Imagine that, as an educator, one of your long-term goals for students is that they acquire critical thinking skills: You want them to evaluate the soundness of logical arguments in persuasive essays,
determine whether scientific research studies truly support certain conclusions, and so on. At a school board meeting, a father of one of your students complains about your emphasis on critical thinking. He insists that the purpose of education should be simply to teach students facts that experts have determined to be "true" in various academic disciplines. Of the following ways in which you might respond to the father, which one is most accurate and defensible?
a. Students are more motivated by long-term, abstract goals than by shorter, concrete objectives.
b. Critical thinking is the most basic cognitive process identified in the recent revision of Bloom's taxonomy presented in the textbook; all other cognitive processes build on it.
c. Standards developed by professional groups in various academic disciplines often include critical thinking.
d. Virtually any approach to instruction—whether it be expository instruction, mastery learning, cooperative learning, or some other approach—invariably involves mastering aspects of critical thinking.
C
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Social studies material contains little technical vocabulary
Indicate whether the statement is true or false.
Which of the following is a key difference between shared writing and interactive writing?
A. The teacher shares the writing tool. B. The teacher stretches words to vocalize the individual phonemes. C. The teacher talks about spaces between words. D. The teacher reads the sentence.
Students who enter school with larger vocabularies are at an advantage because
a. a large store of words facilitates phonemic awareness. b. it is easier to decode words that are in one's oral vocabulary. c. vocabulary is the basis of comprehension. d. all of the above
There has been recent growth in the number of magnet school because they
a. represent a voluntary approach to school desegregation b. they are an alternative to the local school in the era of school choice c. they provide knowledge that can be helpful for students' particular career choice. d. all of the above