Teaching technique
I am working to create (and test) a novel way to teach and assess critical thinking, an approach I call TILES.
TILES is Teaching students to Identify Logical Errors Systematically, from a “concept inventory” I created from a list of common logical errors that students make in their essays. I created this list of common errors from 15 years of allowing students to rewrite their papers, as many times as they want, for a better grade. My qualitative inference from these errors is that they exist in a hierarchy. Students must learn X before they learn Y, and Y to understand Z, etc.
My exams test students’ ability to identify mistakes that a fictional student makes in their essay or from a set of hypothetical scenarios that tests students’ ability to apply the underlying logic of these skills, in conjunction with course knowledge. Part of the idea is that higher education is meant to teach students to identify nonsense in the arguments in the real world. Essay assignments are not necessarily the gold standard in teaching those skills for a variety of reasons:
- Most students (even those rewriting for an improved grade) do not read our comments, and even if they do…
- … they do not understand the underlying principle associated with an error
- Example: In my Constitutional Law classes, I would ask for a legal interpretation, and they would give me a summary, or they would write a normative essay. I would tell them not to include their normative input, explaining the meaning of normative with tons of examples. Many students would write another normative essay with the opposing normative argument.
- So, in every class I have taught since 2006, I would spend three weeks covering the different kinds of claims, and then, I would give a quiz, asking students to categorize causal, normative, interpretation and factual claims. In every class, regardless of freshman or seniors, the score on this quiz was a B-.
- From this I conclude, asking them to “avoid normative,” is a recipe for failure. And even if they do understand it, they think that there is something “wrong” with making ethical arguments, which is not the message we want to send.
…
… and even if they do understand them…
3. . they do not make all the possible set of errors I have identified, so they only learn from the mistakes they happen to make.
Using the TILES technique, I start from the beginning from the most foundational errors, so that they learn those and then move up the hierarchy, which might differ, depending on the course context.
TILES: a PowerPoint presentation of using TILES to teach the Nature of Science in a large American politics course. We argue that this technique is more equitable and easier on instructors and are currently investigating the impact on critical thinking and writing skills. Christopher J. Lee (Computer Science, Bi0-chemistry, UCLA) and I are testing a variety of pedagogical hypotheses, so check out our research!
Using a free open source app, Courselets, with TILES: This PowerPoint (use the slide show because there are animations that illustrate some points) reviews some STEM education literature on “concept inventories.” STEM researchers have been doing what they call concept inventories for 40 years, research that is virtually nonexistent in the social sciences. STEM education researchers were SHOCKED at what their students do not understand. What would social scientists find out if we started digging for whether our students are actually learning?
Mini-language technique for teaching statistics: Using Pimsleur’s language model to ensure that students in methods classes can transfer course knowledge to new (out of class) scenarios. These slides illustrate the Scatterplot, Venn diagram, DAG, correlation, linear regression with two and three variables to illustrate statistical relationships and the meaning of a “control variable.” The basic idea is to give students multiple ways of seeing the same information, and then tests their ability to translate one language into another and it deepens their understanding of statistics, which they can then apply with ease. As one student told me, “I will never be able to unsee the world in terms of confounding and mediating variables.”
Download password protected examples of exams: email me at Vanessa.Baird@colorado.edu for the password.
Examples
Lengthy appendix to a working article with many examples