinks it’s an absolutely objective, measurable fact that the majority of people believe in an afterlife.
I mean, Derleth says otherwise, but who knows what that means?
(BTW, Derleth, you only have it on hearsay that it is in theory possible to objectively measure the number of people in France.)
Cute, but wrong.
Once we define the words ‘people’, ‘live’, and ‘France’, it is obviously possible to measure how many people live in France. However, no suitable definition for ‘belief in the afterlife’ exists, because we can’t objectively measure belief. We’re held back by the usual lying and lack of prior consideration (“I’ve never really thought about it before”) that accompanies any attempt to pry into an internal mental state.
More philosophically, however, is the fact that there is some number that is the number of people who live in France, regardless of whether we can measure it accurately. France exists, and those people exist, quite independently of our ability to count or properly define borders. Beliefs, on the other hand, have no separate existence; they’re entirely in the mind, part of subjective reality liable to be changed simply by how the question is worded.