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Applied Critical Thinking (ACT) at RIT-Dubai

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ACT at RIT

  • University Initiative (600 of 2000 annual courses, gen ed)
  • 21st century skills tied to effective citizenship, innovation & leadership
    • Building the performance chain of knowing-doing-creating.

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ACT at RIT (Cont.)

Fram International Advisory Board

    • Dubai: Jamaal Pitt
    • Kosovo: Francis Brassard
    • Croatia: Albina Balidemaj
    • China: Jude Okpala

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What is ACT?

    • Many Definitions Out There…. There Is No Perfect Definition- RIT has 5 working definitions!�
    • Short version “effective thinking in any context”

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Core Elements of Critical Thinking*

  • Supporting Claims:
    • Consistency: Relevance of claim and non-contradiction with other claims
      • Consequences
    • Evidence: grounds for justification of a claim

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  • Disproving claims
    • Defeaters/counterexamples/alternate explanations: undermine or outweigh evidence provided for claim

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  • Critical Thinking Disposition
    • Suspicion: withholding trust
    • Skepticism: refusing to believe in the absence of sufficient evidence/reasons
    • Scrutiny: attention to consistency and evidence

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*Taken from “Advice on Critical Thinking: A Pragmatic Perspective on Critical Thinking for the Real World” presentation by Gary Merrill delivered Fall 2021

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Instructor Experiences with Critical Thinking

Do you currently actively or intentionally focus on critical thinking in your classes? In what ways? How effective would you say these techniques are?

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ACT & Engaged Learning are Linked

  • Engaged students are practicing thinking
  • Engaged students are extending knowledge & application
  • Engaged students learn concepts and create connections

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  • Engaged students transform action into thought and thought into action!

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More Advantages for ACT

  • Professional advantages
    • Prepare students for uncertainty in workplace/professional life
  • Confidence and self-esteem for students
    • Reduces plagiarism
    • Improves student performance
  • Enhanced learning and teaching experiences
    • Facilitates innovation in assignments, lectures, etc.
    • Increased student interest in courses

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RIT’s Applied Critical Thinking ladder:

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ACT General Strategies

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Analyze & Construct Arguments

Why did you choose?

    • Tell me a story relating a big decision in your life….
    • Present a discipline-based case, asking students to choose/compose the end
    • Use metacognition: Think about your thinking….

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A good way to poke at premises, bias, assumptions, etc.

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Teamwork & Critical Thinking

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ACT

COMMUNICATION

COLLABORATION

  • Teaming builds capacity across critical thinking, communication, collaboration
  • Requires individual and team expectations- to control for students that are not contributing
  • Rounds of feedback/iterative
  • Relationship building

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Problem Scoping & Solving�

WAYS TO UP THE CHALLENGE:

    • Create complexity: less available information, vague or competing needs (what's the point?)
    • Time constraints
    • Competitive situations
    • Different parts of the problem given to different students, they have to make connections and find the whole

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WAYS TO SOFTEN THE EXPERIENCE:

    • Operate in teams (watch for free riders)
    • Allow for preparation time
    • Break it up into smaller pieces
    • Comedy

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Problem-Solving through Integration

But, not all ACT is problem solving!

  • What you are looking for:
    • Independent thinking with a process orientation– HOW or WHY (not just a judgement!)
    • BUT: weave in ethics
    • Management skills (within a context)

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The beginnings of professionalism!

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Cautions & Caveats

    • Assessing only within ability to communicate/ write/collaborate
    • Assessing only the result: ACT is about the process as well as the result
    • Using only your world as reference

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  • Remember the point of ACT: Build an essential skillset for thriving, resilient students & alumni!

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ACT Specific Techniques

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Questioning

  • A fundamental component of effect critical thinking is the ability to ask good questions.
    • Creates a context and a significance for answers for students
    • Students develop an internal motivation to seek answers instead of teachers providing an external one

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  • Difficult activity for RIT Dubai students (in my experience)�

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Questioning (Cont.)

  • Question types model higher order thinking processes:
    • Analytical: What are the key components? Why are these important? How are they connected?
    • Evaluative: Is this information credible? Is this idea/solution/argument a good or bad one? How does this solution/approach/idea measure up to certain standards/criteria/goals?
    • Synthesis: How does knowledge connect with other knowledge I possess? What are the similarities and differences? What is the significance of these similarities or differences?
    • Creative: What could work for our purposes? Does it exist? How do I create it?

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Questioning: Example Assignment

  • Phil 202 Assignment: Critical Thinking Question (CTQ)
    • Students asked to post a CTQ about the class content covered in a given week
    • Submissions must contain context and content leading to critical question
    • Example models desired student responses (see next slide)

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Questioning (Cont.)

Many Natural Law theorists hold that all forms of suicide are prohibited by natural law theory including physician assisted suicide. They endorse this claim despite the fact that physician assisted suicide is often used in cases where patients either 1) have a terminal illness that cannot be cured or 2) have an extremely painful condition that will last indefinitely. These theorists argue that life is an intrinsic good and, since suicide ends one’s own life, that it is wrong for a person to kill him/herself and that it is also wrong for anyone to help others end their lives. This implies that the intrinsic value of life is grounded in biological existence. On this view, it seems that it is the mere persistence of the human biological form that grounds the intrinsic value of life. However, there seems to be more to the intrinsic value of human life (if it is intrinsically valuable) than simply the proper functioning of human biological systems. This raises the following question: what other feature of human life besides biological existence could explain its intrinsic goodness?

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If the moral significance of human life goes beyond mere biological existence, what other feature of life might account or explain its intrinsic goodness?

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Context & Content

Question

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Other ACT Assignments

  • Class Presentations
    • Require reflection, analysis, evaluation, synthesis, creativity, collaboration, and effective communication
  • Discussion Boards
    • Allow for critical thinking on class topics outside of class lecture time
    • Can be easy to grade with rubric

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Class Assessment Techniques

  1. One Minute Paper
  2. Muddiest Point
  3. 3-2-1
  4. SEEI, CLIMB, and IDEA

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One-Minute Paper

  • In a one-minute paper, students are given one-minute (or more) to reflect on and write about course content
    • Can be used at beginning, middle, end of class
    • Examples of questions for students*:
      • What was the most surprising and/or unexpected idea expressed in today’s discussion?
      • During today’s class, what idea(s) struck you as things you could or should put into practice?
      • What do you think was the most important point or central concept communicated during today’s presentation?
    • Useful to get students to connect with course ideas and knowledge beyond academic requirements
    • Also, provides helpful feedback concerning teaching effectiveness���

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*Questions from “One Minute Paper”, https://oncourseworkshop.com/self-awareness/one-minute-paper/

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Muddiest Point

  • Muddiest Point focuses only on content students do not fully understand
    • Similar to the on-minute paper, except the focus of the activity is limited only to the content students are struggling with
    • Example question
      • What was the muddiest point for you from today’s lecture?
      • What idea did you have the most difficulty understanding from the assigned reading for today’s class?
    • Prevents students from developing unearned confidence in their comprehension
      • Often students do not know what they do not know
    • Invites opportunities to modify and improve teaching of specific concepts

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3-2-1

  • For 3-2-1, students complete three tasks by writing:
    1. 3 things they learned in the lecture
    2. 2 things that caught their interest in the lecture
    3. 1 question they have about lecture content

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    • Checks student understanding of main idea for lectures
    • Situates lecture content within student concerns and motivations
    • Incorporates questioning which facilitates students seeking further knowledge, solutions, etc. on their own

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SEEI, CLIMB, and IDEA*

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SEEI

CLIMB

IDEA

  1. State the concept
  1. Choose an idea from class lecture
  1. Identify an idea from class
  1. Elaborate on it
  1. List similarities with ideas from another class
  1. Describe its importance or significance
  1. Exemplify by with an example or application
  1. Identify differences with this idea
  1. Elaborate what thoughts or questions the concept brings up
  1. Illustrate with a graphic
  1. Make up new examples
  1. Apply the concept to your life

 

  1. Build a paragraph showing understanding of idea

 

*SEEI, CLIMB, and IDEA classroom assessment techniques can be found at “Teach Philosophy 101”, https://www.teachphilosophy101.org/classroom-assessment-techniques

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Bonus

  • Table of Contents Activity
    • This is an activity that I do with my students on the second day of class.
    • Procedure:
      1. Show students name of course or the name of the textbook for the course
      2. Ask students to individually brainstorm and list the content they believe will be covered in the course
      3. Pair students up to discuss their respective lists, generate more ideas, and begin to organize and categorize their pooled ideas
      4. Create groups of four by combining pair and have students repeat previous step but ask them to create a table of contents which reflects essential content for the course as well as a logical ordering of these idea
          • Students do this with markers and poster paper (or with PowerPoint)
      5. Hang posters at the front of class and discuss (or display PowerPoint slide) and discuss with class

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Longer Term Initiatives

    • Incorporating critical thinking CLOs into course syllabi
    • Pooling critical thinking resources together for faculty access
    • Critical Thinking Talks
      • Fall 2021: “Advice on Critical Thinking: A Pragmatic Perspective on Critical Thinking for the Real World”
        • Speaker: Gary Merrill, PhD in Philosophy
      • Spring 2022: ???

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References and Further Sources

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