Standardizing Critical Thinking

But how can the fundamental moves of critical thinking be standardized—that is, represented with enough consistency and redundancy across the  curriculum that all students, not just the elite few, can see these moves as fundamental? And how can this be done in a way that allows the educational results to be assessed and measured?

The first step is to identify and name these fundamentals  in terms that are simple and familiar enough to be grasped and retained by the vast majority of students as they move from course to course but comprehensive enough to do justice to the obvious complexity and heterogeneity of academic practices. Our candidate for such a formulation, as we have suggested, is the dialectical practice of summary and response. On the one hand, summarizing and responding is a familiar argumentative skill that students have practiced virtually every day since childhood (“But you said if I cleaned up my room tonight I could go out with my friends”). As we see it, summary and response gets as close as any formulation can to the pervasive practice of making claims not out of the blue, but as responses to others. On the other hand, summarizing and responding encompasses all the most advanced academic skills, including (in addition to those listed in our article) close reading, interpretation, and analysis; working with factual, statistical, and textual forms of evidence; and even the ethical ability to entertain opposing perspectives, putting ourselves in the shoes of those who disagree with us. And though this summary response practice is deployed in different ways in different academic disciplines, there is no discipline that does not require that we enter a conversation, stating our views not in a vacuum but as a response to what others in the field have said or might say.

Describing this transdisciplinary practice in more polemical terms, the influential rhetoric and composition specialist David Bartholomae observes that “the best student writing works against a conventional point of view. . . . The more successful writers set themselves . . . against what they defined as some more naive way of talking about their subject—against ‘those who think that . . .’—or against earlier, more naive versions of themselves—‘once I thought that.’” If this view is right—that the best student writing engages (challenges or adds to) other perspectives— then why withhold this crucial information from students? Why not be explicit about this key to academic success?

But this first step—highlighting summary-response across the grades, disciplines, and courses—is not enough. A second step is needed in which we go beyond simply explaining that engaging others is the central move of academic culture, but provide training devices—concrete templates or scaffoldings—that enable students to enact this move in their writing. Bartholomae provides an example of such a training heuristic when he recalls one of his underg raduate literature teachers suggesting that, whenever he was stuck for something to say in his writing, he try out the following “machine”: “While most readers of _________ have said _________, a close and careful reading shows that _________.” A scaffolding like this could help students unsure about the basic shape of academic discourse make a claim and indicate why that claim matters by showing what alternate claim it is correcting, supplementing, complicating, or otherwise in dialogue with. If for “most readers” we substitute “analysts of these statistics” (or “of these economic data” or “of these sociological patterns”), we can see how this scaffolding can be adapted to virtually any discipline.

Following Bartholomae’s lead, we have published a textbook, “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, in which we provide templates like the following that prompt students to engage dialectically with the views of other thinkers and writers:

In recent discussions of _________, a controversial issue has been whether _________. On the one hand, some argue that _________. From this perspective, _________. On the other hand, however, others argue that _________. In the words of one of this view’s main proponents, “_________.” According to this view, _________. In sum, then, the issue is whether _________ or _________. My own view is that _________. Though I concede that _________, I still maintain that _________. For example, _________. Though some might object that _________, I reply that _________. The issue is important because _________.

At first glance, it is easy to dismiss such formulaic devices for being too mechanical and prescriptive. But these complaints ignore the fact that such models can be modified to meet the needs of particular arguments, voices, audiences, and contexts. The complaints also ignore the fact that, while experienced writers unconsciously absorb these models through their reading, most students do not. Most students will never make a move like “my point is not _________, but _________” or “at this point you may object that _________” unless given explicit prompts for doing so.

Indeed, there is even reason to believe that it is not just humble undergraduates but graduate students and faculty members as well who need explicit help making these key academic moves. In a recent textbook addressed to thesis and dissertation writers across the academic disciplines, Irene L. Clark offers the following formulas for entering academic conversations: “Some scholars who write about this topic say _________. Other scholars who write about this topic disagree. They say _________. My own idea about this topic is _________.”

Along similar lines, the National Academy of Education requires applicants for its postdoctoral fellowship to complete the following template in fifty words or fewer: “Most scholars in the field now believe . . . ; as a result of my study. . . .”

Similarly, the editors of the leading science journal Nature feel obliged to provide prospective contributors with writing guidelines that follow a classic summary response format, requiring that all submissions open with a clear declaration not just of the authors’ central findings, but of how those findings compare with “previous knowledge.” If, as these examples suggest, even those at the highest reaches of academe need explicit help making the standard moves of academic critical literacy, think how much more struggling undergraduate and high school students need it.

In introducing standardized templates like these, teachers need not ignore the often wide differences in students’ cultural backgrounds and learning styles. Middle-class students, for instance, often resist becoming the type of intellectual critic that the templates assume, while some women and minority students resist the contentiously argumentative persona that the templates might seem to require. These in fact are excellent topics for classroom discussion and debate. But in our view, the skills modeled by these templates can only empower students of all backgrounds, even in those discussions in which the merits of such templates (and the skills they model) are being weighed and debated.

This standardized approach can also help meet one of the key challenges of outcomes assessment: avoiding what might be called the laundry-list trap, in which so many different assessment criteria are offered that assessment ends up mirroring the fragmented academic curriculum itself and students come away with no solid grasp of academic literacy’s basic shape. This trap can be avoided by developing exit essays— and gearing curricula and programs around them— that ask students to enter academic conversations. For example, at the completion of their college careers, students could be asked, as they are at California State University–Northridge, to write essays based on an article of current interest. Students would identify the text’s basic arguments, defend their own position, and, ideally, imagine opposing perspectives. Or, at the completion of their majors, students might write exit exams modeled on templates like the following:

• Before I began my major in _________, I, probably like most other people, assumed that _________. But having studied the field, I now see that it’s far more complicated, primarily because  _________. 
•  One school of thought in the field of _________ suggests that _________. Skeptics, however, might object that _________. My own view is that _________.

At the same time that assessment essays like these would test students’ critical-thinking skills, they would also test traditional skills like familiarity with the basic knowledge of the field, its key concepts and terms, and how its different schools of thought can be challenged and put into dialogue.

Is this a one-size-fits-all approach? Yes. And that’s precisely why we think it has a chance to work, especially if it can be implemented democratically, with a high degree of faculty buy-in. The more we proliferate multiple objectives and standards, the less chance there is that large numbers of students—or teachers, for that matter—will assimilate any of them. Conversely, the more we standardize—that is, collectively streamline, simplify, and reinforce—what we want students to learn, the more chance we have of making academic critical literacy available on a mass democratic scale.

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