Here are some quick takeaways from Why Content Knowledge is Crucial to Effective Critical Thinkingby Jill Barshay.

My Notes

  1. To help student see analogies, “show students two solved problems with different surface structures but the same deep structure and ask them to compare them,” 
  2. Williingham advises teachers, citing a pedagogical technique proven to work by researchers in 2013.
  3. In math, students often get derailed when a word problem is slightly different from a step-by-step model that they’ve studied. 
  4. A research-tested strategy here, developed by Richard Catrambone at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is to label the sub-steps of the solution with the goal they serve. That way students can understand why they’re using each step and what it’s accomplishing.
  5. In order to compare and contrast, the brain has to hold ideas in working memory, which can easily be overloaded. The more familiar a student is with a particular topic, the easier it is for the student to hold those ideas in his working memory and really think.