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Teaching Critical Thinking About Difficult Topics
the examples used to teach critical thinking skills focus too strongly on evaluations of the
findings of formal research, students will learn to apply their critical thinking skills to such
evaluations, but not to their other beliefs. In this situation, we will have provided students
with a way to reject whatever formal research challenges their unfounded prior beliefs
without teaching them to also evaluate those prior beliefs: We will have taught them to
defend their personal prejudices against reasonable and well-founded objections.
Whenever we teach students skills, it is important to teach explicitly about the condi-
tions of applicability as well. In the case of critical thinking skills, failure to do so raises the
risk of a very undesirable outcome.
Teaching Students to Evaluate Their Personal Experience-Based Beliefs
Including personal experience-based beliefs as targets of critical thinking practice examples
does not guarantee that students will apply those skills to their personal experience-based
beliefs. Students expect to learn to critique research and the media and are proud to
recognize deliberate scams, for example. They may be considerably more resistant to the
suggestion that they apply critical thinking skills to their own beliefs, particularly those
formed on the basis of personal experience, and they often find ways to avoid changing
their beliefs regardless of the amount and quality of evidence presented (Chinn & Brewer,
1993, 1998). Among the factors that determine how strongly people hold and value beliefs
is the extent to which those beliefs participate in our explanations of the events we see in
the world around us (Anderson, Lepper, & Ross, 1980; Preston & Epley, 2005; Slusher &
Anderson, 1996). The belief that personal experience has a special epistemological status
is fairly central to how most people understand the world (Trosset, 1998). Furthermore,
the belief that personal experience is epistemologically unique is reinforced by cultural
norms, and often even by formal education.
Carey and Smith (1993) suggested that the assumption about the unique power of
personal experience forms part of a “common-sense epistemology” (p. 237). They propose
that persons holding such an epistemology are unaware of the role of theoretically tainted
interpretation in the establishment of beliefs and, instead, they “see knowledge arising
unproblematically (and directly) from sensory experiences and see knowledge as simply the
collection of many true beliefs” (p. 237). If students believe that particular beliefs come
directly from sensory experience, they will not consider it necessary to evaluate those beliefs.
If we insist that they evaluate those beliefs, we challenge not just the beliefs, but also the
students’ common-sense epistemology. Making changes to that basic epistemological
assumption requires students to make changes to their system of beliefs as a whole.
To what extent is the “common-sense epistemology” correct? Clearly students don’t
need research or critical thinking to evaluate the beliefs that, for example, they have two
children or drive a used car. But they may assume for the same reason—their personal
experience—that the belief that they have precognitive dreams is also outside of the
domain of research and critical thinking. They may respond to our insistence that they
think critically about the evidence for precognitive dreams the same way they would
respond if we insisted that they think critically about how many children they have or
whether they drive a used car.