Can software help people create better themes?
View(s):Although almost everyone agrees that critical thinking must be learned at school, teaching the best reasoning is not easy.
However, it is becoming increasingly clear that concept mapping can help students participate in a better way of thinking and an upcoming review of research claims that helping students create online organizers to reason more solidly. The authors argue that mapping tools are simply “a very effective way to teach critical thinking”.
As an educational approach, the conceptual mapping is anything but new. The practices date back to at least the 1970s and usually involve the creation of diagrams that visually represent a set of ideas. Theme mapping is a variation of concept mapping and the approach encourages users to create theme-based theme diagrams.
For example, I included an image of a thematic map below, which comes from an article by researcher Charles Twardy. He created a simple two-dimensional argumentation card for this statement: “Socrates is mortal because Socrates is human”.
Even in this simple example, the benefits of creating a map of themes are pretty obvious. By visually representing the statements of a statement, people better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the statement and, in this example, we can see that Twardy does not provide much evidence that Socrates is mortal beyond the fact that Socrates is human.
The following article brings together a large amount of research to support the idea that argumentative maps can increase critical thinking. Written by Martin Davies, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne and his colleagues, the paper cites a series of studies that show that mapping problems have a huge impact. in some cases, double or even triple the impact of a traditional critical thinking course.
One of the advantages of argument cards is that they orient students to deductions. According to the research work of Davies and his colleagues, it is easy to lose the discordant reasoning. The topic cards address this problem by delineating the claims of a contest. So, people better understand how to create a top quality theme.
The paper also notes that mapping topics online offers benefits to teachers. Unlike many educational technologies, the approach is fairly straightforward to distribute in the classroom and subject mapping allows students to “engage in self-directed exploratory learning while experimenting with different argumentative structures to see what works best”.
When it comes to teaching critical thinking, argument cards are more effective than many other interventions. In a previous article, Davies observed that students who used 10-week subject mapping improved their critical thinking skills, as well as those who had spent four years in more critical formal training.
In addition, it is possible that ten weeks of practice on thematic maps are not even necessary, and Davies notes that some students show improvements in critical thinking even after an hour of practice on a topic mapping tool.
A large number of mapping packages are now available. Some like the reason has a cost. Others like MindMup for free, as Davies points out. You should not even rule out an old-fashioned mapping approach, and a study by Carnegie Mellon University found that using paper and a pencil to draw a discussion also yielded positive results.
Of course, there are some disadvantages to mapping the arguments. On the one hand, the practice may end up transforming students into reasoning because the tools facilitate the return of the subject after the discussion.
But in the end, the thematic maps should be in each teacher’s toolbox that aims to teach more specific reasoning. The approach is cheap, easy to use and proven, which, as Davies points out, makes it “a clear course of action for modern educational institutions”.
-A.G Sonalie Silva