Thank you for sharing this! I'm a critical thinking educator for kids and teens, and love to see that its value is being widely recognized.
Anyway, I wanted to leave my thoughts on this quote:
"Critical thinking often involves recognizing reasoning strategies in the abstract, and that’s hard. For instance, a student might learn in class about the difference between correlation and causation — but then fail to recognize one being mistaken for the other the next time they see it in the real world."
I deal with this problem by teaching through stories, as these make abstract concepts concrete. I follow up with a few other examples, and then ask students to come up with an example of their own.
But, very importantly, I also give examples where something might look like an error/fallacy but isn't. One problem I find with critical thinking education is people start over-identifying fallacies.
In the correlation/causation example, I would emphasize that, while correlation does not guarantee causation, it may be a reason to investigate further. (Too many people act as if correlation studies are useless because they've heard "Correlation is not causation" so many times.)
Thank you for sharing this! I'm a critical thinking educator for kids and teens, and love to see that its value is being widely recognized.
Anyway, I wanted to leave my thoughts on this quote:
"Critical thinking often involves recognizing reasoning strategies in the abstract, and that’s hard. For instance, a student might learn in class about the difference between correlation and causation — but then fail to recognize one being mistaken for the other the next time they see it in the real world."
I deal with this problem by teaching through stories, as these make abstract concepts concrete. I follow up with a few other examples, and then ask students to come up with an example of their own.
But, very importantly, I also give examples where something might look like an error/fallacy but isn't. One problem I find with critical thinking education is people start over-identifying fallacies.
In the correlation/causation example, I would emphasize that, while correlation does not guarantee causation, it may be a reason to investigate further. (Too many people act as if correlation studies are useless because they've heard "Correlation is not causation" so many times.)