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Steering into the Skid: On the Norms of Critical Thinking
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Cognitive bias presents as a pressing challenge to critical thinking education. While many have focused on how to eliminate or mitigate cognitive bias, others have argued that these biases are better understood as result from adaptive reasoning heuristics which are, in the right conditions, rational modes of reasoning about the world. This approach presents a new challenge to critical thinking education: if these heuristics are rational under the right conditions, does teaching critical thinking undermine student abilities to reason effectively in real life reasoning scenarios? I argue that this challenge calls for a reconception of the goals of critical thinking education to focus on how rational ideals are best achieved or approximated in human reasoners. Critical thinking educators should focus on developing the metacognitive skill to recognize when different cognitive strategies (including the heuristics) should be used.
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“There is some debate in education literature about whether metacognition can be taught, or if raising awareness of factors which affect human thinking such as biases has a perceptible impact on critical thinking (Battersby and Bailin, 2013; Kenyon, 2014; Maynes, 2017; van Gelder, 2005).”
From ‘Why is this hard, to have critical thinking?’ Exploring the factors affecting critical thinking with international higher education students (2024) · cites this paper as Maynes, 2017
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Metadata
- Authors
- Maynes, J.
- Affiliations
- St. Lawrence University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Maynes, Jeffrey
- ORCID
- Maynes, Jeffrey
- Venue
- Informal Logic
- Publisher
- University of Windsor Leddy Library
- Published
- 2017-06-03
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 114-128
- ISSN
- 0824-2577 (ISSN-L)
- 2293-734X
- OpenAlex
- W2620736329
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 1 · 2020: 1 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 1.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Informal Logic (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Education and Critical Thinking Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Educational Strategies and Epistemologies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Keywords
- critical thinking instruction, cognitive biases, heuristics, adaptive reasoning, metacognition, rationality, cognitive strategies
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