Thursday, September 15, 2005
Dialogue as Medium (and Message) for Training Critical Thinking
Dialogue as Medium (and Message) for Training Critical Thinking (application/pdf Object)
from the "Abstract
Standard internalist approaches to critical thinking insist that critical thinkers maintain conscious, deliberate access to the reasons for their beliefs and actions. A more useful approach is externalist, focusing on the reliability of different types of processes for generating beliefs and decisions under different circumstances.
We describe an externalist approach to critical thinking based on dialogue. According to the theory, critical thinking is asking and answering questions about alternative possibilities in order to achieve some objective. Three perspectives are coordinated (by different individuals or inside a single head): a proponent, an opponent, and a referee. By asking and answering questions, the defender and challenger introduce new possibilities (mental models), understand them more completely, and learn one another’s beliefs and preferences. The referee, who represents an external perspective, regulates the dialogue so that it reliably achieves the participants’ objectives within the available time."
"Hypotheses. The common knowledge effect is a well-documented shortcoming of group decision making that critical dialogue might mitigate. Group members are more likely to discuss information they already hold in common, even when there is more valuable unshared information; moreover, even when unshared information is mentioned, it has less impact on group decisions (Stasser, 1996; 1999). We predicted that teams trained in critical dialogue would be more likely to (i) pool information and (ii) use the pooled information to develop novel solutions. More specifically, training would increase the frequency with which team members discussed information not already held in common by members of the team and the frequency with which they made effective use of that information."
from the "Abstract
Standard internalist approaches to critical thinking insist that critical thinkers maintain conscious, deliberate access to the reasons for their beliefs and actions. A more useful approach is externalist, focusing on the reliability of different types of processes for generating beliefs and decisions under different circumstances.
We describe an externalist approach to critical thinking based on dialogue. According to the theory, critical thinking is asking and answering questions about alternative possibilities in order to achieve some objective. Three perspectives are coordinated (by different individuals or inside a single head): a proponent, an opponent, and a referee. By asking and answering questions, the defender and challenger introduce new possibilities (mental models), understand them more completely, and learn one another’s beliefs and preferences. The referee, who represents an external perspective, regulates the dialogue so that it reliably achieves the participants’ objectives within the available time."
"Hypotheses. The common knowledge effect is a well-documented shortcoming of group decision making that critical dialogue might mitigate. Group members are more likely to discuss information they already hold in common, even when there is more valuable unshared information; moreover, even when unshared information is mentioned, it has less impact on group decisions (Stasser, 1996; 1999). We predicted that teams trained in critical dialogue would be more likely to (i) pool information and (ii) use the pooled information to develop novel solutions. More specifically, training would increase the frequency with which team members discussed information not already held in common by members of the team and the frequency with which they made effective use of that information."
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