An important goal of this class is for the students to identify opportunities to engage others in critical thinking exercise. Our daily lives present plenty of such opportunities, as the following examples show. (They are works on Digital Project III, the prompt for which is described here.)
The first example looks at how Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), during a high-profile 2015 congressional hearing, used a misleading graph (made by Americans United for Life) to challenge Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. The author then shows the same graph to a pro-life subject and a pro-choice one, respectively, to get their initial (somewhat predictable) reactions, before presenting them with a corrected graph.
The second author engages two preteens (7 and 12 years old) in exercises involving informal fallacies and poor data visualizations, ending with this inspiring observation: “more valuable than innate skills is an excitement for learning and a willingness to listen, and it would be useful to take advantage of the presence of this trait in children, who can be more logical than we give them credit for and are generally happy to absorb new knowledge.”
The third author focuses on food labels and talks to two subjects who are different in age, gender, profession, and general attitudes toward “healthy food.” This seemingly mundane topic is nevertheless important, the author notes, “because if consumers are not aware, or do not care, about what is in their food or the different products to choose from, companies will only continue to exploit this lack of knowledge to make profits.”
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