Curriculum Based on Critical Thinking

Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University has an opinion article in the Oct 14, San Francisco Chronicle.  It explains how other countries are testing students’ 21st century skills and how NCLB is not helping to prepare our students for the knowledge economy that creates our high standard of living.

The focus of the opinion piece is testing.  Our tests in the United States are usually multiple choice.  Other countries use an assortment of questions that focus on critical thinking skills.  Here is a paragraph from the paper.

In the United States, a typical item on the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, asks students which two elements from a multiple choice list are found in the Earth’s atmosphere. An item from the Victoria, Australia, high school biology test (which resembles those in Hong Kong and Singapore) describes how a particular virus works, asks students to design a drug to kill the virus and explain how the drug operates (complete with diagrams), and then to design and describe an experiment to test the drug – asking students to think and act like scientists.

Critical thinking skills are definitely harder to assess.  It takes a long time to grade a test with open ended questions that can have many different paths to a correct answer.

I had to take three calculus courses in college.  I took the first two from the same professor who focused on real-world applications of mathematical principles.  The questions on the tests always looked completely different than the ones in the book.  I learned that I couldn’t memorize all the homework and then do well on the tests.  I had to understand the concepts. I learned to understand how calculus could be used as a tool to solve real problems.

When it came time for the third calculus course, the section offered by the “real-world professor” was at the same time as one of my major courses so I had to register for another section taught by the “multiple choice mathematician”.  That’s right.  All the tests were multiple choice.  While I can remember many questions verbatim from the first two courses, I cannot remember a single concept from the third class.

I’m sure the tests in that third course were a lot easier to grade, but that didn’t help me when it came time to use those principles in my upper-level science courses.

Changing our curriculum to focus on critical thinking and problem solving skills will not be easy.   Our standard of living depends on this change.  Our students must be able to function in the real world which is not multiple choice.