When we were preparing the grading rubric to assess critical thinking (which is more complicated than you might think), Marianne Staempfli found this very useful resource: The Critical Thinking Community. While the website itself is quaintly old-fashioned, it has a lot of useful information. For instance, a definition:
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
This is an article in the Globe and Mail that struck a cord with me, "Ten years that shook, rattled, rolled and helped repair the world" by Doug Saunders. If you do not have the time to read the full article, you can click on this shortened version with most of the salient points summarized in a concept map structure (make sure to click on it to see the bigger version so that you can actually read the text ;-):This article provides a very nice example of the 10th Cottenie Commandment: Thou Shalt Listen to thy Intuition, but Follow the Data.
Since we seem to be on a roll on the what should come first in science, this Nature article actually presents a much better written and argued case in favour of combining the strengths of both approaches (maybe scientists should do what they are good at, science, and leave the writing to, journalists with a PhD?). Some of the costs for doing these genome studies: US$1 billion. How does that stack up to other funding, I have no idea, but this is a big number.
We discussed these two articles mentioned in a previous post in our Community Ecology class, and this is the summary of the very interesting discussion between the students, the TAs, and Tom and I:
It is not one or the other (which is actually acknowledges by using the “first” in the title)The scientific method is cyclical and depends on data, hypotheses, predictions, increased information, or is cyclical as is illustrated by TomBut I added (which was not supported by the majority of the students, or Tom ;-) that the start of the scientific method is data, or the description of a natural phenomenonI also tried to argue that the “hypotheses first” in its extreme is related to religion, since religion is essentially a hypothesis (causal mechanism) without data to support it, but at this point I was way outside my zone of expertise
The recent nature issue had an interesting point-counterpoint series of 2 articles as a reflection on 10 years of the human genome project. The first article argues that hypotheses should come first because little progress has been made in the last 10 years as a result of the abundance of data from these different genome projects. The second article argues the exact opposite, that this data-driven approach has resulted in a series of break-troughs that could not have been possible with a hypothesis-driven approach.