Hello, maybe this could help you : http://repository.uwyo.edu/smtc_plan_b/52/

Thank you for sharing the BBC link! I have used the Asynchronous Debate in developing student's critical thinking skills on topical issues. Perhaps, you can also use it for a topical issue related to your course content. You may have to modify it, but this is a successful example used at the tertiary level that I hope would be useful for you: Conference Paper Debating: A Dynamic Teaching Strategy for Motivating Student...

Best regards,

Debra

Thanks, Debra. Debate is a great activity - giving oxygen to diverse perspectives & doing this in an asynchronous way provides more opportunity for reflective thinking

Hi Jon: I haven't responded right away as I had to think about your question. Good question and a very interesting BBC initiative. I have been thinking about it in a slightly different context - the critical thinking skills context. What I know is that critical thinking and an ability to spot fake information is very much content dependent. For example, if my expertise is in physics, I am much more capable to spot it in this context as opposed to the context of biology, history or other fields. Maybe if you are an expert or a critical thinker, what you can do is to recognise your own limitations and be honest and confident to say that you do not have the knowledge to judge some information. Very often people think that if you have a Ph.D. in one field you know the answers to everything. Of course it is easy to spot fake info when a simple factual check can do it for you, but when it is a more sophisticated debate, it is much harder. In terms of politics, it is enough to look at CNN versus Fox and to see that the big issue is the interpretation. Notice how they interpret the same events from very much opposite standpoints...

What I am worried about is that debates and discussion are disappearing from our educational system both at K-12 and at universities. In order to be able to spot "fake news" one has to have experience listening to the other side of the political debate without judging them immediately. My worry is that we are getting unused (I know the word doesn't exist) to listen to the arguments made by people who we disagree with... So this is my big concern... Thanks for sharing this info. Very interesting.

My own critical skills were more self-taught than formally taught. In about grade 8 we had our English teacher give us the task of taking an advert from the Reader's Digest, and to write about what emotions the advertiser was appealing to. In other words, for the first time we had to change our roles from being a consumer of information to being a critic.

When my daughter was in 3rd year university, she learned for the first time that purpose of playing music videos on TV was to market CDs! More recently my own students believed that if it was on the Internet, then it must be true, and I had to disillusion them by way of an example. In my E-textbook, I give my template for the critical review of a research paper, which could be taught even in high school.

But to address your headline question, I believe that we need to separate critical thinking, critical reviewing, data literacy and data critiquing. I do this in our Research Monograph on 21st C teaching.

Google News has a panel on the right of the computer screen which give fake news. Pupils can be given an example from this panel and one from the main news, and have to distinguish between the two.

thanks for your input, Ian -- I think I probably experienced a similar entry into critical thinking at school. I also agree that it is often helpful to separate out the semantics of different constructs

re data literacy - I don't think it is just about interpreting numbers. It often is in quantitative research but not so in qualitative approaches. I like most of Ridsdale's definition: "‘Data literacy is the ability to collect, manage, evaluate, and apply data, in a critical manner." I'm also inclined to think about data as something we produce as much as consume, following a great paper by Mirra et al., on multiliteracies

Mirra, N., Morrell, E., & Filipiak, D. (2018). From Digital Consumption to Digital Invention: Toward a New Critical Theory and Practice of Multiliteracies. Theory Into Practice, 57(1), 12-19.

Ridsdale, C., Rothwell, J., Smit, M., Ali-Hassan, H., Bliemel, M., Irvine, D., Wuertherick, B. (2015). Strategies and Best Practices for Data Literacy Education: Knowledge Synthesis Report (p. 123). Dalhousie: Dalhousie University.