Sasha Thackaberry's List: disruptive innovation

• Our faculty advisor warned us, "B papers will give you the most trouble." Critical feedback on C or D papers was pretty straight forward. The challenge lay in responding to grammatically correct, precisely written papers that conveyed little original thought. He warned us, too, of the opposite problem: Sloppy papers that nonetheless demonstrated more critical thinking than the carefully penned essays did.
• Yet the paradox of well-written, poorly reasoned student papers might lead us to wonder, What exactly, is the link between critical thinking and writing?
• Consider the following word problem: A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
• From his synthesis of decades of research, Kahneman has concluded that human thinking comprises two mental systems. System 1 engages in automatic (fast) thinking; among other things, this system helps us read and write words effortlessly, gauge the distance of objects, and answer simple math problems. System 2 entails more effortful (slow) thinking, such as focusing on a conversation in a noisy room, comparing products when making a purchase, and determining the validity of a complex argument. The trouble is, our brains are—in a word—lazy, says Kahneman. We default to System 1, and only with effort power up System 2. In short, critical thinking requires effort and doesn't spring automatically from a pen moving across paper.
• The researchers also found, however, that the writing assignments most benefited students who had stronger critical-thinking skills in the first place. In other words, the analytical writing exercises seemed to have the same sort of Matthew effect that researchers have observed in reading—students who start with better skills increase their abilities at a faster rate than students who start with weaker skills (Stanovich, 1986).

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