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[escepticos] RV: Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#173 CRITICAL THINKING AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
Interesante abstracto sobre la pedagogia del pensamiento critico.
Va con referencia bibliografica para quien pudiera interesarle.
-----Mensaje original-----
De: owner-tomorrows-professor en lists.Stanford.EDU
[mailto:owner-tomorrows-professor en lists.Stanford.EDU]En nombre de Rick
Reis
Enviado el: Monday, November 15, 1999 12:31 PM
Para: tomorrows-professor en lists.Stanford.EDU
Asunto: Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#173 CRITICAL THINKING AND
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV
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Folks:
The posting below is an abastract of a chapter on the key aspects of the
pedagogy of critical thinking and its relationship with collaborative
learning. It is taken from Nelson, C. (1994). Critical Thinking and
Collaborative Learning. In K. Bosworth & S. J. Hamilton (Eds.),
Collaborative learning : underlying processes and effective techniques. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
The abastract, prepared by Vaibhavi Gala of the Stanford University
Learning Laboratory (SLL) and under the direction of Dr. John Nash, is
another in a series of learning summaries prepared regularly by the Lab.
All abstracts in this series are copyright ©1999 Board of Trustees Leland
Stanford Junior University.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis en stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Response - Higher Education: The Vision [2015]
--------------------1,540 words ------------------
CRITICAL THINKING AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
Nelson, C. (1994). Critical Thinking and Collaborative Learning. In K.
Bosworth & S. J. Hamilton (Eds.), Collaborative learning : underlying
processes and effective techniques. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Keywords:
* Mental models
* Discourse communities
* Discipline communities
* Perry's Scheme of Intellectual development
OBJECTIVES
In this chapter, Nelson provides an introduction to key aspects of the
pedagogy of critical thinking and its relationship with collaborative
learning. He develops three frameworks-existing mental models, differences
between academic and discourse communities, and differences in the
expectations of different disciplines-to illustrate why it is so hard for
students to acquire critical thinking skills. He also presents
collaborative learning approaches that faculty can use to circumvent these
difficulties and help foster critical thinking.
SUMMARY
1) Mental Models:
Piaget (1967) proposed the idea that each of us has a certain mental
framework based on our past experiences. Trying to fit new experiences to
our exiting mental models often leads us to wrong interpretations and
ideas. This suggests that besides teaching the right way to view the
material, faculty must also help students to understand what is wrong with
alternative interpretations. However, there is simply not enough time for
the faculty member alone to work through the misconceptions of all the
students. Engaging the students in collaborative learning activities can
often help discover many misconceptions. For example, consider a
teach-write-discuss approach. At the end of a unit of instruction, students
can be asked to answer a short question with an explanation of why their
answer is good. Once the students have worked on it individually, asking
them to compare their answers with each other will allow many
misunderstandings to be corrected. A whole-class discussion will then find
the array of answers that still seem reasonable and why. This also helps
the faculty become aware of what misconceptions need to be addressed and
what content needs to be taught or retaught.
2) Discourse Communities:
There are large differences between the communities that a student
encounters before college and the general academic conversation in college.
In most discourse communities, which are imbued with social traditions,
great emphasis is given to factors such as deference to authority,
unreflective intuition, and social dexterity. In contrast, academia
requires us to justify our beliefs and actions in ways grounded in reason,
evidence and personal values. In other words, it is no longer enough that
my dad says so. These differences between the two communities are a further
explanation of why critical thinking is difficult. An example may help
elucidate this issue. Treisman (1986) found that about 60 percent of the
rural whites and some ethnic minorities were making very low grades in
calculus at the University of California, Berkeley. Further investigation
revealed that these groups came from high schools that were not heavily
oriented toward college preparation and that they harbored the notion that
only weak students studied together (as in remedial halls). Moreover, in
their high school peer communities, studying had negative social
prestige-they made you a nerd-so, many students studied alone, virtually in
secret. In contrast, Asian Americans had formed study squads to get through
calculus. Treisman invited the students from the underrepresented groups to
an honors discussion section in which he required them to work in
collaborative small groups. As a result of the intervention, the proportion
of D, F, W, and I grades dropped from about 60 percent to 4 percent. This
example illustrates three key points:
a) The reacculturation that college demands is not restricted to
controversial topics like creationism or social roles, but is a part of all
courses, even mathematics,
b) Large increases in student success can be made by instituting
collaboration, and
c) Collaboration is important in achieving even the simplest form of
critical thinking-complex critical thinking-where all students should get
the same answer (e.g., calculus problems).
3) Collaborative Learning and Disciplinary Discourse Communities:
Each discipline has its own conventions and these conventions differ
markedly among disciplines. Because of this difference in discipline-based
expectations, the expected response to structurally identical questions can
differ radically among fields. Consider Compare plants and animals in
biology and Compare Hercules and Hamlet in English. In biology, we expect
the students to list five to ten important points. A student who applies
the same approach to the latter question ("both lived in ancient times") is
in trouble. In humanities, a compare question should elicit one or two
existentially important theses.
To address this issue, a professor provided sample essay questions with an
array of answers and asked students to decide collaboratively in small
groups which answers were good and which were not, and what made them so.
Once the students understood the key differences between good and bad
answers and the conventions associated with the discipline, their answers
improved remarkably. This example illustrates two key insights
a) It is helpful to try and make the tacit disciplinary expectations
explicit and give students guidance in seeing and using the expectations
and
b) Collaborative learning is very effective in helping students to
understand and master a discipline's conventions.
Intellectual Development:
According to Piaget (1967), children initially acquire skills in concrete
tasks, and only with more experience and maturation do they become capable
of dealing with abstract ideas. When students come to class, they may not
have developed the intellectual capacity needed to understand the way in
which a discipline works. Perry's (1970) scheme of intellectual development
help us understand four different approaches to intellectual challenges
that students face in accomplishing tasks that faculty usually characterize
as critical thinking.
The simplest approach is dualism, which divides reality into polar
categories, such as true and false. Students who use this approach rely on
authority on provide the 'right' answers without questioning why. However,
no one can think critically about things that they accept as unquestionably
true. The primary teaching task with such students is to show them the
extent and scope of legitimate uncertainty in the area. This leads students
to the second stage i.e. multiplicity. This stage is usually characterized
by students thinking that as there is no guaranteed right answer in an
area, all opinions in the area must be equally valid. The transition from
multiplicity to the next stage, contextual relativism requires students to
recognize that, despite the uncertainty about 'the' right answer, we can
still often select one or more ideas that are superior or inferior to
others. The primary teaching task becomes one of showing how we recognize
acceptable, better, and terrible within the discipline. Students can think
more critically if faculty explicitly delineate both the alternatives and
the criteria that they use to adjudicate among them.
In the intellectual games of contextual relativism, we understand that
people living in different contexts often legitimately have different
beliefs. However, in order to make wise judgements, we need to assert our
own values. We have to begin to take stands again, as we once did in
dualism, but our enterprise is now based on an articulation of our own
values and analyses, not an echo of authority's positions. We come to see
knowledge as constructed rather than discovered, as contextual, and based
inevitably on approximations.
Collaborative Learning and Intellectual Development:
To foster critical thinking, it is not sufficient to simply have students
work together. Faculty can provide intellectual scaffolding in the
following three steps: preparation, cognitive structuring, and role
structuring. Preparation can achieved either by structuring a shared
background or selecting for discussion, points on which all students can
safely be presumed to have some relevant knowledge. A common background can
be provided by readings outside class, or presentations in class. Cognitive
structuring implies providing students with frameworks or questions that
prompt them towards more sophisticated thinking than would come
spontaneously. The question 'what assumptions underlie this argument?'
often serves this function. Role structuring is the specification of a
collaborative process that gets all the members of a group to participate
meaningfully. Consider the teach-write-discuss exercise discussed earlier.
The lecture segment and the writing time prepare the students for
collaboration. An appropriate question provides cognitive structuring.
Finally, working briefly in pairs on what each student has written provides
role structuring i.e. students primed by their small-group discussions will
be more willing to participate in whole-class discussion.
As our thinking becomes more sophisticated, we switch from an identity
based on what one believes and does-an identity base that persists from
dualism through contextual relativism-to an identity based on conscious
choices. Whether we view these changes as intellectual development or
reacculturation, the existential challenges are great. Most students do by
far the most serious rethinking during and in preparation for collaborative
sessions. Collaboration thus often provides an effective stimulus for the
changes required for critical thinking. It also provides the social support
needed to make those changes emotionally acceptable.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the author recapitulates the various alternatives that
faculty can adopt to foster critical thinking and reemphasizes the positive
relationship between critical thinking and collaborative learning. Faculty
can expand their teaching to help students discover and correct the mental
models of reality that they have. They can introduce the conventions of
individual disciplines and explicitly teach features of critical thinking
such as an acknowledgement of the extent and sources of uncertainty and the
use of criteria to adjudicate among possible formulations. With each
approach, structured collaborations increase the number of students with
whom faculty will be effective. And these approaches will in turn increase
both the effectiveness of the uses of collaborative learning and the
enthusiasm with which the students embrace them.
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