When we asked our peers to imagine the world ten years from now, their nightmares came easily. Within minutes, our installation at the Oculus in
Across higher education, artificial intelligence has rapidly changed how students complete academic work. Essays, summaries, explanations, and structured problem-solving can now be generated instantly. The
The purpose of this article is to discuss our observations and insights into the challenges many doctoral learners face in writing their dissertations. In more than 30
I will never forget the expression of bewilderment and abject fear on my undergraduate researcher’s face when I said “Can you create a mathematical model of worms messing up age layering?” I am sure he
As a learning designer in a centralized teaching and learning unit, it’s my job to explore new technologies, particularly AI. But I’ll admit, I didn’t
Three years into the current Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype cycle, catalyzed by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI continues to profoundly disrupt higher
The anticipation of a new semester has always excited me. I have been an educator for 41 years and have worked with students from Pre-K
The Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Peer Review highlights the powerful impact ‘transparency’ can have on learning for all students. One aspect of transparency is making obvious the intellectual practices involved in completing and evaluating a learning task. But making these processes visible for students is more easily said than done; we are experts in our fields for the very reasons that our thinking and evaluating are automatic and subconscious. It’s hard to describe exactly what we do intellectually when we synthesize or integrate, critique, or create. Similarly, it’s difficult to articulate the differences between an assignment we score as an A and one to which we give a B. Thus, a challenge in achieving transparency is developing a deep awareness of our own processes. Only then can we explicitly teach those thinking processes.
We all endorse it and we all want our students to do it. We also claim to teach it. “It” is critical thinking, and very few of us actually teach it or even understand what it is (Paul & Elder, 2013). Research tells us that our students learn critical thinking only after we receive training in how to teach it and design our courses explicitly and intentionally to foster critical thinking skills (Abrami, Bernard, Borokhovski, Wade, Surkes, Tamim, & Zhang, 2008). We have to start by formulating assessable critical thinking learning outcomes and building our courses around them.
The wealth of digital information has shifted our focus in higher education from developing critical thinking skills to developing critical information processing skills. Today’s students are digital natives, and many assume these students possess basic research skills because of their natural ease with technology. However, many college students lack important information processing skills to understand electronic material. Grafstein (2002) noted that “Given the seductively easy accessibility of masses of unregulated information, it is imperative that students, from the very beginning of their academic careers, adopt a critical approach to information and develop the ability to evaluate the information they encounter for authenticity, accuracy, credibility, authority, relevance, concealed bias, logical inconsistency, and so on” (p. 199).