In my last blog, I began exploring how writing and speaking can help students achieve the seven TAMU Undergraduate Learning Objectives. In this entry, I want to discuss the objective, “demonstrate critical thinking.”
Written and spoken performances are a primary avenue by which students can demonstrate critical thinking, although a well-designed multiple choice or short answer test can also be used for this purpose (as, for example, the CAT, or Critical Assessment of Thinking, used by Texas A&M Office of Institutional Assessment). However, writing and speaking can also give students practice in critical thinking—a good writing or oral presentation task motivates students to think deeply and carefully as part of the communication process.
Not all writing/speaking tasks provide practice in critical thinking. Some are more valuable than others in this regard. Lavelle and Bushrow (“Writing Approaches of Graduate Students,” Educational Psychology 27.6, 2007: 807-22), drawing on various strands of writing research, have identified what they call writing approaches, some of which are more likely to spur critical thinking: specifically, they assert that in some circumstances writers take a “deep” approach, characterized by the writer actively engaging in creating meaning, solving problems, and making significant revisions to a text, while in other circumstances, writers take a “surface” approach, which they describe as “primarily reproductive” and “involv[ing] a listing strategy and a linear outcome or an ‘ordered’ presentation of facts” (808). Often the surface approach is associated with formulaic, fill-in-the-blanks writing.
If you find yourself giving an assignment that is highly detailed, or if you provide a very rigid framework for writing, you may be encouraging a surface approach. I am not referring to the obvious need to provide basic frameworks and strategies, for example, having students follow the IMRaD organization (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). Rather, I mean telling them what each sentence or paragraph should do or giving them all the answers and just expecting them to “write them up.”
To spark critical thinking, assignments must position students as problem-solvers. They should be expected to grapple with ambiguities and complexities. All the better if they have to identify or define a problem and then seek solutions. Their writing and any attendant research should help them see the problem from different perspectives. It should expose gaps in their data or their logic and encourage them to recast their original ideas and reconsider their prejudices.
It’s a mistake, then, to see writing as something that happens after a problem is solved, after the research is done. One of the reasons writers get stuck at the surface level is because they slight the stages of the writing process where they should linger—the prewriting, where they have to read and do research and take notes and plot out ideas, or revision, where they cut full paragraphs, move sections, or add hundreds of words, then start all over again. A student writer recently described her process to me. She spends days reading and just thinking, then she writes plans, then she writes a draft, and as she put the words down she stops every few paragraphs, reads and reconsiders. Once she has that draft done, it’s pretty good. But then she gets an outsider reader to respond, and she begins the review process all over again. Her process exemplifies a deep approach.
You can encourage this in your students. Build opportunities for prewriting and revision into assignments. Require drafts and make sure writers get some feedback (that is, comments from you or a peer) that leads to revision. If students are preparing an oral presentation, the same drafting process applies. If students are doing research or reviewing theory, give them lots of opportunities to write about what they are learning: reading logs, field notes, and journals help them reflect on the class content. Having them write and then share their writing in pairs or small groups is also effective in helping them refine or shape their ideas as they bounce them off others. Writing, discussion, and critical thinking are all social processes, and whenever possible they should reinforce one another.