Skeptical Thinking in the Classroom and its Impact - School of Arts ...

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the seed that makes the leap to other credulous claims more palatable and believable. I hope that through this study I will be able to ascertain to what extent critical thinking skills from the classroom are transferred to the real world, how to identify students that are deficient in skeptical thinking, and gain insight on how to improve critical thinking skills in the real world. Methodology While there are many ways to address and assess critical thinking in the classroom, one of the ways that is largely ignored is when it comes to superstition and paranormal events. As a result, I have crafted these exercises myself. It seems as though I had a very clear idea of what I was assessing, but had a difficult time designing exercises that could possibly assess it. Once I created them, I had an even more difficult time assessing them quantitatively. My basic methodology was to establish a baseline for students’ attitudes, present students with claims of paranormal activity, have them evaluate the claims, and give a response as to how much credibility each claim had. Students used written responses in most cases to ascertain their logical/critical thinking skills. 1) Student feelings about science a) Students wrote a short one paragraph essay on their feeling about science in general. They were to write about what they thought it was, if it was good, if they liked it, if it was hard, etc. i) I use this every year to get to know my students better and to help me target students that have a poor attitude about science. That way I see it as a challenge to get them interested in science and to achieve at a high level. ii) It helped me establish a baseline for each student as to their attitude towards science for this project. 2) TOSRA test of scientific related attitudes a) The Test Of Science Related Attitudes (TOSRA) was developed by Professor Barry Fraser of Curtin University of Technology in Bentley, Western Australia. It is aimed to examine the attitudes of students towards science and their "scientific inclination". It is a 70-item self-report instrument that is designed to obtain information about a person's attitude toward science. (See index for the test) i) Assessment (1) Students took the test in November and it was scored to give the students a baseline to compare further activities as to their growth in skeptical/critical thinking skills. (2) Students were scored as per the TOSRA scoring guide. 3) Hope Diamond Essay a) Students were given two articles to read and write an essay on the two articles. One article was on the curse of the Hope Diamond and all the trouble that it has
caused through the years. The other article was on debunking the curse of the Hope Diamond. b) Students were then required to write a one page essay explaining which article they felt was more convincing. They were to use examples from the articles to support their position, and to include their own ideas or life experiences into the essay. i) Assessment (1) Students were assessed by their logical reasoning skills on a scale from -2 to 2, with 2 being high critical thinking skills. Students that found the curses debunked article more credible scored positively and students that found the curse article more convincing scored negatively. (2) I was also looking at the strength of belief or disbelief in the curse coloring their perception of the articles. Statements like: “I do not believe in curses to begin with” or “Curses are real” gave me insight as to the relative impact of the readings. 4) Astrology activity a) Students were given a sheet of paper to describe how their day went. They were to include how they were feeling at different times of the day, if anything good or bad happened. b) Students were then given their horoscopes for the previous day and asked to answer questions as to how accurate their horoscope was. They were to rate it from: Very accurate, more accurate, less accurate, and not at all accurate. c) Assessment i) We then did a statistical analysis of the whole class on the accuracy of the horoscopes. ii) Students then answered questions regarding astrology (1) Students then suggested that we do it again tomorrow and check the accuracy of astrology. (2) The following day we repeated the activity. 5) Haunted House Activity a) Students were given a pre-read activity asking how they felt about ghosts and hauntings. b) Students were then given an article “How to Haunt a House” by Benjamin Bradford to read. c) They were asked questions regarding the article and their opinions about the haunting in general. i) Assessment (1) The students were rated as to whether the article moved them towards a very critical analysis of ghosts (2), a more critical analysis (1), unchanged analysis (0), less critical analysis (-1), much less critical analysis (-2) 6) Ending activity
Page 1 and 2: Skeptical Thinking in the Classroom
Page 3: skills as it pertains to belief and
Page 7 and 8: There was 1 student that fit in to
Page 9 and 10: One student received a -2. (1) The
Page 11 and 12: Student 11 had one of the best anal
Page 13 and 14: comes to skepticism in paranormal,
Page 15 and 16: Further testing of this hypothesis
Page 17 and 18: Literature review Most of my attitu
Page 19 and 20: ERIC Title: Teaching Students to Th
Page 21 and 22: : discipline as a whole. This chapt
Page 23 and 24: Journal Articles; Reports - Descrip
Page 25 and 26: Discusses Bloom's Taxonomy of Cogni

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