Each day, Google users perform more than 2.9 billion searches. Wikipedia claims over ten million articles in two-hundred and fifty-three languages. Today’s students have greater access to information than ever before. As Keeling (2004) articulated in Learning Reconsidered: A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience, “…knowledge is no longer a scarce – or stable – commodity. (It) is changing so rapidly that specific information may become obsolete before a student graduates and has the opportunity to apply it” (p. 4).
And while this vast quantity of often conflicting information should make students less confident in what they know and believe, it seems often to have the opposite effect. For many college students, highly dubious information passes as truth based only on the credibility of the Internet or some other source they believe to be authoritative. Most students lack the skills to evaluate the claims of these sources.
Despite decades of research, few teachers or practitioners can claim mastery in eliciting critical thinking or reflective judgment in others. This session will provide practical, hands on activities to help participants gain the skills they need to enhance their own critical thinking and reflective judgment in order to improve these skills in their students in a variety of contexts.
Participants will be able to:
- Appreciate the value of reflective judgment as a learning outcome
- Understand the role of educators in helping students to develop reflective judgment
- Express improved confidence in their own critical thinking and reflective judgment
- Articulate strategies for creating/adapting programs which promote reflective judgement
- Identify methods of measuring/assessing reflective judgment
