Content Knowledge AND Critical Thinking, Part II

Yesterday, I said this: "Some bloggers continue to suggest that increased focus on creativity and critical thinking skills threatens basic literacy, numeracy, and knowledge in the disciplines." My first example was a post in the Core Knowledge blog showing how critical thinking without background knowledge would limit listeners' grasp of the President's inaugural speech. As you can see in the comments for yesterday, the author of that blog did not intend to suggest that thinking skills are unimportant and has had some experiences with those who take the "learning how to learn" position too far. I think we all need to examine our positions continually in search of the right balance and I intend to to put that into practice using the Core Knowledge blog and other good sources with perspectives that differ from my own.

Perhaps Ken DeRosa, who writes a blog called D-Ed Reckoning, also has seen some examples of dismissiveness toward content knowledge and poorly implemented strategies for teaching thinking. But I'd like to suggest that he underestimates the power of critical thinking and the idea of "learning to learn."

In a January 21 entry, he outlined a projectile motion physics problem and on January 23 (in an entry called "Where's Your Google Now?"), he discusses "how difficult it is to think critically about Physics unless you know quite a bit [of] physics and have had quite a lot of practice solving similar physics problems."

Clearly, he demonstrated what he set out to demonstrate. But I think that in many contexts, good research and analytical skills can overcome gaps in content knowledge.

For example, I did not take physics and higher level math courses in school, and I know that even with my advanced Googling skills and high aptitude for gleaning information from technical texts, I would not be able to solve a projectile motion physics problem. But when a problem is relevant to something I need to understand and write about, I can discern that relevance through research and thought and can develop the background knowledge required for my communication task. In my career, and in many others, that is good enough.

When I worked for a NASA contractor as a writer, I covered basic and applied research projects across a variety of disciplines. When I started in 1987, I would not have been able even to identify or define those disciplines and knew nothing about how engineers analyzed design concepts and tested prototypes. As a writer, I used my critical reading and thinking skills when I needed to summarize physical processes within a system or communicate with physicists who were working on advanced concepts. By examining some technical references and project reports (No Idiot's Guides in those days), I was able to ask good questions and synthesize information from several sources to create background explanations for general and managerial audiences. Thus with a limited based of knowledge, I was able to educate citizens about the amazing work behind things they take for granted, to help legislators make decisions from a more informed context, and to make researchers aware of what was happening in other areas so they could make better use of the limited time they had to explore outside of their specialities.

Certainly, we need people who can do much more than what I did. My simplified explanations were much less important than the work of those who could write technical reports that other scientists could act upon. But my "good enough" knowledge base, cobbled together primarily through critical reading and thinking, fulfilled a purpose. Perhaps knowing more physics and being able to solve physics problems would have made my technical writing better in some instances, but most of the time I was effective because I was a learner—someone who could listen to a totally new concept and make enough sense out of it to tell a bigger story of ideas, innovation, collaboration, practical problems solved, or progress toward national goals. Moreover, imagine the benefits of having someone on the team who doesn't know the science but is a good learner. If he or she can't understand your explanation, you know you need to work on your message. Otherwise, those less motivated to understand you might not fund your project.

I don't mean to say that my avoidance of physics and math in high school and college was a good thing. Nor do I suggest that content knowledge played no role in my technical writing during that time. Certainly, my knowledge of structure, learned through studying English language content, helped. I was very interested in biology and anatomy. Maybe my content knowledge about living systems helped make it possible for me to converse with physicists and engineers—and maybe their "good enough" content knowledge in areas outside of their specialized domains helped them communicate their work to a tenderfoot.

I guess what I'm saying is that it would be wonderful if schools could figure out a way to broaden students' content knowledge in math and science while making them agile learners who can compensate for gaps in knowledge at the same time. Because gaps are always going to be there.

Another post on D-Ed Reckoning needs, in my opinion, to take a broader view of creativity. I will continue this in tomorrow's post.