WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.400 I'm only going to be able to make brief comments today, but I'd like to pick up a couple of themes from the seminar. 00:00:05.920 --> 00:00:11.140 My research interests are very much in the area that's relevant today in terms both of taxonomies, 00:00:11.760 --> 00:00:15.540 the impact of thinking skills, approaches, critical thinking in particular, 00:00:16.240 --> 00:00:20.600 and also the best way it can be taught and developed in schools. 00:00:21.500 --> 00:00:27.240 But to start off with, I also have a similar anecdotal example bemoaning the state of critical thinking in the UK, 00:00:27.240 --> 00:00:29.540 and it comes from this morning's news 00:00:29.540 --> 00:00:31.720 about wealthier people live longer. 00:00:31.720 --> 00:00:35.240 And the implication on the news story I heard seemed 00:00:35.243 --> 00:00:42.243 to be that if we increase the minimum wage, we'll somehow solve the problem of people's 00:00:42.243 --> 00:00:48.643 health problems. And also, it got me thinking, well, I suppose that also argues actuarially 00:00:48.643 --> 00:00:54.283 that wealthier people should get cheaper life insurance, which seems inequitable in terms 00:00:54.283 --> 00:01:00.923 of values. But that, for me, encapsulates the issues in critical thinking. Because for 00:01:00.923 --> 00:01:03.363 To me, it's the application of logic and values 00:01:03.363 --> 00:01:05.503 and the relationship between the two 00:01:05.503 --> 00:01:08.203 that is at times extremely complex. 00:01:09.803 --> 00:01:10.483 Taxonomies. 00:01:10.485 --> 00:01:16.485 I probably know more than is healthy for a person in casual conversation to know about thinking taxonomies. 00:01:17.325 --> 00:01:30.925 It was part of a project at UCAS a few years ago where we analysed and summarised over 50 different taxonomies of thinking in terms of instructional design, cognition, but also critical thinking. 00:01:31.505 --> 00:01:37.685 So don't engage me in conversation later about that unless you really want a detailed description of those. 00:01:37.685 --> 00:01:42.685 It's certainly clear to me that they're essential for mapping, 00:01:42.685 --> 00:01:45.725 for planning, for teaching, for developing 00:01:45.728 --> 00:01:49.748 consensus about what's meant in a particular area of education. 00:01:50.288 --> 00:01:56.688 I don't see how you can do that without starting to be clear analytically about what's involved 00:01:56.688 --> 00:02:01.608 in a particular subject and the way particular skills are conceptualized. 00:02:01.608 --> 00:02:09.628 And certainly the work in North America that Beth cites in her study, looking at Halpern, 00:02:09.628 --> 00:02:13.788 and NS Paul's work, there's a huge amount of work 00:02:13.788 --> 00:02:17.428 in developing taxonomies of critical thinking 00:02:17.428 --> 00:02:20.968 that's already out there and I think it's necessary 00:02:20.971 --> 00:02:28.251 to develop some clarity around particularly what they mean for their particular assessment. 00:02:29.471 --> 00:02:36.111 There is, however, I think an issue if we look at the history of the use of taxonomies 00:02:36.111 --> 00:02:42.671 in that all of those experts in those fields have struggled to produce valid and reliable measures 00:02:42.671 --> 00:02:44.471 on the basis of their taxonomies. 00:02:45.151 --> 00:02:49.571 Because the problem for me with taxonomies, they're great at one level for clarity, 00:02:49.571 --> 00:02:51.931 but they actually make it quite difficult 00:02:51.931 --> 00:02:54.451 to assess something like critical thinking, 00:02:54.451 --> 00:02:56.211 which for me is a combination 00:02:56.214 --> 00:02:57.754 of logic and values. 00:02:58.534 --> 00:03:00.654 The judgments involved are complex, 00:03:01.154 --> 00:03:03.994 and at times we certainly don't want to reduce those 00:03:03.994 --> 00:03:06.594 to a simple set of criteria or tick list. 00:03:07.034 --> 00:03:10.274 I did synthesis today, I can now synthesize, 00:03:10.334 --> 00:03:12.214 it's a skill I never have to be taught again. 00:03:12.554 --> 00:03:14.914 It's just not ever going to be like that. 00:03:14.914 --> 00:03:18.434 But developing your understanding of what that might mean, 00:03:19.014 --> 00:03:23.414 how causation might play out in history or science, 00:03:23.414 --> 00:03:27.154 would be an interesting dimension to, I think, 00:03:27.154 --> 00:03:29.094 a more informed curriculum. 00:03:29.094 --> 00:03:31.454 So not only do you start to be able to articulate 00:03:31.456 --> 00:03:36.836 that you're learning, we can also start to articulate those disciplinary perspectives. 00:03:37.496 --> 00:03:39.636 But then I am perhaps a bit of a dreamer. 00:03:40.176 --> 00:03:47.016 My advice, I guess, in this area would be to look at taxonomies that also try to re-piece 00:03:47.016 --> 00:03:52.116 things together into a whole, like the solo taxonomy, which looks at relational complexity. 00:03:52.696 --> 00:03:57.656 So you don't just look at the individual criteria and whether they're present or not, but you 00:03:57.656 --> 00:04:00.576 look at the way those different parts relate to each other. 00:04:00.576 --> 00:04:06.696 There was some interesting work done in the late 1990s with QCA in geography using that particular 00:04:06.699 --> 00:04:11.839 the taxonomy, for example, in analysing pupils' short answers, short responses. 00:04:12.599 --> 00:04:18.099 Rather than just giving ticks for whether something was there or not, the relation of the elements was also given value. 00:04:19.019 --> 00:04:21.479 So that, again, would be one of my indicators. 00:04:22.639 --> 00:04:28.879 The other, and this is usually the academic criticism of thinking skills, is are they really skills? 00:04:28.879 --> 00:04:31.359 Is it critical thinking skills we're talking about? 00:04:31.359 --> 00:04:35.839 or is it more to do with dispositions and approaches 00:04:35.839 --> 00:04:40.019 to the way you think about your orientation towards topics? 00:04:40.719 --> 00:04:41.899 Certainly the evidence is... 00:04:41.942 --> 00:04:46.622 in the literature suggests to me that just because you can think 00:04:46.622 --> 00:04:48.442 doesn't mean that you will. 00:04:48.442 --> 00:04:51.162 And I'm sure we can all think of people in our own experience 00:04:51.162 --> 00:04:53.222 that we know are accomplished thinkers 00:04:53.222 --> 00:04:56.562 but don't necessarily bring their powers of thinking to bear 00:04:56.562 --> 00:04:59.102 in situations where they think they ought to. 00:04:59.102 --> 00:05:02.502 So I think underpinning what Beth was saying 00:05:02.502 --> 00:05:07.542 is also a desire in education that we develop more critical thinkers, 00:05:07.542 --> 00:05:11.222 not just in terms of skills, but in terms of their dispositions 00:05:11.222 --> 00:05:15.622 an orientation towards the work they're doing. 00:05:15.622 --> 00:05:17.182 OK, evidence of impact. 00:05:17.185 --> 00:05:21.565 again, another area where I've done a fair amount of research. 00:05:22.145 --> 00:05:25.485 My take on this as a headline level 00:05:25.485 --> 00:05:27.965 is that there's consistent positive evidence 00:05:27.965 --> 00:05:32.665 of the benefits for articulating, making clear, 00:05:33.585 --> 00:05:36.945 expressing clearly thinking objectives in teaching and learning. 00:05:37.845 --> 00:05:41.685 And that actually there's stronger evidence in this area 00:05:41.685 --> 00:05:43.965 than there is for most educational interventions. 00:05:43.965 --> 00:05:48.965 Any academics in the audience might be slightly horrified that I've put up John Hattie's book 00:05:48.965 --> 00:05:52.425 because it's methodologically questionable. 00:05:52.427 --> 00:05:57.467 admire what he's trying to do in setting out kind of the vista if you like of 00:05:57.467 --> 00:06:03.367 educational research and trying to quantify the relationships within it so 00:06:03.367 --> 00:06:07.587 he uses a particular technique called meta-analysis and if you look at 00:06:07.587 --> 00:06:11.327 thinking interventions they're distributed towards the higher end of 00:06:11.327 --> 00:06:15.827 impact which is I guess the key point that I'd like to make so I take that from 00:06:15.827 --> 00:06:21.947 his work I also research in the area of technology digital technologies ICT 00:06:21.947 --> 00:06:24.447 whatever that kind of current phrase is. 00:06:24.447 --> 00:06:27.667 And certainly it's the case that the effect sizes in the area 00:06:27.670 --> 00:06:33.370 technology which is a society I suppose globally were prepared to invest in 00:06:33.370 --> 00:06:38.830 extremely heavily on much much lower than they are in the area of developing 00:06:38.830 --> 00:06:43.270 and making thinking explicit so I just kind of throw that out it's something of 00:06:43.270 --> 00:06:47.390 cultural value that's not just in the UK but certainly the whole of the Western 00:06:47.390 --> 00:06:52.570 world we value technology and want to embed it in education without robust 00:06:52.570 --> 00:06:57.310 evidence the evidence I think is much stronger in the area of developing 00:06:57.310 --> 00:07:02.910 thinking, yet it's not an area we seem to be able to identify 00:07:02.913 --> 00:07:08.913 for. I'm going to talk a little bit in the last couple of minutes about the difference 00:07:08.913 --> 00:07:14.233 between cognitive and curricular benefits because again I think this is quite important 00:07:14.233 --> 00:07:22.573 and it's to do with the I suppose final theme is should critical thinking, should thinking 00:07:22.573 --> 00:07:28.093 be taught as a separate subject or should it be taught embedded through different subjects. 00:07:28.093 --> 00:07:33.633 The academic consensus for a number of years has been that it should be embedded, 00:07:33.633 --> 00:07:38.153 partly to do with theories like situated cognition, 00:07:38.156 --> 00:07:41.096 the difficulty of identifying transfer, 00:07:41.476 --> 00:07:44.816 transfer also arguments about disciplinary perspectives. 00:07:45.776 --> 00:07:50.976 But I'd see that very much as being clustered around theoretical perspectives on learning. 00:07:51.656 --> 00:07:56.236 If you actually look at the evidence in the literature in terms of intervention studies, 00:07:56.236 --> 00:08:00.736 the research evidence is very clear that it's much stronger 00:08:00.736 --> 00:08:03.676 for the discrete or separate teaching of thinking. 00:08:04.516 --> 00:08:08.136 Now, of course, this is where this topic becomes extremely complex. 00:08:08.156 --> 00:08:13.396 because of course it's much easier to design a research study where you have 00:08:13.398 --> 00:08:16.038 very clear teaching of a thinking package, 00:08:16.398 --> 00:08:20.038 and you compare that with standard or normal lessons. 00:08:20.498 --> 00:08:24.158 It's much harder to design an intervention and test it robustly 00:08:24.158 --> 00:08:30.478 where thinking is effectively embedded in curriculum subjects. 00:08:30.478 --> 00:08:37.458 So it may be also something to do with the nature of the challenge of investigating this clearly. 00:08:39.478 --> 00:08:41.838 The evidence, I think, is quite strong. 00:08:41.838 --> 00:08:45.338 A recent meta-analysis in the American Education 00:08:45.338 --> 00:08:48.638 Research Journal, McLaur and Phi, looked at the impact 00:08:48.641 --> 00:08:53.741 teaching inductive reasoning and it was actually stronger in terms of its impact 00:08:53.741 --> 00:08:59.501 on curriculum learning as tested by subject tests than it was in terms of 00:08:59.501 --> 00:09:05.081 IQ or intelligence tests so there's clearly an impact that's quite strong 00:09:05.081 --> 00:09:10.481 from the teaching of explicit thinking that does go more widely than the 00:09:10.481 --> 00:09:15.761 lessons in which it's taught that may not be a fashionable academic view but I 00:09:15.761 --> 00:09:17.241 I think the evidence is out there. 00:09:17.401 --> 00:09:20.281 Anyone who questions that, please feel free to email me 00:09:20.281 --> 00:09:23.441 and I can send you what I think is the evidence in that area. 00:09:23.884 --> 00:09:29.784 From a kind of practical and personal point of view, I think it's very clear that we need both. 00:09:30.564 --> 00:09:34.744 That there are times when it's useful to teach skills and capabilities explicitly, 00:09:35.164 --> 00:09:40.444 to give learners a language to talk about what they're learning and to understand what it is that they can do, 00:09:41.064 --> 00:09:43.924 but that we also need to teach for application and embedding, 00:09:44.304 --> 00:09:48.244 because some of the skills do start to pan out differently in different subjects. 00:09:48.244 --> 00:09:52.944 The notion of evidence isn't the same across the curriculum spectrum. 00:09:53.884 --> 00:09:59.124 So teaching the importance of evidence in a critical thinking 00:09:59.126 --> 00:10:03.866 course and then the application of it across the curriculum seems to me to be the obvious 00:10:03.866 --> 00:10:04.486 way to go. 00:10:06.006 --> 00:10:10.486 I guess I'd like to end with a final question that I'm sure will stimulate some debate, 00:10:11.206 --> 00:10:15.886 partly coming from Beth's talk, although I guess I'm being a bit playful. 00:10:16.486 --> 00:10:20.726 Do we really want to teach critical thinking because it helps raise attainment in other 00:10:20.726 --> 00:10:26.346 subjects, or do we want to teach critical thinking because it's an essential component 00:10:26.346 --> 00:10:29.086 of education in a democratic society? 00:10:29.126 --> 00:10:32.026 and just kind of throw that away as my final comment. 00:10:32.286 --> 00:10:32.846 Thank you.