Teaching Critical Thinking: Lessons from Cognitive Science by Tim van Gelder

• Almost everyone agrees that one of the main goals of education, at whatever level, is to help develop students' general thinking skills, including in particular their critical thinking skills. Almost everyone also agrees that students do not acquire these skills as much as they could and should.
• Cognitive science is the best source we have for genuine knowledge about "what works and why" in teaching critical thinking.
• Roughly speaking, critical thinking is thinking which helps you figure out whether you should believe some claim, and how strongly you should believe it. Since you should only believe what is true, critical thinking is, as I like to say, it is the art of being right.
• The first and perhaps most important lesson is that critical thinking is hard. It can seem quite basic, but it is actually a complicated business, and most people are just not very good at it.
• A majority of people cannot, even when prompted, reliably exhibit and the most basic skills of general reasoning and argumentation.
• Humans are not naturally critical thinkers; indeed, like ballet, is is a highly contrived activity.
• Evolution doesn't waste effort making things better than they need to be, and homosapians evolved to be just logical enough to survive while competitors such as Neanderthals and mastodons died out.
• Michael Shermer describes us as "pattern-seeking, story-telling animals." We like things to make sense, and kinds of sense we grasp most easily are simple, familiar patterns or narratives.
• Critical thinking is a complex activity built up out of other skills which are simpler and easier to acquire.
• Critical thinking involves skillfully exercising various lower-level cognitive capacities in integrated wholes.
• Because critical thinking is so difficult, it takes a long time to become any good at it. As a rule of thumb, my guess is that mastering critical thinking is about as difficult as becoming fluent in a second language.
• Critical thinking may be hard, but it is certainly not impossible.
• Ericsson found that achieving the highest levels of excellence in many different fields was strongly related to quantity of deliberate practice.
• They have to actually engage in critical thinking itself, not just learn about it or observe others do it.
• One of the biggest challenges in learning new skills, particularly general skills like critical thinking, is what is known as the problem of transfer. In a nutshell, the problem is that an insight or shill picked up in one situation isn't, or can't be, applied to another situation.
• Transfer of acquired knowledge and skills certainly does occur to some extent; otherwise, education would be largely futile. The problem is that it tends to happen much less than you'd naively expect.
• The problem of transfer affects critical thinking as much as any other skill. Indeed, critical thinking is especially vulnerable to the problem of transfer, since critical thinking is intrinsically general in nature.
• Beyond a certain point, improvement demands getting some theory on board.
• Knowledge of the theory allows you to perceive more of hat is going on.
• The better you can "see" what is going on, the more effectively you can understand what you are doing and how you can do it better.
• The mistake is to think that skills are a natural outcome of theory. They are not; skills are a natural outcome of practice.
• At root, belief preservation is the tendency to make evidence subservient to belief, rather than the other way around; or, put another way, to use evidence to preserve our opinions.
• When we strongly believe something (or strongly desire it to be true) then we tend to do the following things:
• We seek out evidence which supports what we believe, and don't seek, avoid, or ignore evidence which goes against it.
• We rate evidence as good or bad, depending on whether it supports or conflicts with our belief.
• We stick with our beliefs even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, as long as we can find at least some support, no matter how slender.
• The ideal critical thinker:
• Puts extra effort into searching for and attending to evidence which contradicts what she currently believes.
• When "weighing up" the arguments for and against, gives some "extra credit" for those arguments which go against her position.
• Cultivates a willingness to change her mind when the evidence starts mounting against her.
• As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself---and you are the easiest person to fool."
• A core part of critical thinking is handling arguments.
• An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition.
• If evidence forms complex hierarchical structures, then those structures can be diagrammed.
• Argument maps are simply a more transparent and effective way to represent arguments, and so they make the core operations of critical thinking more straightforward, resulting in faster growth in critical thinking skills.
• Motivation comes in two different kinds, knows as intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is caring about an activity or achievement for its own sake.
• Extrinsic motivation is caring about an activity or achievement only because it will get you something else, something extrinsic to the activity.