Critical Thinking

with
Jim Formosa

Nashville State Community College

 moderated by

Dr. Carol Helton & Dr. Nicole Kendall

a Tennessee Board of Regents
Regents Online Campus Collaborative Podcast

Helton : Hello. Welcome to today’s podcast on Critical Thinking. I’m Carol Helton with the Regents Online Degree Program, and I’m also an associate professor at Tennessee State University. I want to welcome our guests today. We have with us Dr. Nicole Kendall, who is an assistant professor at Tennessee State University, and Dr. Jim Formosa, who is an associate professor with Nashville State Community College. Jim, would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself, please?

Formosa : Yeah, I’ve been in higher education going on my twenty-second year. I spent a number of years in industry; I’m a CPA, and I teach accounting. And [I] came to higher education as like a respite from industry, thinking I’d spend a couple, three years, learn something about microcomputers, and go back to industry. Never went back. Fell in love with the classroom, fell in love with the students, fell in love with higher education. Never regretted it.

Kendall : Well, I would like to know – I have a background with elementary education, and I’m recently at Tennessee State University – and I would like to hear your ideas on what you think critical thinking is and what it offers to higher education and even online education.

Formosa : Great question. I’m going to quote someone who is one of the renowned authors in the critical thinking movement. His name is Richard Paul, and his definition of critical thinking is briefer than most, but it goes something like this, and I’m probably going to misquote him. “Critical thinking is thinking about your own thinking while you’re thinking with the goal of improving your thinking.” OK? So, Richard Paul and a lot of other people believe that a great deal of critical thinking is involved with metacognitive processes, understanding how you think about the way you’re thinking. And basically in a nutshell that’s what it’s really all about. It’s about improving your thinking process so that the outcome is the best it can possibly be. Another aspect is critical thinking is generally thought of as dealing with – and I don’t want to say problems, because that’s an incorrect word – with situations that are very fuzzy. OK, let me give you an example, and this is one that’s used a lot in the literature. Deciding whether or not to marry someone – OK? Is that a problem or is that a critical thinking exercise? Hopefully it’s not a problem, OK? But it is definitely a critical thinking exercise because it’s very fuzzy, has no – potentially – has no absolutely correct answer, as we know, and it’s just kind of a fascinating field. I fell in love with it because I began to wonder why is it that accounting students, beginning accounting students have such a high failure rate? And I began to look at it, and this has evolved over time for me, over about the last fifteen years, and I wish I had another thirty years because I think from where I am, I could really get pretty good at it if I had another thirty years. But, I looked at why students fail, and I read a couple of monographs. One of them was “Becoming a Critically Reflective Practitioner,” which really dealt with accounting. Another one of them was a Stephen Brookfield book called Becoming a Reflective Teacher. And both of those are related, even though one’s really more about industry than higher education because they talk about the fact that if you’re going to teach well, in effect, you’ve got to spend some time thinking about what you’re doing. I know for myself I didn’t always do that, because I knew the rules of debits and credits, and I knew what financial statements look like, and if you can’t understand it that’s your problem. You just don’t have enough intelligence. And unfortunately that’s a serious flaw in higher education – to a lesser or greater degree depending upon the discipline, the individual, the institution, the culture of the institution. Because – I’ll give you a good example – last week there was a workshop dealing with planning for online education here in the state and the Chancellor spoke. And one of the things he said which really struck home is [that] our problem in Tennessee is not dealing with the upper third, those are the people we all want to see coming into our classroom, right, because they never give you any trouble, they do exactly what you ask, and their thinking skills are already pretty good. If Tennessee is going to expand its economy and if we’re going to be successful for all of our citizens, we’ve really got to begin addressing that second third of our population, and those are the folks who really come to us without really good academic credentials, without a good track record, and generally without much ability to think critically. Long answer to a short question, I apologize.

Helton : Now what do you see as the difference between problem solving and critical thinking?

Formosa : Generally, problem solving – I know exactly what the problem is, and I’ll use accounting as an example since it’s my discipline. If someone gives me an invoice and says, “How am I going to record this?” - in other words, what are the debits and credits going to be? -there’s a problem that I would give a student. If, on the other hand, let’s say the controller came to me as an accounting person or the VP of finance or even the general manger or president and said, “Competition is becoming keener. What can you do in the accounting area to make us more competitive?” Open-ended, no clear answer. The first one was a problem with a very clear answer – we know what we’re going to debit, we know what we’re going to credit. For a financial person or an accountant or a bookkeeper to help the business in a severely – in a downturning economy or in a hyper-competitive economy – they got to think. Because there’s no clear answer – the boss didn’t come in and say, “Here’s the problem, solve it.” But he said, “What’s going on? I need your help to help me determine what I’m going to do.”

Kendall : There’s also a perception that when you have an online program or online course, that there’s not a lot of interaction between the professor and the student. So what is you views [sic] on the need for critical thinking in an online course?

Formosa : Very interesting question. I have been a proponent of online courses for years and teach fully online now in accounting. I’ve found I can do a better job online that I can in the classroom. OK, a lot of people would want to dispute that. “You can’t do a good job online. You can’t do this.” As a matter of fact, there are a lot of accounting faculty – not necessarily here – but people I’ve talked to and I’m associated with who don’t believe you can teach accounting online. You can teach accounting and you can teach critical thinking online better, I believe, and here’s why. In a classroom if I throw out an overhead classroom, and I want to know how you think about the question, how everybody thinks about the question. I ask it and the first couple of people get it right, guess what, everyone else has the answer, OK. And they’re all going to get it right. Not only that, but I don’t have time. If it’s a complex question, which critical thinking questions have a tendency to be, I don’t have time to get forty people to answer it, because I’ve only got maybe seventy-five minutes, maybe fifty minutes in a class. Online I can send the question out or put it in the assignments in WebCT, for instance, and get an individual answer from every student in the class. And I use assignments, for instance, in WebCT as a method of formative assessment where they get one point. Doesn’t impact their grade, but when you add them all together, they can have a minimal impact, but what I want to do is see how you’re thinking. I ask many problems or many questions where I don’t want an answer in terms of a debit or credit; I want you to display your thought processes to me. And I can work with you one-on-one in an online environment to help you clarify or move your nudge you – sometimes maybe I need to bludgeon you a little bit – but to nudge you to begin thinking about these problems from the standpoint that they really need to be addressed. So I think online, in my opinion, is superior than the classroom environment, unless you’re teaching a graduate seminar where you’ve just got a few people – whole different ball of wax. Again, I’m addressing that second one-third of the population that comes into the undergraduate – particularly the community college, which is where I teach – they walk into our classroom unprepared, underprepared.

Helton : Yeah, those are good points. Are there particular tools – online tools – that you think promote critical thinking more than others?

Formosa : Yeah, let me tell you, assessment of critical thinking is a big issue for anyone involved in the area at this point in time, and it really ties all together with this philosophy I’ve been developing over the last fifteen years. And it – let me quote someone, the quotations not going to be exact – there’s a guy who wrote, and I don’t recall his name, that we – when students leave our institutions, their success or failure is not going to judged by an objective true/false, multiple choice test. Their success is going to be judged by an open book essay. And that’s what it’s all about. In an online environment I can ask questions. Let me give you an example of one that I asked recently on a test [in] four different sections and got some fascinating answers. I like to tie critical thinking and information literacy together, OK? Information literacy is another skill that employers want and that students need if they’re going to move from here to the university or maybe somewhere maybe some of them even to graduate school. Who knows? I posed the question this way. I want them to look up on the web or use the library – the online library – which many of them do – what is the Wal-Mart Effect? Part one of the question . Part two of the question: what is the Law of Unintended Consequences? Many of them had never heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Then I stated a simple little scenario which came out of the book The Wal-Mart Effect, as a matter of fact, where Wal-Mart a number of years ago, someone thought, “You know, if we could stop deodorant manufacturers from putting those tubes of deodorant in cardboard boxes, it might save us some money.” It did. Saved a nickel from every stick of deodorant that Wal-Mart bought. They passed half of it along to the consumer and they kept half. Two-and-a-half cents apiece. And I said, “What I want you to do is take what you learned about the Wal-Mart Effect and the Law of Unintended Consequences and tell me what the unintended consequences were when Wal-Mart forced their vendors to stop supplying deodorant in cardboard boxes.” And the unintended consequences, both positive and negative, moved throughout the entire economy, like the box manufacturers are not manufacturing. And many of those people – ma and pa shops – some of them went out of business because nobody needed them. And not only did – when Wal-Mart stopped, guess what, all the other retailers said, “No more cardboard boxes.” They could package more in the same container when they shipped it, more shelf space, and it goes on and on and on and on, saved trees, yada yada yada yada . But that’s kind of an interesting question, and some of the students did really well and others just – it never – so what I tried to do was go back to those that really didn’t do a good job and show them how to build a decision tree and, you know, if this happens what are the consequences good and bad? If this happens what are the – and I hope I had an impact on some of them. I don’t know.

Kendall : In the realm of higher education, do you think critical thinking is a balance between – of looking at it from application versus regurgitation, and maybe that’s kind of where it’s kind of getting lost where students aren’t able to accurately apply concepts, but they’re more just telling you information that they’ve read or what they’ve – that maybe you’ve applied in notes.

Formosa : Absolutely. Absolutely agree with you, because again, going back to the assessment issue, we love – as a rule – true/false, multiple choice tests, and I want to defend faculty on that point also. If you look at the community college faculty, we’re teaching four or five classes. That may be four or five different preps. You may end up with one hundred and fifty different students. Time consuming to do some of the stuff that I’m talking about and do it well. But there’s also a school of thought out there which is beginning to pop up increasingly that says what we need to do is teach fewer things and teach them well. I’ll give you an example. Take a Principles of Accounting book – two semesters of accounting come out of one book; twelve, thirteen, fourteen hundred pages. Six hundred to seven hundred pages in a semester with unprepared and underprepared students – does that make sense? I’m going to leave it an open-ended question. To me, what does make sense is to restrict the material that I cover to what is absolutely minimally acceptable and to teach them to think critically, to write, to communicate, to work in groups and teams. If I can teach them those skills, if they can learn how to research the literature material and find their answers and how to communicate those answers and think critically, they are much better off than if I give them, let’s say, four tests that are mostly multiple choice, which are rote memorization or regurgitation for the most part. What have they learned? Well, the research says that if I ask them the same question six months from now, I would be shocked at how little they learned.

Helton : I can relate to that. I remember teaching public school, and in English, you know, you teach the nouns, the verbs and all that. And the students would come in the next year and it was like the first time they’d ever heard of those concepts. They just, just never did quite get it.

Formosa : Well, it seems – when we come back to school Monday – we’re on Spring Break now – there will be faculty who will bemoan the fact that students have forgotten material over Spring Break. You know, it’s like, well, I’ve got to teach this again and that again because they don’t know it. Well, you know, my suspicion is if we took time to teach fewer concepts more thoroughly and really worked on application that we wouldn’t go through that every Spring Break of Fall Break or whatever it happens to be.

Helton : Do you see in your years of teaching experience that the students that are coming to you today are better prepared to think critically than they were, or is it about the same?

Formosa : I would say – if anything – perhaps they’re less prepared. OK? And I think the reason they’re less prepared – and we discussed this earlier – if I look at public schools where I am so exit-test oriented or whatever they call the standardized tests, I would probably prepare students better to think critically, because I suspicion that we spend so much time teaching them to pass a test that we don’t teach them – we don’t have enough time to teach them to think critically. If you look at education from a very broad perspective, you have to question whether or not the political arm of the state – although well-intentioned – creates bureaucracies that interfere, and then they complain that students don’t have the skills that employers want them to have. It’s a kind of a crazy situation, crazy world we live in. It really is. Bureaucracy is our downfall. I hate bureaucracy.

Kendall : Well, I will say that one of the things I’ve noticed as a new instructor is that when I give an assessment, and I like the to see application – I’ve actually applied that model, application versus regurgitation – I’ve had a lot of problems with students who will ask, “what chapter, what page, is this from the notes.” And I pull a lot of the questions from our discussion because it’s something that is individualized. I can see how they’re going to apply the concepts to the future teachers that they hope to be. And its something that new to them, because they will always comment, “My other instructors – they don’t do this. It’s very, you know, cut-and-dry.” They can actually go back into their book and cite page numbers and say, “This is where we got this information from.” So, I do agree with that. But I want to also ask – you mentioned accounting, and I know I’m looking at online classes and education from an education standpoint. Do you think it lends itself to all disciplines?

Formosa : Yes, absolutely. Let me, before – I don’t want to take up too much time with this – but let me cite some people you might want to read. There’s a woman named Susan Wolcott, the name – her – she is a C.P.A., Ph.D. in accounting, and she and I have been in contact. And fourteen years ago, she began to wonder about why her students didn’t do so well, and she became interested in thinking and assessment. She has a website, and it’s WolcottLynch , single word, just look up WolcottLynch and go to her site. She has published gratis on her site several hundred pages of documentation for how to teach critical thinking and how to assess critical thinking, just a wealth of materials out there. Well worth a look. Even though much of it is business, some of it is not, and she has links on her sites that take you elsewhere. Give you an example, one of them was someone she’d encountered who teaches at the Air Force Academy, and they had asked a critical thinking question – this just amazes me – because as we know, the best and brightest end up in our service academies. She had given a question on a test, after the test actually, she gave a test back – every one of them was graded – and she wanted them to write an essay about how effective their study habits were. OK? One student didn’t do well at all on the test but then defended his study habits as being outstanding even though he didn’t do well on the test and said that the fault had to lie with the instructor. But those are the kinds – those are the kinds of things you get into. I mean, but that’s a great question.

Kendall : Right.

Formosa : You know, tell me about your study habits. Really interesting question. Another site is the Critical Thinking Community. It is an extensive site with links all over the world. Lots of stuff about different kinds of rubrics that you can use to assess. Those are two great sites. I mentioned Richard Paul. He has – and I’m not sure if this woman is a partner, but they’re colleagues – Linda Elder. If you look up Richard Paul or Linda Elder, you’ll find they’ve written extensively. And you’ll find that on that critical thinking community site they have lots of brief pamphlets, and I bought one on ethics from them. Really well done, because ethics is a great way to study critical thinking; it really is, because a lot of ethical questions are not nice and neat, they’re real messy. And that’s how we develop critical thinking. Another resource is – let’s see , I mentioned Walcott, I mentioned Paul and Elder – Diane Halpern . She is a cognitive psychologist. She wrote one of the best books I’ve ever seen on critical thinking. She wrote it a number of years ago. It looks at critical thinking from the standpoint of learning. And cognitive psychology. Still available, one of the best I’ve ever read, and there’s also a brief edition.

Helton : I was wondering if you see critical thinking as more of an independent or group activity in you’re teaching. Do you ever?

Formosa : I see it – I use it more as an individual activity and let me tell you why. In RODP for instance, it has been decreed, and I think it’s valid and I support it one hundred percent, that we teach asynchronously rather than synchronously. And [in] an asynchronous environment where increasingly our students are all over the place – not only in the state of Tennessee – getting them together in a group is almost an impossibility . I’ve tried it a few times and failed miserably, just – I make it optional, still doesn’t work. So I do it individually. I think, as is true in most disciplines when you’re trying to teach, if you can get a group to interact well, they’re great because there’s nothing better than a student teaching a student. We know that. The most powerful learning that takes place is student teaching student, and that’s always been the case and always will be. It’s just that it doesn’t work as well online as it does in the classroom. Does that answer your question?

Helton : Yes, I think so. And I think that’s a good point, that if you could teach it then you know you know it.

Formosa : Absolutely. And there – let me tell you another interesting – when you begin to teach students about bias, which is one of the real dangers in thinking critically, the kids that come into our classroom – particularly that second third – they have biases and many of them don’t even know what the meaning of the word is. So they come at thinking assignments with these biases that are deeply engrained, and students may be better in some cases at bringing those biases to the surfaces and challenging another student’s bias, because it’s not – many of these kids do not want to be challenged by an authority figure. If another student does it, it doesn’t have as much authority as if I were to challenge your bias. It’s something you’ve got to be real careful of because you can turn a student off as well as turning them on.

Kendall : Do you think that instructors are equally prepared to engage in critical thinking as their students?

Formosa : No. And let me explain why. OK? The Richard Paul site that I mentioned earlier – Critical Thinking Community – buried in that site is an interesting study. Where they went and talked to a bunch of college professors about critical thinking. How important is critical thinking? Yada, yada, yada. Everybody believed they were doing it, it’s so important, and then they went into these professors’ classrooms and found out they didn’t know what critical thinking was. So not only did they not only know what it was, but they couldn’t teach critical thinking. And we were talking before we began the session, to me one of the classic examples and its thrown up periodically in the literature is if faculty were such good critical thinkers – and let me throw in here very quickly, faculty are the best problem solvers in the world in their discipline. And they can solve problems, and many of them are good critical thinkers, it varies by discipline. OK? But if faculty were great critical thinkers, they would ask this question, “Why is it that fifty percent of my students fail?” And then they would take action. Many of them – or they would not bring their bias to the classroom which says, “They’re stupid, they don’t work, they’re underprepared.” These are all student problems. If they thought critically, they might at least think about, “Is any of it my fault? Am I the reason that fifty percent – could I do something to bring it down to forty or forty-five or thirty?” But they don’t do it. Many of them don’t do it, and that’s why Stephen Brookfield’s book Becoming a Reflective Teacher or whatever it is – it’s such a great book, he does a masterful job of bringing these things to the surface. You know, faculty work very hard, they are very bright, or they wouldn’t be where they are, but we – like in my case, I’m one of the old, graying, well, what’s left up here is graying, and here, faculty; I came through undergraduate and graduate school where it was survival of the fittest. And there wasn’t a whole lot of teaching that went on, to be very honest. There was – I can remember first class of accounting in undergraduate school years ago. The guy who taught it died several years ago. But we came into class the first day and he said, “You’ll notice that I don’t have a handout or syllabus.” He said, “The reason for that is you will work every question at the end of every chapter, and I’ll tell you the week before you have a test.” And, bang! That was it. And that’s the way we were taught accounting. And at University of Tennessee, failure rate sometimes was seventy percent; because that’s the way it was done. There was no teaching. You solve a problem, and you came back to class and you wrote it on the board and the professor would say right or wrong. And if you’re right, it’s great. And if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. But there’s never any teaching. The question is – is that fair to the kids we encounter today, particularly that second third. The answer’s obviously “no.” We cannot continue, and I would say most of my colleagues that I’m aware of have come off of that style of teaching. You don’t see that very much, and I would say – and I can only speak for my institution and a few where I’ve visited – faculty care a great deal about students.

Helton : Jim, what is your advice on the best way to teach critical thinking?

Formosa : Great question, Carol. I think it must be taught explicitly, and let me tell you what I mean by that. One of the misconceptions that faculty have is if you teach students to solve a problem and they can solve it, that they are therefore critical thinkers, and we know that that’s not necessarily true, as we discussed earlier. By teaching it explicitly, what I’m talking about is you as a faculty person must put your brain on display in the classroom and show them exactly how to solve problems or the think critically step by step. And we don’t do a good job of that, and it’s interesting; there’s some research that says why. There’s something called automaticity of experts in learning. As experts in a field, we become so automatic that we don’t know how we reach our decision. We don’t have a clue. But I can tell you if you give me a business transaction exactly how to account for it, what financial statement it will be on, how it impacts cash flow without thinking about it. If we’re not careful, we expect students to be able to do the same thing, and they can’t. Particularly, again, that second third. That second third becomes very frustrated if we expect them to be able to do something they can’t. One of the worst things we do to that second third is have expectations that are unrealistically high. So we’re not only teaching critical thinking, but in teaching generally we’ve got to be able to display our brains. When we come back and we assess critical thinking, we need to be able to assess it explicitly. And let me give you an example; this is one of the things I like to do. If you look at most college level textbooks, they come with exercises and questions and problems, OK? If you take those as they exist out of the textbook and pose them to students, they’ll go scrambling through the textbook and trying to find an example just like them, and they’ll solve it. You throw them a curve when you put down below it, “Explain your answer.” OK? Same thing’s true on multiple choice , true/false tests, which I hate. But if I take a multiple choice or a true/false question and down below it say, “And why?” or “And explain your answer,” it changes the whole complexity – the whole complexion of the test and makes them really think. Another thing that I believe in doing is giving them tough questions ahead of test time. And I do it in my online classes. Generally on any test I give there will be a fifteen point essay that I always give them ahead of time, because part of my essay says, “And explain your reasoning.” Another thing that I like to do, again online it’s easier, I will send them an e-mail question posing a problem and asking them, “Explain to me step by step how you reached the solution to this.” Because if I can see – and we talked about this a little earlier – if I can see how they’re thinking, I can correct many problems, and on another important thing is formative assessment – we mentioned this earlier. And formative assessment I don’t – doesn’t count many points if any except to get them to do it. I’ll give them a point for doing it. I don’t give them a point for right or wrong. But, you know, in many, particularly higher education, institutions – and when we talk about K though 12 we have those – whatever we call those tests – Standardized tests? – They’re what we refer to as high-stakes assessment. You win it or you lose it based on that one test. I’ve never been a big proponent of that, but about ten, maybe twelve years ago, I began to use a lot of formative assessment. I can correct an error before I pop you with that midterm or final and help you, and it has really worked in my accounting classes, and my students – it’s real interesting, initially I got mixed reviews this semester because I started doing it in earnest, big time – a lot of students complained. Nyah , nyah , nyah , nayh – now just grousing and groaning. But now they love it because many students, once they took their real test, saw that by posing different kinds of questions in the same domain, when they got to the test, it was a piece of cake. And if we do our job all the way along the line, and if we clearly define up-front what we expect the students to be able to do, define the competencies in terms that the students understand and reach agreement. Here’s what I expect you to do. And you say, “OK, Jim, I see what you want me to do.” Come test time, there should never be a surprise or a shock.

Kendall : So for those opponents out there that would say, “I don’t have enough time to do critical thinking exercises in my class. I have these dynamite students that are in my room. And my workload and my time – when it’s an hour class, you know, fifty-five minutes in they’re packing up and getting ready to leave.” For those opponents, why is critical thinking important?

Formosa : Well, great question, and I think all you’ve got to do is look at some of the surveys of employers, not only in this state but across the country, and there was one that I encountered. I think it’s something like the Annual Report Card for Higher Education, where and I believe – and don’t hold me to any of this, anybody who’s watching this – but I think it was a Harris Poll. I can’t keep this stuff in my head anymore. Having senior moments increasingly frequently. Anyway, they asked employers about people coming out of higher ed and how satisfied or dissatisfied they were with them. Generally, in a given discipline they’re pretty satisfied, and I don’t remember the percent. They asked about critical thinking, creative thinking, and problem solving as a group. Tennessee, thirty-six percent of the employers were satisfied, across to country thirty-eight percent of the employers are satisfied. It’s not a Tennessee problem. It is a problem across the country. So the short answer is [that] our employers are looking for people who can solve problems. And let me give you a little anecdotal material; I read this on the web on one of the ListServs I belong to. A gal who was getting a masters degree, an MPA, a five-year degree in accounting, went to interview for a job. OK. She was shocked. The first question the interviewer asked her was he gave her an accounting problem and asked her to make the journal entry. She couldn’t do it. Graduate of a five-year accounting program. The second question he asked her was a critical thinking question. She couldn’t do it. And this was as student coming out of a major university, Top Ten accounting program, who couldn’t do basic accounting – bookkeeping – and couldn’t think critically. So this was one of the major accounting firms that did this. They’ve changed up their interviewing process. They want to know if you can think critically or not. And I think, as I said earlier, if we can teach students to think critically, to think creatively, to solve problems, to communicate, to work well in groups and information literacy, they’re much better off than if we try to give them fourteen pages in two semesters from my accounting textbook.

Helton : Well, this has just been so informative. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Nicole, for being with us today.

Kendall : Thank you.

Formosa : Thank you.

Helton : This podcast was a collaborative effort between Nashville State Community College, Tennessee State University, and the Regents Online Campus Collaborative. Thank you for joining us.