In preparation for writing a paper on developing students critical thinking skills, I read an article? chapter? by LeRoy Hay entitled “Thinking Skills for the Information Age”. It is the second chapter in an ACSD book entitled Developing Minds A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking and if you dont have a copy - you should strongly consider getting one. Not one article from the book has been a waste of time to read.
In Hay’s chapter he talks about the emerging need for American Students to have increasingly more critical thinking skills, and how this is a definite shift from the needs of students in the 1960s and 1970s. Anyone who has talked to me about this issue knows that I strongly agree that it is not a problem where our schools are getting worse than they were, but instead are not designed (curriculum wise) to meet the needs of the current population of students.
Hay defines Information Literacy as “the skills necessary to efficiently access information that is accurate and relevant, to apply that information to solving a problem, and to effectively communicate the results in a format that combines language and graphics.” I think this is the cleanest definition of Information Literacy that I have ever seen. He talks about the changing needs of education:
In the industrial-age model of education, all students were expected to master the ability to recall and comprehend information. In recent years, we have added the expectation that students should be able to apply information to problem solving. But mastery of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation skills has been, and for the most part remains, the focus of learning for only the best and brightest. that must change if most of our students are going to be information service workers in the future.
No longer can we rely on a small segment of our population with college degrees to be the thinkers of society. The creme de la creme of our students leave our schools better educated than ever before, with the high-level thinking skills that will serve them well in the information age. The problem is that there isn’t enough cream in the graduating crop to meet the rapidly growing need for information workers. so the real challenge lies with the students in the middle. How can we improve their thinking skills so that they are prepared to succeed in the information-based society of the third millennium?
I’m not even sure what to add to that - it says everything I have been thinking about for the last few years. I will expand it beyond the information literacy definition that Hay gave though and include that students need to be able to reason about how technological tools can act upon their data (and LARGE quantities of that information) in order to produce meaningful results.
What does that mean? That means we need to think about re-emphasizing statistics in our mathematics. We need students to understand the functionality and limitations of computers acting upon data. Perhaps computer applications should be expanded to include simple machine learning (using algorithms already designed and developed to aggregate information). Maybe students need to learn about data storage and retrieval before we teach them how to implement the data types. Maybe we need to focus on helping them understand the applications they already use, before asking them to develop new ones (or old ones).
Every now and again you read something that affirms your beliefs and then at the same time forces you to question the foundations of the system (whatever your beliefs and system attach to). This paper is one of those for me. I have a feeling it will be cited in most things that I write over the next couple of years.
