How to Define, Assess and Develop Critical Thinking in Professional Antonella Poce Development Associate Professor in Experimental Pedagogy Contexts - at Roma Tre University Antonella.poce@uniroma3.it Reflections and Empirical Evidence
Aims for today today… Understanding better • the role of Critical Thinking and Information Literacy in the 21 st century society; Presenting some ideas • regarding how to improve The these skills; unexamined Showing the results of • life is not my research on the automatization of CT worth living assessment in open- ended answers; Socrates
The Centre for Museum Studies (CDM) CDM was set up in 1994 to encourage a more conscious and targeted use of museum Antonella Poce heritage, bearing in mind: Francesco Agrusti the insufficient use made of the huge wealth of heritage assets available in Italy for Maria Rosaria Re educational aims CDM the gap between Italy and other countries as Francesca Amenduni regards cumulative knowledge and definition of models of intervention Carlo De Medio research in the specific field of education in order to work out new strategies through museum heritage Mara Valente
CDM CD M Nation onal and Intern rnation onal Pr Projects Inclusive Memory National Project Interact CrithinkEDU European OpenVM Projects DigiCulture Advanced Studies in Museum Post- Education graduate courses Museum Education. Theoretical aspects
The leitmotif of our research Promote and assess thinking skills and a critical use of digital technology by learning through cultural heritage, arts and literature enhanced by technologies.
Why Critical Thinking is so critical today? Educational policy makers have recognized from many years Critical Thinking as an essential driver for progress and knowledge growth in any field and in the broad society (World Economic Forum; UNESCO; OECD).
New (unpredictable?) challenges for Critical Thinkers • We know that the current pandemic is related in different ways to technological progress, for better and for worse. • As a researcher and professional in the field of education, I am concerned about a specific kind of relation between the Covid- 19 and another well-known effect of technological progress, also known as information overload . • When during a pandemic a big amount of new information is produced, we face what the World Health Organization call infodemic . Infodemic was defined as an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it (World Health Organization, 2019). WHO (2019) Novel Coronavirus(2019-nCoV) Situation Report – 13. Retrieved from: https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200202-sitrep-13-ncov- v3.pdf?sfvrsn=195f4010_6
The WHO was interested in infodemic because of the danger of misinformation during the management of virus outbreaks, since it could even speed up the epidemic process by influencing and fragmenting social response.
The different type of mis and disinformation https://firstdraftnews.org/latest/fake-news-complicated/
- One poll by YouGov and the Economist in March 2020 found 13% of Americans believed the Covid-19 crisis was a hoax while a whopping 49% believed the epidemic might be man-made. https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/1ghnp qhhpu/econToplines.pdf - The New York Times reported that several videos featuring the Gates conspiracy had been viewed over 160,000 times on TikTok (The New York Times, 6 th February 2020) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/0 6/health/coronavirus- misinformation-social-media.html
What should we learn? • We need to develop in citizens the anti-bodies to be prepared to autonomous interpret and assess the information that they receive in complex digital eco- systems and to be responsible for the information they share; • These antibodies are Critical Thinking and Information Literacy. Source: World Economic Forum https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/children- digital-risks-cybersecurity-screentime-covid19/
What is Critical Thinking? Skills : e.g. analyse, evaluate, make inference, argument; Dispositions : open-minded; skeptical; inquisitive According to McPeck (1981) “Critical Thinking is a process where an interaction occurs between individuals and the interpretation of knowledge which they contribute to create”. In his definition of CT, McPeck not only includes internal cognitive activities, but also a disposition to act in a critical, social and interactive way in order to interpret and create knowledge. Nowadays, a great amount of information exchange happens online .
From Critical Thinking to Information Literacy While some similar skills are required to read both online and printed documents, online texts often pose greater challenges to readers than printed texts (OCSE, 2015): - multimodality; - The presence of hyper-links (non sequential texts); Text-processing + navigation PISA Students, Computers and Learning Making the Connection: Making the Connection. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/publications/students-computers-and-learning-9789264239555-en.htm
Digital / Information Literacy Calvani, Fini and Ranieri (2009) summarize digital literacy as a combination of concrete and unquantifiable skills Covello, S., & Lei, J. (2010). A review of digital literacy assessment instruments. Syracuse University, 1-31.
Information Literacy Skills Intra-personal Inter-personal Katz, I. R. (2005). Beyond technical competence: Literacy in information and communication technology. Educational Technology, 45(6), 44-47.
Putting here the poll! Three open ended questions. Time 1 minute and 30 seconds. Q1) Emily’s father has three daughters. The first two are named April and May. What is the third daughter’s name? Q2) If you’re running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place are you in? Q3) Go to the DATA section of the OECD official website http://www.oecd.org/ and look for data relating to employment in the ICT sector: "ICT employment". Which country has a percentage of 4.7?
Q1 + Q2 Cognitive Reflection Test (Sirota et. al., 2018) – CT dispositions Q1) Emily’s father has three daughters. The first two are named April and May. What is the third daughter’s name? Emily Q2) If you’re running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place are you in? Second Q3) Go to the DATA section of the OECD official website http://www.oecd.org/ and look for data relating to employment in the ICT sector: "ICT employment". Which country has a percentage of 4.7? Japan Q3 Webtrotter (2019) Information Literacy (Goal oriented navigation)
How can we develop IL and CT skills? Research highlights that social interaction and language (verbal, mathematical, figurative) are fundamental tools for the development of higher order cognitive skills: - deep “reading” (e.g. literary texts; pieces of art; museum objects and artifacts); - writing and building knowledge artefacts (e.g. essays; object-based learning; digital story telling); - dialogic interactions, both online and offline. (From Socratic tradition);
Source: World Economic Forum Blog: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/c ovid-19-museum-kids-action-plan/
Online dialogic interactions Research suggests that asynchronous online discussions can support critical thinking and knowledge co-construction even more than synchronous face-to-face discussions, due to the available time for reflection (Wang et al., 2009; Meyer, 2003) and more critical, constructive and explicit contributions. (Wang et al., 2009). Meyer, K. A. (2003). Face-to-face versus threaded discussions: the role of time and higher order thinking. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 7(3), 55-65. Wang, Q., Woo, H. L., & Zhao, J. (2009). Investigating critical thinking and knowledge construction in an interactive learning environment. Interactive learning environments, 17(1), 95-104.
The assessment challenge Although we know that online discussions and activities could be designed to promote CT and IL, there are still some issues: • How to monitor these activities? • How could we assess the quality of dialogic interactions, especially in discussion forums of Massive Open Online Courses or big classroom?
How to assess CT in online discussion? In recent years, to face the challenge of the analysis of big amount of educational new research field have been developed named Learning Analytics and Educational Data mining (Liñán, & Pérez, 2015). • Learning analytics focuses on extracting meaning from large amounts of data in educational digital environments. • Educational data mining adapts statistical, machine-learning and data-mining methods to study educational data generated basically by students and instructors.
• Recent research describe the development and the validation of automatic tools for the assessment of CT sub-skills, such as reasoning (Mao et al., 2018) or argumentation (Song, Heilman, Klebanov, & Deane, 2014). • Having said that, the authors suggest that there are still open-challenges in terms of validity and reliability of the measures.
Recommend
More recommend
