Comment by galoisscobi
Comment by galoisscobi 6 hours ago
That's an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing. If you had free rein of an engineering school in a university system, how would you re-design curriculum to address your concerns and establish proof of teaching critical thinking?
I don't know, I never thought about it much. I think engineering schools already do better than most others at this because requirements validation and weighing tradeoffs is such a big part of engineering as a discipline. Validating requirements often boils down to critical thinking, e.g. "but do you really mean that" and "is there a better way?".
The issues with critical thinking really show up in the other areas of academia, the humanities and natural sciences. But it's hard to get people to do it because often there are strong incentives not to think critically, or to be outright misleading deliberately.
I guess a curriculum focused around finding subtle flaws in arguments would be a reasonable place to start. It could be a lot of work to compile teaching materials that are tough enough. You could take papers that you know contain logic errors and ask students to find them. For instance, a lot of COVID papers work like this:
1. A COVID case is defined as anyone who gets a positive PCR test.
2. A positive PCR test is defined as detecting a COVID case.
When you see it spelled out so simply the problem is obvious but the whole field of public health managed to not see it (there were a few papers that timidly pointed out the circular logic, but it never reached public awareness). Of course maybe it was deliberate. But you could assign students a few relevant papers and ask them to analyze them critically.