In my current work as a Fellow at Baruch, I’ve been encouraging students to formulate questions as they begin to work on research papers. The idea, in part, is that it’s a whole lot easier digging through the literature on a given subject when you know what you’re looking for. The process of coming up with appropriate questions, however, has been more difficult for the students than I thought it would be.
While pondering why this might be so, I stumbled on an article that may or may not be relevant (to the question of why questioning well is hard). In Critical Thinking Development: A Stage Theory, Linda Elder and Richard Paul detail, among other things, some of the traits and implications for instruction of what they call “The Practicing Thinker.” In order for students to become practicing thinkers, they argue, teachers must help them understand that “thinking is inevitably driven by the questions, that we seek answers to questions for some purpose, that to answer questions, we need information, that to use information we must interpret it (i.e., by making inferences), and that our inferences, in turn, are based on assumptions, and have implications, all of which involves ideas or concepts within some point of view.”
The rub is that “The Practicing Thinker” is stage four in what Elder and Paul put forth as a six-stage process through which “every person who develops as a critical thinker passes.” The stages range from “The Unreflective Thinker” (stage one) to “The Master Thinker” (stage six). If there is any connection between this theory and my question, then the students who are having difficulty formulating good questions might be “Unreflective,” “Challenged” (stage two), or “Beginning” (stage three) thinkers, and my job is to move them in the direction of becoming “Practicing” thinkers.
Part of Elder and Paul’s project is to highlight what all of this means for the educational process. I have to admit that I hadn’t thought about teaching in these terms, though I have sometimes wondered whether the seeming lack of critical thinking abilities in some of my students is connected to stages of cognitive development. Any cognitive psychologists or education specialists out there care to weigh in on this?
Well, I’m neither a cognitive psychologists or education specialists, but I would like to believe I’m a pretty good thinker. I’ll presume to make a contribution.
My approach to critical thinking can be characterized as fact-based hypothesis-driven, a description I first learned in the early 1990s while at IBM. I believe I entered this thinking framework long before I was introduced to the characterization.
I encourage my students to consider fact-based hypothesis-driven thinking. To that end, I give them a brief note on the subject (a copy can be found at http://jmsdrgn.squarespace.com/storage/A Note on Fact-Based Hypothesis-Driven Thinking.pdf)
Suppose, for example, you are given the following assignment (Spring 2007 Graduate Capstone course at Maritime).
“The job of the management consultants (student team) is to create a plan to optimize the supply chain operations of three projects that their global trading house client find particularly troublesome. Assuming the consultants succeed in making a good plan and the client accepts it, further business may develop. Each team will develop three optimized scenarios in which you will detail the business environments and supply chain processes involved in these specific international commercial transactions, from sourced raw materials at their origins to delivery in final form:
1.Exporting corn originating from growers in the Midwestern “Corn Belt” of the United States to Japan, South Africa and the European Union;
2.Importing comprehensive Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) services from India to the United States;
3. Importation of Natural Gas from Afghanistan to the United States.”
How can one approach this? I recommend fact-based hypothesis-driven thinking.
Critical thinking is hard work. Dead ends abound. Persistence and imagination are virtues when it comes to this sort of labor.
The questions are critical. Years ago, as I was leaving a consulting engagement, one of my clients said; “I hope to see you again, You ask good questions.”
Reply to James Drogan