Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Great minds don’t think alike—which is why students need to witness examples of genuine thought in all its glorious and messy individuality.

I work with a fifth grader—let’s call her Sasha—who struggles with math. She’s anxious about it, she’s told me. Sasha doesn’t like how it feels when it seems like the other kids are getting it and she’s not. She asks me to give her a practice problem like the ones she’s working on in class.

I think for a moment, then type onto our Zoom chalkboard: “I recently bought an 8-kilogram bag of Kitty Kibble. Assuming that I don’t go to the store again and Tabitha eats 50 grams of food a day, after how many days will she be completely out of food?”

Onscreen, I watch her read. First, she smiles—she likes it when my cat makes it into word problems—and then her expression darkens. She blinks, then swallows. Blinks again. Then she looks up. “Fifteen,” she says matter-of-factly.

At one time or another we have all engaged in poor thinking habits. After all, nobody’s perfect and neither is anybody’s thinking. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t get better at it and start thinking more critically. It’s worth our time to seek ways of improving our thinking and to guide our learners to do the same.

Poor thinking habits refer to the ways of thinking that produce adverse effects in every part of our lives. They can negatively affect our personal progress, our relationships, and everyone around us. But they do much more than that, actually. Not only do they affect the outside world, but they do damage from within as well. In the long run poor thinking can affect our self-esteem, our ability to cope with challenges, and even our physical health.

It’s natural to want children and graduates to develop a set of all-purpose cognitive tools with which to navigate their way through the world. But can such things be taught? Carl Hendrick argues that general critical thinking skills cannot be so easily transferred from one context to another.

Being an air-traffic controller is not easy. At the heart of the job is a cognitive ability called “situational awareness” that involves “the continuous extraction of environmental information [and the] integration of this information with prior knowledge to form a coherent mental picture”. Vast amounts of fluid information must be held in the mind and, under extreme pressure, life-or-death decisions are made across rotating 24-hour work schedules. So stressful and mentally demanding is the job that, in most countries, air-traffic controllers are eligible for early retirement. In the United States, they must retire at 56 without exception.