Building our critical thinking muscles

The flood of misinformation online is not going away any time soon. We could slow its spread by regulating all technology platforms to kill engagement based algorithms, but our government seems to have little appetite for going head to head with the tech industry, and it’s only a part of the story anyway.

Regulation is important, but, ultimately, the ability to detect and reject misinformation relies on one key skill: Critical Thinking.

Years ago, when I was an academic, I taught a communications course to first year Computer Science students. I built a critical thinking unit in to the course, and something interesting happened to me: the longer I taught that course – thinking about critical thinking, and looking for good examples to dissect in class – the better I became at spotting the tricks that get used to mislead us.

We used to do things like pull apart columns by the likes of Andrew Bolt, and explore the way statements by politicians could be both true and impressively misleading. (A classic of the genre was the Education Minister saying “Universities receive more funding now than ever before.” Which, when you factored in student numbers, inflation, and more universities, became a laughably simple misdirection.)

The more examples I found, the easier it was to find them. I started to spot them even when I wasn’t looking. I got really, really good at critically evaluating everything I saw in the media. Which makes sense, because building critical thinking muscles with real world examples is the best way to make them strong.

When we try to teach critical thinking with small, neat, toy examples, it’s like training people to use their core muscles by lifting a small teddy bear. Only ever lifting tiny, light weight things means you won’t ever develop core strength, or even know how to use core strength safely. Later, when you need to lift something serious, you’ll either be completely unable to get it off the ground, or you will tear something important. (don’t ask me how I know!)

A few weeks ago I attended a Science Misinformation Symposium, organised by the Australian Science Media Centre. It was a really interesting event, including presentations from researchers about how we believe (and disbelieve) things, and the origins of misinformation. Some excellent ideas were proposed for tackling the problem.

Bizarrely, though, the Education system just wasn’t a part of the conversation. No teachers, curriculum designers, or Education researchers were invited to deliver talks or be on panels, and those few attendees interested in Education were there by accident, not design.

The reality is that we can train our critical thinking abilities with the right information and exercises, and while that’s not a complete solution to the problem of misinformation, it would be a huge step forward. And, like muscles, our critical thinking abilities are easiest to build and train when we’re young. Unfortunately, our education system trains us more to get the right answer than to think critically, in part because we use too many neat, toy problems, and fail to build those core critical thinking muscles.

In 2018, I founded the The Australian Data Science Education Institute, to give students a reason to learn programming, using authentic problem solving as a way of showing kids that data science and other technical skills were things they could use to change the world. But the more real projects we built, the more I realised that the technical skills are just a bonus. The real value of authentic problem solving is the critical thinking that is fundamental to every stage of the process.

Real data is never perfect, so you have to critically evaluate it, and figure out its strengths and weaknesses, both when you measure the initial problem and when you measure the impact of your solution. Unlike neat textbook data with only one possible approach, there are many ways to analyse any real dataset, so you have to think about that as well. There’s no such thing as a perfect solution to a real problem, so to evaluate a solution you have to critically evaluate its impact. Communicating the results of a complex, messy, rich analysis is tricky, too, so you have to figure out what you want to emphasise, and what type of graph communicates that message most effectively. Critical Thinking is built in to every step of the process.

Instead of our current focus on facts and known processes, if we filled our schooling with authentic problem solving, teaching our kids to critically evaluate everything – data, analysis, solutions, and evaluation – in their own work, and the work of others, we could really beef up those critical thinking skills and build a rationally sceptical population.

The best time to start all this, of course, was decades ago. The second best time is now.

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