Teaching Critical Reasoning in the Information Age: The Challenge
Introduction
In The Real World of College, we contend that the major goal of institutions of higher learning should be to enhance the content and the quality of students’ thinking. To determine whether such learning has in fact been enhanced, we introduce the idea of Higher Education Capital (HEDCAP, for short). And we suggest ways in which educators can assess whether students have in fact increased their abilities to attend, analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate about various topics.
In a pair of blogs, our colleagues Mita Banerjee and Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia ponder a challenging problem of our time: the extent to which all of us are exposed to vast amounts of information, much of it of dubious value, if not completely misleading or wrong. They then introduce a promising way to examine how contemporary college and university students assimilate and make use of information that is available. Through careful control of that information, researchers can assess which forms of information attract students’ attention and how the students draw on that information when they carry out consequential tasks.
Teaching Critical Reasoning in the Information Age (Part: 1/2)
Suppose that you wanted to know how well—or how poorly—your students were making use of information available online. In this and the following blog, we introduce a new way to obtain such knowledge.
The Challenge
For learning and for acquiring new knowledge, the Internet is both a benefit and a curse. Potentially, it gives us access to an infinite variety of information sources and enables us to form our own, well-founded, evidence-based and carefully balanced opinions. At the same time, however, the Internet has few if any gatekeepers or quality standards comparable to “traditional” institutions of learning. The Internet ‘democratizes’ knowledge, since anyone can upload new content, regardless of whether the information is true or not, or whether this person is an expert on the topic or just someone who feels that they should have their say.
This situation puts institutions of higher learning, especially universities, in a challenging position. Nowadays, students prefer studying for exams using Internet sources rather than textbooks; this is true for students within and across disciplines. Moreover, the content provided on the Internet often seems more alluring and entertaining than that conveyed in textbooks. One could argue that our discussion may give textbooks too much credit: They, too, may contain outdated information or blatant misinformation and “slanted” representations of discipline-specific concepts. Concepts and methods change over time-- such is the nature of science and research progress. Even as textbook representations may not always be completely accurate, however, one issue remains: There is a gatekeeping function according to which textbook knowledge has been “checked” by the research community. In most publishing houses, such books usually undergo an external review process, providing some form of quality assurance; no comparable quality control exists for freely available information on the Internet.
The mission that universities have in the Information age does not differ significantly from previous times. Then, as now, universities have to educate their students in specific subjects, enabling them to reason critically in their core area and, in generic terms, fostering their general online reasoning skills. At the same time, they ultimately have to prepare students for their roles as responsible citizens, who are able to think through complex problems and arrive at well-founded and carefully balanced decisions. And of course, they have to prepare students for their future professional roles in an ever-changing economy and labor market.
How can universities prepare students for these future roles? At the core of university education, is the concept of critical reasoning. Students have to be able to understand a complex task (e.g., whether there should be a national limit on immigration), to weigh arguments in favor or against a certain decision (e.g., ban or encourage immigration), and to form an opinion of their own based on evidence-based arguments.
Since there are no gatekeepers or well-established “fact-checkers” on the Internet, students may find it difficult to distinguish ‘false’ information from information that is factually correct. Moreover, the content of information is never independent from the narrative or ‘story’ it is woven into. The narrative, in turn, has specific features that students may be unaware of: it may use metaphors that touch the students affectively and influence them in specific ways (e.g., immigration can be described as a “flood” of foreign bodies, implying a “threat” to the general population), it can make use of certain genres or analogies (e.g., immigration as a “tragedy” for the nation). Moreover, an article may cite or quote a particular expert, which will make readers identify with this expert; conversely, readers may fail to take seriously another expert whose argument was merely reported in indirect speech, and about whom they know very little. Such narrative cues or frames are very subtle; they may catch us unawares, and we may be unconscious of how they guide our information-seeking and decision-making.
Faced with these circumstances, researchers and educators are well advised to embrace instructional concepts and to carry out studies that serve a twofold purpose. First, they should study empirically whether students are able to use the Internet in a way that is constructive rather than detrimental. Second, researchers should study students’ narrative competence: To what extent are students aware of (hidden) narrative framing and how they arrived at their own conclusions?
In the next blog, we present a specific performance task in which students are asked to respond to a problem hotly debated in the arena of higher education, especially in the United States: the question of legacy admissions. This issue is sufficiently complex that it requires both the consultation of several sources and insights into their own presuppositions and predilections.
© 2022 Mita Banerjee & Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia