CRITICAL THINKING FOR STUDENTS

Hi, in student life its worth Keeping your dreams and learn how not to sabotage them. After the presentation there is an open house where I look forward to your views.

This presentation is in 3 parts.

1.      Starts with a typical situation where we are overwhelmed with some concepts in our studies, which we are unable to understand & get edged out of a subject of our choice.

2.      So, the antidote of that is to create a process of learning.

3.      Then, to see if there is a general way of thinking that can be applied to life situations which helps in solving problems faster & smartly.

 Imagine that your dream is to be part of space missions & so you want to do well in math. You are doing well & this one topic comes along. Maybe you were that day inattentive at class, so you missed a couple of concepts. and unfortunately lose the thread of understanding. Subsequent sessions are all Greek. Soon you mentally mark the topic as difficult. You try to recover from the situation, through extra classes, tuitions, etc. But unfortunately, in this case it’s not working. People close to you want to be helpful. They tend to rationalize the situation with comments such as – your basic concepts are not so strong. Also, at times especially in Class 9, there are too many concepts to handle. A few such experiences with other topics and you mentally mark math as difficult & in all probability at Class 10 you are told that you don't have the aptitude for the subject so chose something else. In a way your dream is sabotaged. The question I put to you is who sabotaged your dream ? - yourself ,the teacher, the system or something else?

After the initial unhappiness, you reconcile quickly. When you compare your marks with friends who do consistently well & how quick they are in raising their hands in answering class questions you start having self-doubts about your own aptitude in math. Also, you are told that you did not work hard enough, so the guilt trip creates a justification too. Also, in my time gender biases existed in certain parts of the country, for e.g. girls don't have a natural aptitude for Math. But half a century later, when you see that our space missions are managed by women mathematicians & scientists, this gender-bias is punctured.

For your dream can take shape, you need to understand the topics in the relavant subjects. Also, you need to be confident that you will understand the topics. How to consistently do that?

So let me digress and tell you about an article ‘MS Dhoni’s approach to cricket is spiritual’ by Sanjay Manjrekar. I quote “…he (i.e. Dhoni) uses the word process a lot. He absolutely and genuinely believes in it…. If the team did not follow the process well, then the win for him was because of luck. That did not make him happy. For him, the right process was playing clinically and smartly as per the situation and not allowing the emotions raging inside get the better of you. Which is why often he would not look too unhappy with the loss because in his mind, his team followed the right process… Why did Dhoni win so much? My answer is because he didn't obsess about winning too much. Like he didn't worry about losing too much. He focused on the steps to be there, the process. Looking at the trophy in the distance longingly only gets you to stumble on your next step right before you...”

Dhoni’s way to confidence was to have a process & keep on reviewing and updating it. Nothing else mattered as much as the process. Much later in life, I picked the concepts from this article & applied them. So, the first question that I ask in any situation is – what really is the process?

 So, for a student it is the learning process. What sabotagued the dream was an ineffective learning process. As every school has its own ways of teaching so should students only restrict the learning process to that? In my time we used to often complain, when poor results came “Oh! but we did not have this facility or the teacher was casual with the classs?” Then the next question was “Whose dreams are going to be shattered?” What ways are you supplementing your learning?” Half a century ago & even today the position is the same – The student needs to take ownership of his/her overall learning process.

When I am facing difficulty in learning, I tell myself never mind, we all have a sort of a natural aptitude for certain subjects where intuitive understanding takes place & for me not so for this topic. Here I need to follow a disciplined learning process & it works like this:

First pass: How interesting can I make this topic to be for myself                                                                                                                      

Let’s say you are reading up on Valency tables in chemistry or the Pythagoras theorem in geometry. To make it interesting, first identify the use of these formulas in real life & the value they bring. For e.g. as per Chat GPT Pythagorean theorem can be used for calculating the number of tiles to be used for a tiled roof. Valency of different elements help scientists predict their chemical behavior and interactions. My appoach is to keep on finding more use cases till I develop a curiosity for the topic.

Second pass: Identifying the broad contours

With a good curiosity quotient, let’s create a broad plan for exploring & discovery by collecting metadata on the topic. Metadata provides information about other data in the topic. For example, in a book, the table of contents is metadata & so also the bibliography. At the end of a chapter if there is a summary, then reading that will give an idea of the main points. Also it is worthwhile reading the questions at the end of a chapter. It is probable that you may not have understood much but would have got some pointers of the chapter. Now writing a short paragraph of what the chapter is on, what it wants to convey will improve clarity

Third pass: List the details that you need to understand.

By looking at the summary that you have written & glancing through the chapter, identify the concepts & details that you want to learn about.

Fourth pass: Hunt for the information that you are seeking.

Have you ever searched for an important paper in a big wastepaper basket. After soetime it becomes a game. Something like this is what you need to do now. Search for information in your class notes, through Chat GPT, etc.

CASE STUDY

Let’s say you are reading Chapter 4: ‘What causes What?’ from the book ‘Art of Statistics – Learning from Data’ written by the internationally acclaimed statistician David Spiegelhalter

First pass: How interesting can I make this topic to be for myself. Every other day there are newspaper reports on how to manage for good health. What to eat & what not to. But over the decades, what was thought as good or bad is reversed.  The causes & solutions are changing. So how to determine if there is a cause & affect relationship or that two things are simply moving together. For e.g. It is easy to spot when two things are moving together but one is not causing another, in the news headlines that can as absurd as  Shark attacks have increased on the back of ice cream sales. Another newspaper headline was ‘Does going to university increase the risk of brain tumor? ‘ Although in a sample of highly educated the statistics showed a slightly higher percentage of brain tumor.

Second pass: Identifying the broad contours.

Now in statistics causation is difficult to establish.

The purpose of this chapter is how to conclude in statistics that an observed link between an exposure and an outcome is causal (i.e. one of them is influenced by the other). Alao how to identify observed correlation that might be spurious (false positives.)

Third pass: List the details that you need to understand.

-          Randomized Clinical trial                    

-           Prospective cohort study

-          Retrospective cohort study

-          Simpson’s paradox

-          Reverse causation

Fourth pass: Hunt for the information that you are seeking.

Now that I know the importance of differentiation between causation and correlation in statistics and how difficult it is to know that, also where are the clues that will help in honing my skills (Third pass), I will be motivated to research them. Also to do that there are many sources including my class teacher, friend circle, seniors, Chat GPT, online research, writing to professors of statistics, etc.

A CRITICAL WAY OF THINKING

 Every student wants to do well in their academic life. Theoretically that shouldn’t be a problem - as curiosity & acquiring information is a  distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens. By the way do you know what homo sapiens mean? I would like to be a bit more modest & call ourselves ‘thinking mammals.’

However, if you were to get hold on the statistics of the student life of a large population say a billion people, my guess is that a large proportion would be fairly unsatisfied of their academic journey.  It makes sense to manage your academic life in school for after all that is the central theme for 12- 13 initial years of your human journey. If you don’t manage it & instead let it fall in some form of a rut of unsatisfied LIFE, remember it is as habit forming as a satisfied one. Manage your academic journey, rather than others manage it for you.

At some stage you get an idea about yourself regarding your academic capabilities & limitations. There is also a theory behind it – The theory of constraints and that we will discuss later on after we have discussed a general method of thinking that helps solves problems smartly.

Talking about solving problems smartly i.e. smart decision making, let us see briefly how we think. The human brain is flooded by over a hundred thousand of  thoughts in 24 hours, some we are conscious about & others we are not. Some are useful, others are a waste. Some are positive, others are negative. Some are within our control while most are not.

The human brain generates emotions & thoughts (cognition). Emotions and cognition are closely intertwined, but they represent distinct aspects of human brain functioning although they overlap. Emotions refer to our subjective experiences related to feelings, moods, and affective states. They involve physiological responses, such as changes in heart rate, facial expressions, and hormonal activity. On the other hand, Cognition encompasses mental processes like thinking, reasoning, memory, attention, and problem-solving. Also, the subconscious mind, also known as the unconscious mind, plays a significant role in human cognition.

Now, we from time to time operate either intuitively or in a deliberate and conscious way especially when we are doing reasoning. It is this deliberate thinking using reasoning & other cognitive skills that is the wonder tool for humans, which has helped it evolve from a weak animal that used to hide so that larger animals did not prey on it and evolve to be the Master Of Planet Earth controlling everything that is going on & fearing only fellow humans. Now we all do deliberate thinking. As emotions & cognitive activities are intertwined we end up doing a mix. That may not be that helpful for quality decision making, especially when we lose objectivity & ae influenced by bias. Over the years universal intellectual standards have been developed to provide a means of checking the quality of reasoning about a problem, issue, situation, etc. Thinking critically entails knowledge & application n of these standards for clarity, accuracy, relevance depth, breadth, logic, significance and fairness in decision making. Hence critical thinking is that general smart thinking skill & in any job interview this is one skill the organizations are looking for apart from trade skills & other soft skills.

By the way in the earlier part of my talk when I created the process of it was using critical thinking skills. You may want to create your own learning process; Critical thinking is a skill that can be learnt & you could recommend your school to consider having a course on it

Deepak Wadhawan is former CEO, The Institute of Internal Auditors – India (IIA India) & on an IIA Global committee. He speaks at different international conferences on Auditing emerging technologies & Critical thinking. He advises  on Governance, Risk Management & Controls (GRC). Deepak is a Chartered Accountant from India, Certified Public Accountant (USA) & Certified Internal Auditor (USA).