Common Reading I: In this excerpt from his book, Chet Meyers looks at what we know of mental structures and what implications this knowledge has for the teaching of critical thinking. Although the book was written with teachers of college students in mind, almost all of what he says here is equally applicable at the high school level. I have taken the liberty of italicizing a few passages which I think are of particular relevance to the goals and activities planned for our institute. The bibliography for the parenthetical notes is available on request.

- RBS

Examining the Process of Critical Thought
- Chet Meyers, from Teaching Students to Think Critically, © Jossey-Bass 1986
(Permission to post on the Punahou CTI site granted by Chet Meyers.)



What goes on in our brains when we solve a problem in physics or analyze a Hemingway novel? How do experts and novices differ in the ways they analyze issues and solve problems? What methods can teachers use to help students learn specific approaches to critical thinking that are appropriate for different disciplines? What can college leachers learn from cognitive scientists about developmental theorists that will help them teach critical thinking?

Morton Hunt summarizes recent developments in the rapidly changing field of cognitive science. He stresses the human brain's innate abilities. "Research suggests that our minds come equipped with highly efficient neural arrangements built into us by evolution; these predispose us to make certain kinds of sense of our experiences and to use them in that distinctly human activity we call thinking'' (1982a, p. 13A). Hunt goes on to argue that humans are "concept-making creatures" and that we use our innate thinking abilities to categorize, generalize, and in other ways make sense of the world.

The equipment, ability, and general predisposition to think may be innate, but the specific ways in which we make sense of the world are learned. They are also poorly understood and very complex. Some scientists believe that the healthy human brain has the capacity to store as many as 100 trillion bits of information&emdash; more than 500 times the amount of information contained in an entire set of Encyclopaedia Britannica (Hunt, 1982b). Researchers are just beginning to understand how this vast capacity for storing information is used in thinking processes.

Studies comparing the problem-solving techniques of experts and novices offer some interesting observations. To study such techniques, scientists have presented individuals with a problem and then asked them to talk out loud as they thought the problem through, verbalizing their thoughts as quickly as possible. By analyzing what different people said, researchers discovered some important aspects of critical thinking.

Hunt (1982b, p. 140) cites a report by Paul Johnson, of the University of Minnesota, that shows how an expert cardiologist, when presented with only a few scraps of information, formulates a correct diagnosis. Such an expert can analyze problems quickly because he or she has a wealth of previous experience in working with the materials, issues, and problems of his particular discipline. The information from those previous experiences is structured and prioritized through practice so that it is readily available for analyzing problems and issues.

When novices in any field attack a problem, they develop a hypothesis and follow a lead until it results in a dead end. Then they backtrack and start over with another approach. Novices also typically have difficulty prioritizing issues and sorting out variables; they act as if all considerations have equal importance. The experts, on the other hand, quickly identify central variables, eliminate noncrucial considerations, and, drawing on their vast previous experience of related problems, formulate an analysis (Hunt, 1982b, p. 264). They are able to do this because they possess a framework for analysis, some structure for making sense of things and organizing experience. How such frameworks or structures develop is an important consideration in teaching critical thinking.

Mental Structures: The Contributions of Jean Piaget

T he Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget has developed a number of helpful analogies for describing how the human brain seems to structure and make sense of experience. Piaget's work derives from years of closely observing and talking with young children as they worked and played, noting the ways they solved everyday problems. His insights about how children solve increasingly complex problems provide a helpful perspective for thinking about the teaching of critical thinking skills and attitudes.

Piaget (1976, p. 119) insists that children do not receive knowledge passively but rather discover and construct knowledge through activities. As children interact with their psychological and physical environments, they begin to form what Piaget calls structures for thought. These structures help to organize the children's experience and direct future interactions. Piaget envisions the structures as problem-solving methods or blueprints for guiding behavior. The infant's first structures are sensorimotor - for example, developing the hand-eye coordination necessary for thumb sucking or manipulating toys in the infant's crib. As the child grows, more complex mental structures are added.

As long as a particular structure works, it will guide a child's interactions. Sooner or later, however, the child's blueprints are bound to be challenged. As two of Piaget's followers note, "Owing to the child's inborn drive to interact with his environment, he meets contradictions, that is, things do not fit his present mental structures. These contradictions produce a state of disequilibrium. In other words, the child's present mental structures are found inadequate and must be altered or replaced" (Lawson and Renner, 1975, p. 337). As we grow older, we come to have a greater investment in maintaining our old blueprints for interaction, but we will still modify them (and when necessary create new ones) when circumstances create enough disequilibrium.

Although Piaget's work describes young children, we can draw on his concept of structures when discussing learning processes in college students. If we view mental structures as components of larger disciplinary perspectives for problem solving and analysis, we can say that when we teach students to think critically, we are helping them alter or replace their mental structures.

Piaget's description of equilibrium and disequilibrium is also useful in that it provides a perspective for understanding some of the tensions involved in teaching critical thinking. The process of modifying old, or creating new, mental structures is often uncomfortable and at times even painful. This is especially true when blueprint modification involves not merely the rearrangement of mental furniture but major structural renovations.

Such major renovations are most likely to occur when students explore new disciplines. If students have entered college with rather sparse mental accommodations, they may find themselves being asked to adopt completely new ways of perceiving the world. Exposure to a multiplicity of new ways of thinking in the early college years can be very disconcerting. Some degree of student discomfort, however, is inevitable and ultimately beneficial. Teachers should be acutely aware of the inherently disruptive nature of this educative process. Teaching critical thinking involves intentionally creating an atmosphere of disequilibrium, so that students can change, rework, or reconstruct their thinking processes.

One reason that reconstructing thinking processes can be painful is that structures of thought are not merely matters of dispassionate cognition. They are also highly personal and emotional, involving cherished values and beliefs. Personal beliefs and values serve as a perceptual grid through which experience is screened. As Yinger points out, "As a result of our experience, each of us has 'implicit theories' about the world and the way in which it functions. Implicit theories are the unexamined or unconscious theories that allow us to structure, interpret, and make sense of our world.... Together they constitute our belief system and our personal perspective. Implicit theories become the lens and filter for everyday experience, dictating what one sees and how one interprets it" (1980, p. 16). Part of teaching critical thinking necessarily involves challenging students' implicit theories and teaching them new perspectives for interpretation. It can thus become a very emotion-laden process.

I am reminded of a story a colleague tells about an adult student in one of her introductory linguistics courses. After the fifth week of class, this student approached her teacher and complained bitterly that she was not getting out of the course what she wanted. T he student said, "Look, all I wanted to learn in this class was something about correct and incorrect English usage. But you're telling me that some forms of expression are proper today, while my English teacher twenty years ago taught me they were wrong. Who's right? What's proper and what isn't?"

An important part of the critical thinking process that my colleague was trying to teach her students had to do with the dynamic aspects of language and with raising questions about the nature of language. What was "standard English" in Shakespeare's day, or even twenty years ago, may no longer be standard. But this student was looking for the "right" answers to usage questions&emdash; the right answers for all time. My colleague's relativistic approach was challenging the student's mental structures and implicit theories, causing great conflict. The teacher was asking the student to be flexible and change the way she thought about language, and the student, stuck in her old ways of thinking, was experiencing the pain of disequilibrium.

Some students handle disequilibrium better than others, but all students have their limits. Teaching students new thinking processes involves gauging very sensitively the amount of disequilibrium that will do the most good. Too much can overload students and be dysfunctional, while too little can result in warm, wonderful classes where no learning takes place. A friend of mine suggests that the best teachers are those who know how to create and maintain a proper balance between challenge and support, and I agree wholeheartedly. One of the keys to teaching critical thinking successfully is to simultaneously challenge students' old modes of thinking and provide structure and support for the development of new ones.

Making Implicit Thought Processes Explicit

When we see a juggler effortlessly tossing oranges in the air, we fail to appreciate the first stumbling efforts and the hours of practice that laid the groundwork for that proficiency. The same holds true for expert critical thinkers. All experts started as novices - struggling with basic concepts, questions, and issues - as they developed the thought processes that would help them make sense of things. The problem is that by the time they have achieved their expertise, many of those thought processes have become so automatic, internalized, and implicit that the experts have difficulty explaining explicitly how they think.

Teachers are experts, too. By the time most college teachers have completed their undergraduate and graduate education, they have spent thousands of hours immersed in the terminology, concepts, issues, and methodologies of their disciplines. The ways they critically analyze issues and problems have often become second nature to them. Although they may demonstrate their critical thinking abilities implicitly in the ways they organize lectures, raise questions, and engage students in discussion, they may have trouble providing the explicit formulations that students need in order to develop their own critical thinking abilities.

In the initial stages of teaching undergraduates to think critically, the wise teacher will avoid overwhelming them with the intricacies of the process. Instead, the instructor should focus on teaching the basic disciplinary foundations - terms, concepts, issues, methodologies, and so on - and providing general ways to structure that knowledge and begin asking questions about it. In other words, the teacher should create the foundation for a framework of analysis. This is not to suggest that teachers "spoonfeed" their students by oversimplifying, but simply that they take time to structure the information they present. When students see some order or sense in things, they are much more likely to be able to recall information and apply what they have learned.

One of the pioneers in the study of retention, F. C. Bartlett, demonstrated that an important function of memory is to reconstruct or structure information according to one's initial assumptions and beliefs about "what must have been true." Bartlett discovered that "people tended to interpret information in terms of previously acquired knowledge and concepts, which in turn influenced their recall of the material" (Bransford, 1979, p. 156).

The message of this finding for teachers of critical thinking is that if they do not offer a framework for making sense of the content of their courses, students will provide their own. And the framework that students provide for themselves may not help them develop the analytical skills that their teachers want them to learn. As Norman notes, "We found it essential to provide the prototype model for the students.... If you as a teacher do not provide the model, the student is likely to pick one anyway, and if you are to have any control in the situation, it is best for you to have made the selection" (1980, p. 44).

Visualizing the Critical Thinking Process

As we have noted, making one's implicit analytical framework explicit can be difficult. Many teachers, like other experts, have great trouble with this task. One way to make the job easier is through visualization. In this process one tries to envision, as best one can, what one's thinking processes "look like." I have learned from personal experience that this technique can be very rewarding.

Over the years I have been involved in numerous workshops on setting course objectives for critical thinking, and I have usually left them with a sense of frustration. For one thing, they are usually too theoretical. For another, the limited workshop format does not afford enough time for teachers to undertake the demanding process of clarifying critical thinking concepts. Finally, one-shot workshops do not provide the psychological support necessary for making significant changes in one's teaching methodology.

Attempting to remedy these deficiencies, I recently had the opportunity to design an ongoing seminar that would allow an extended period of time for faculty to clarify teaching goals related to critical thinking and would provide group support for implementing change. In the initial seminar, a group of eight faculty agreed to meet one evening a month for six months to work on clarifying the exact nature of their teaching objectives and to focus specifically on the thinking skills they wanted students to learn. The group also planned to share teaching strategies and written assignments designed to test critical thinking.

It was a big agenda for six meetings. What actually happened was that the group spent the entire six months helping one another "talk through" teaching goals and definitions of critical thinking. It became clear that each person in the seminar had a fair idea of what he or she wanted to teach in terms of content, but few had ever taken the time to spell out any organized framework for thinking processes. Although everyone found the seminar helpful, we fell short of our individual and group goals in identifying specific approaches to critical thinking.

Fortunately, in the same year that I initiated my teaching seminars, a colleague, Carol Holmberg, was struggling with what turned out to be a related problem. For years Holmberg had been trying to teach adult students to read literature critically and had encountered many of the same frustrations that teachers of normal age undergraduates do. Despairing of lecture and discussion techniques, she decided to attempt a new approach. In a paper entitled, "Using Visual Paradigms in Classroom Teaching," she describes how the inspiration for this new approach occurred.

One evening some years ago, while struggling to teach the essentials of a complex novel to a Twentieth Century Literature class, I asked myself, "What do you really want your students to master of this writer's work?" The answer came: "The principles of perception which guide the artist's aesthetic experience." To illustrate this point, I turned to the blackboard and drew a simple sketch, developed as a result of some earlier work on William Blake. I wished to illustrate that artistic products reflect "degrees of perception" . . . and that the process of perception usually begins with a concrete, or sense focused, experience . . . and "expands" to encompass more comprehensive patterns of thought and feeling reflected in our social, philosophical, and cultural traditions....

What had actually occurred that evening so long ago? I was simply "translating" that elusive process called ''thinking'' into something that students could actually see (albeit metaphorically) and more easily grasp 11982, pp. 1-2].

Holmberg's sketch [provided] a visualization of one possible framework for critical thinking in literature. One of Holmberg's primary teaching goals was to move her literature students beyond narrow, literalistic perceptions of prose to more expanded interpretations that incorporate the richness of imaginative metaphor and visionary imagery. Her model illustrated one way to conceive of this movement. It became an organizing principle for her class and resulted in the development of increasingly critical modes of perception in her students.

(The sketch showed two lines joined at the left and opening at an angle toward the right, in a shape resembling a megaphone or a thin piece of pie. Arcs drawn through the angle separated it into four sections. At the left, closest to the vertex, was the section labeled "sensory". Moving to the right were progressively wider sections of the angle lbaeled "rational," "imaginative," and "visionary." - RBS)

In her four-stage model, Holmberg began where students' perceptions of literature usually start - at a concrete, sensory level. For example, The Plague, by Albert Camus, is, on a sensory level, a novel about a plague with ghastly implications for the people of Oran. The rats, pustular boils, and stench of death are all part of that sensory level. On a rational level, the book describes a disease with its own logic that must be combatted by the rational resources of medicine, exemplified by Dr. Rieux. On a metaphorical level, Camus may be making a statement about the effect World War 11 had on separating individuals from things they love. Finally, on a visionary or mythic level, Camus may be using the idea of the plague to make a personal philosophical statement about the human condition.

Holmberg's work is important for the teaching of critical thinking because it uses a concrete, visual image to explain an abstract process of thought, thereby making that thinking process more accessible to students. Holmberg herself quickly realized this. Her model worked so well in her own classes that she began sharing her ideas with other teachers. She held a number of workshops in which she offered this visual model as a tool for teachers to use in moving their students to higher levels of analysis and critical thought. Whether or not they decided to use that particular model, almost all the people who attended Holmberg's workshops found the attempt to visualize the ways they analyze disciplinary materials worthwhile.

After attending one of Holmberg's workshops and seeing how eagerly teachers participated in attempts to visualize their thinking processes, I saw a possible answer to the frustrations in my own critical thinking seminars. Our attempts to "talk through" teaching goals related to critical thinking had remained at a much too abstract, theoretical level. The use of a concrete visual image did more to make explicit the implicit concepts of critical thinking than any amount of talking could ever have accomplished.

When I began a second series of seminars the following year, I asked Holmberg to present her visual model at the first seminar meeting. She then asked those present to draw, as best they could, a visual representation of the critical thinking process they wanted their students to master by the end of their respective courses.

The results were dramatic. Though the artistic level of some participants extended little beyond drawing stick figures, some powerful visualizations emerged. After two additional seminar sessions in which participants helped each other clarify the design of their visual models, a number of teachers said that, for the first time in their careers, they were beginning to understand not only the critical thinking skills they wanted students to learn but their own overall teaching objectives as well. In Holmberg's words, "The visual becomes a metaphor for the central teaching goal of the class and 'speaks' with eloquent clarity and cohesion" (p. 20).

The actual visual models developed in the seminars ranged from an artistic representation of a tree, with key concepts indicated on the branches, to a geometric design of overlapping circles, in which each circle represented a concept central to the course. A visual model for a class in management theory consisted of a linear formula illustrating the concepts and variables involved in analyzing a management problem. Another visual model resembled the "before and after" advertisements for weight loss or body building. Developed by a teacher of statistics, it showed what she thought students' thought processes when analyzing raw data looked like before the students took her course and what she hoped these processes would look like when the course was over.

Not all attempts at visualization were successful. One professor, who was having a difficult time communicating with students in his philosophy of religion class, despaired of visually representing the critical thinking skills he wanted students to learn. He did, however, offer the group a graphic verbal representation of the general direction his class took. He said, "At the beginning of this course I envision myself and my students entering a ship for a grand journey into new realms of thought. We set sail, and somewhere about the fourth week of class the ship sinks." Such humor often saved participants from taking themselves too seriously.

It should not be surprising that many teachers found the creation of visual models far more helpful than written or verbal exercises as a means of understanding their own thinking processes. Such a result is entirely consistent with Piaget's theory that all learning begins in concrete experience before progressing to an abstract representation, a theory we will explore in more depth in the next chapter. In order to make the implicit framework of their mental process explicit, they had to begin, just as their students did, with something concrete - a visual representation.

Of course, we can never fully comprehend what goes on in our brains when we engage in critical thinking. Yet making explicit even an approximation of that complex thought process is helping to students trying to learn its rudiments. Indeed, the great value of a visual model is that it does simplify an incredibly complex process. This simplification can greatly aid students in beginning to grasp the new ways of thinking that their teachers wish them to understand.

Some caveats about the use of visual models in teaching critical thinking are in order, however. The teaching of such models should never become an end in itself, nor should students be required to adhere to a model rigidly. Whatever models are presented will - and should - be modified by students in the creation of their own developing disciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, the attitudes that accompany the teaching of a model are as important as the model itself. The most graphic of models will count for little if its presentation is not accompanied by the fostering of attitudes of questioning, probing, and wonder.

Finally, teachers must be realistic about what can be accomplished in the way of critical thinking development in a typical ten-week college course. Most students' previous thinking processes are not going to be radically altered in this length of time. One can only hope to sketch the "bare bones" of an analytical framework - and even this will not help much until students have had time to explore the materials of their discipline and realize their need to develop new ways of thinking in order to make sense of this new information.

Helping students recognize this need for change involves challenging their present, often simple, thought processes and then leading them to more abstract and critical levels of thought. In the chapter that follows, we will describe the movement from concrete to abstract thought and present some ways to bring about that movement in the classroom.