A computational model of student cognitive processes while solving a critical thinking problem in science

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lamb ◽  
Jonah Firestone ◽  
Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe ◽  
Brian Hand
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Cognitive Processes

A Compass During the Storm: Offering Students Critical Rigor for Polarizing Times

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Wender ◽  
Valerie J. D’Erman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Learning Objective ◽  
First Year

ABSTRACT Teaching and learning in higher education is occurring, unavoidably, within the broader civic context of today’s extraordinarily polarizing political times. We seek to help students situate themselves with respect to and, above all, thoughtfully assess others’ as well as their own perspectives on issues of profound contention, without contributing to exacerbated polarization ourselves. Specifically, we offer students in our first-year exploratory political science course a vital tool—critical rigor—for navigating but not being inundated by the storm. This article discusses our experiences in teaching the course titled, “The Worlds of Politics,” as we attempt to help students deeply engage in cognitive processes of critical thinking and analysis, without undue infringement from their own—and least of all our own—personal political biases. Our focal learning objective is the cultivation of critical-thinking skills that promote students’ drawing of distinctions between advocacy and analysis, as well as their discerning civic engagement.

scholarly journals BUILDING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS THROUGH LITERARY TEXTS IN EFL CLASSES

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Viktoriia Osidak ◽  
Nataliia Nesterenko
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Cognitive Learning ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Practical Implementation

Background: The chapter argues that building critical thinking skills and enhancing students’ cognitive processes has become a primary goal of teaching in secondary schools. It is generally agreed that the relationship between learning and reading literature has always been very close. Also, literature is widely recognised as an effective, motivating and enjoyable facilitator for work on critical thinking skills through challenging students’ cognitive processes by means of comparing and contrasting of and differentiating between the specific events of the plot, analysing main characters, interpreting the meaning created by the author’s choice of words etc. For these reasons this chapter investigates the efficacy of literary texts in building critical thinking skills in secondary schools. Purpose: The main focus of the chapter was on designing effective and feasible critical thinking model of teaching instruction that incorporates literary text in EFL classroom to stimulate students’ cognitive processes. Results: Many methods have been suggested to teaching reading literary texts. For the purpose of this study the authors adopted personal growth model developed by Lindsay Clanfield. The model draws heavily on learners’ involvement in reading with the aim of explaining the implied message of the literary text through employing crucial critical thinking skills such as problem solving, decision making, interpretation, logical reasoning, and metacognition. The critical thinking model consists of the three stages defined as “challenge – comprehension – reflection”. Each of the defined stages focuses on utilising some of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive learning objectives through activities that promote these cognitive processes. For example, to complete activities of the ‘challenge’ stage students rely heavily on their knowledge; cognitive levels of comprehension, application and synthesis are essential at the ‘comprehension’ stage; finally, at the ‘reflection’ stage students are involved in evaluation ideas of moral and social aspects discussed in the text and appraising of their acquired experience. Drawing on this conclusion, the article presents a practical implementation of the model with the focus on cognitive processes and development of critical thinking skills in teaching English through literary texts. Discussion: In further research, it is necessary to experimentally verify the effectiveness of the critical thinking model in building critical thinking skills through literary texts in EFL classes.

scholarly journals An instrument to support thinking critically about critical thinking in online asynchronous discussions

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Empirical Testing ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Asynchronous Discussions ◽  
The Creation

<span>This paper reports on the creation of an instrument for use by instructors, students, or researchers to identify, measure or promote critical thinking (CT) in online asynchronous discussions (OADs). Four models of CT were reviewed, synthesised, analysed, and evaluated to clarify the construct. Indicators of specific cognitive processes related to CT were identified, and subsequently retained, rejected or modified to show how the construct might be operationalised in real contexts of use. Subsequent empirical testing of the instrument for the analysis of a transcript of an OAD revealed that while the instrument was valuable in identifying and measuring CT in the OAD, issues of practicality need to be addressed. Implications for research and practice are presented.</span>

scholarly journals An Early PDP Connectionist Model for Describing the Behavioral Phenomenon

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
Ricardo Tiosso Panassiol
Keyword(s):  
Computational Model ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
Connectionist Model ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Cognitive Constructs ◽  
Behavioral Phenomena ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Behavioral Phenomenon

The focus of modern neuroscience on cognitive processes has relegated to behavior the epiphenomenal status of neural processing and the difficulties generated by this interpretation have encouraged the use of computational models. However, the implementation based on inferred cognitive constructs has been inefficient. The objective of this work was to review the concept of behavior by a selectionist approach and propose a connectionist computational model that operates integrally with its neurophysiological bases. The behavioral phenomenon was functionally defined and described at different levels of analysis. Functional levels make it possible to understand why behavioral phenomena exist, while topographic levels describe how morphophysiological mechanisms implement the response. The connectionist notions of PDP ANNs formalizes the proposal. The model stands out for contextualizing neural processing as part of the response, addressing the behavioral phenomenon as a whole that needs to be explained in its most different levels of analysis.

Cognitive processes in critical thinking

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-49 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Cognitive Processes

scholarly journals A Bayesian brain model of adaptive behavior: an application to the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task

PeerJ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. e10316
Author(s):  
Marco D’Alessandro ◽  
Stefan T. Radev ◽  
Andreas Voss ◽  
Luigi Lombardi
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Adaptive Behavior ◽  
Individual Performance ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Card Sorting ◽  
Information Theoretic ◽  
Bayesian Brain ◽  
Wisconsin Card Sorting

Adaptive behavior emerges through a dynamic interaction between cognitive agents and changing environmental demands. The investigation of information processing underlying adaptive behavior relies on controlled experimental settings in which individuals are asked to accomplish demanding tasks whereby a hidden regularity or an abstract rule has to be learned dynamically. Although performance in such tasks is considered as a proxy for measuring high-level cognitive processes, the standard approach consists in summarizing observed response patterns by simple heuristic scoring measures. With this work, we propose and validate a new computational Bayesian model accounting for individual performance in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), a renowned clinical tool to measure set-shifting and deficient inhibitory processes on the basis of environmental feedback. We formalize the interaction between the task’s structure, the received feedback, and the agent’s behavior by building a model of the information processing mechanisms used to infer the hidden rules of the task environment. Furthermore, we embed the new model within the mathematical framework of the Bayesian Brain Theory (BBT), according to which beliefs about hidden environmental states are dynamically updated following the logic of Bayesian inference. Our computational model maps distinct cognitive processes into separable, neurobiologically plausible, information-theoretic constructs underlying observed response patterns. We assess model identification and expressiveness in accounting for meaningful human performance through extensive simulation studies. We then validate the model on real behavioral data in order to highlight the utility of the proposed model in recovering cognitive dynamics at an individual level. We highlight the potentials of our model in decomposing adaptive behavior in the WCST into several information-theoretic metrics revealing the trial-by-trial unfolding of information processing by focusing on two exemplary individuals whose behavior is examined in depth. Finally, we focus on the theoretical implications of our computational model by discussing the mapping between BBT constructs and functional neuroanatomical correlates of task performance. We further discuss the empirical benefit of recovering the assumed dynamics of information processing for both clinical and research practices, such as neurological assessment and model-based neuroscience.

scholarly journals Pupil responses as indicators of value-based decision-making

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne C. Van Slooten ◽  
Sara Jahfari ◽  
Tomas Knapen ◽  
Jan Theeuwes
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Computational Approach ◽  
Prediction Errors ◽  
Reward Prediction ◽  
Exciting Possibility

AbstractPupil responses have been used to track cognitive processes during decision-making. Studies have shown that in these cases the pupil reflects the joint activation of many cortical and subcortical brain regions, also those traditionally implicated in value-based learning. However, how the pupil tracks value-based decisions and reinforcement learning is unknown. We combined a reinforcement learning task with a computational model to study pupil responses during value-based decisions, and decision evaluations. We found that the pupil closely tracks reinforcement learning both across trials and participants. Prior to choice, the pupil dilated as a function of trial-by-trial fluctuations in value beliefs. After feedback, early dilation scaled with value uncertainty, whereas later constriction scaled with reward prediction errors. Our computational approach systematically implicates the pupil in value-based decisions, and the subsequent processing of violated value beliefs, ttese dissociable influences provide an exciting possibility to non-invasively study ongoing reinforcement learning in the pupil.

scholarly journals Insignificant Effects of Coloring and Labeling on Memory Span and Serial Recall

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Noora N. Saleh ◽  
Michael D. Huffer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Serial Recall ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Cognitive Process ◽  
Memory Span ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Physiological Effects

Human perception involves many cognitive processes, such as memory, attention, and critical thinking. An important cognitive process is memory, which is usually connected with the storing and retrieval of information. Different colors and labeling have diverse physiological effects on humans. Our investigation aimed to determine if a change in color or labeling would have a significant effect on memory span and serial recall. However, our results do not support that coloring and labeling have significant impacts on a subject’s memory.

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