Apply for this Faculty Learning Community at http://tinyurl.com/y7tplog5
Facilitator: Herman Mays Jr., PhD., COS/Department of Biological Sciences
Intuition may serve as a convenient short cut to problem solving in our everyday lives, but it may also lead us astray. Our common sense may cause us to misjudge even the most mundane everyday phenomena and is woefully inadequate for solving problems outside of our everyday experience. Constructing rational quantitative arguments grounded in empirical-evidence allows us to transcend the limits of our intuition. Nowhere are these skills more relevant than in the sciences where so much of nature is inaccessible to our direct observation. The ability to construct rational, quantitative, data-driven arguments however is equally important in fields of study as diverse as journalism, history, philosophy, communications, and education.
This faculty learning community (FLC) as part of the 2017-2018 Hedrick Fellowship at the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is designed to give instructors the opportunity to discover and create teaching tools to foster student skills in constructing quantitative, evidence-based arguments across different fields of study. This FLC will be working at the intersection of three of Marshall’s Domains of Thinking by exploring Quantitative Thinking in connection with Integrative Thinking and Information Literacy. The FLC will be especially centered on the goal of developing critical thinking skills in students that leads them to counterintuitive conclusions.
This FLC is envisioned as a multidisciplinary endeavor that would borrow widely from faculty expertise across departments including, but not limited to, mathematics, philosophy, biology, political science, English, health fields, and library science, and is expected to generate broadly applicable deliverables (student exercises, problem solving topics, active learning environments, etc.) across the academic spectrum at Marshall.
What we’ll do:
- Meet in 11-12 sessions between September 2017 and May 2018 as a group in an open discussion format to explore this topic, build a knowledge base, and share our expertise with other instructors.
- Explore some of the common mistakes of intuition we see both in our students and ourselves and examine how we can avoid these mistakes through quantitative and other evidence-based critical thinking.
- Read “Scienceblind” to better understand the gaps between intuition and truth