Week 2: Lesson 1: 1st Reading Assignment

(See Week 2: Lesson 2 below)

Goal: Students will learn how to critically read a scientific article. 

Learning Outcome: Students will demonstrate 80% accuracy on teacher-made comprehension tests based on scientific research article.

Read research article prior to class: Subvocalization: Aural and EMB Feedback in Reading.

A. Word parts: Correct your medical terminology pretest. Study the prefixes, roots, and suffixes on the test.  

B. Discuss first 10 pages in teams. Select team leader and presenter. Paraphrase main ideas in first section of article. Pay attention to the highlighted areas of the article and instructor comments on the PDF. Stick to the facts for paraphrasing task; opinions can come later.

C. Take Cornell notes or use your own note-taking system to study the article. Send your most difficult question to the teacher for potential use on Friday's IRAT.

Class Teams 

Note: I assigned numbers for iClicker usage. 

Week 2: Lesson 2: Are You a Critical Thinker?

Directions: We will discuss these topics in class.  Feel free to leave comments below.  Students will be tested on these concepts and skills.

I. Characteristics of a Critical Thinker: (Source: Joe Landsberger's Web site, Study Guides & Strategies) 

• They are honest with themselves.
• They resist manipulation.
• They overcome confusion.
• They ask questions.
• They base judgments on evidence.
• They look for connections between subjects.
• They are intellectually independent.

Note: DREAM Students added these to the list of characteristics in 2012:

1. Read a lot  in general and also read from different resources

2. Use analytical skills such as those mentioned in Bloom's taxonomy of higher thinking skills: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

What other characteristics can you name?

II. Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive domain (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, & evaluation)

The knowledge level of thinking is basic memorization. Comprehension is your understanding of the material, and application refers to whether you can apply the acquired information to a new situation.  Hence, these three are the lower level thinking skills.  For academic settings, you need to engage in the upper level (higher thinking) skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.  Here's a link to download Bloom's rose.  Note that Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues only gave us the hierarchical structure of learning skills listed above; other researchers have embellished it to explicitly state how to apply these skills.  This rose design is one example of such embellishments.  Another useful application of Bloom's taxonomy is McWhorter's (2004) guiding questions for reading and levels of thinking.

III. Think critically about the words used to convey a message: judgement words, transitional words that signal opinions, and implied meanings.

1.  Judgement words judge or evaluate. Example: good, bad, worthless, worthwhile, disgusting, amazing, lovely, frightening

Can you determine if a word is neutral or emotional?  Select the neutral word from the list of pairs:

Request: Demand

Ridicule: Tease

Display: Expose

Crowd: Audience

Slim: Skinny

Brainy: Intelligent

Fat: Heavy

Particular: Picky

2. Transitional signals words for opinions: Example: in my view/ or in my opinion, (more covert opinion words: possibly, apparently, presumably, seemingly, according to)

3.  Words with positive or negative connotations- Positive words can be used to make something terrible sound better.  The government often engages in this type of “doublespeak” to make the information sound promising.  (Examples: improving economy instead of the bad economy, etc) Can you give some examples?

Homework:

• Study the research article and your cornell notes for the IRAT on Friday.
• Send the teacher your reading goals.
• Work on computer assigned reading modules in MRL. 
• Study medical terminology word parts.