question
What is important to teach?
Answer
What Matters Most to Learn.
People disagree about the purpose of education, but most agree that education should help people think critically.
Critical thinking is not just being skeptical or thinking for yourself. It means examining evidence, considering alternative explanations, and reasoning logically before reaching a conclusion. The AAC&U VALUE Rubrics define it as “a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion.” This implies that “consequences and implications are logical and reflect [the] ability to place evidence… in priority order.”
This matters because our conclusions lead to decisions.
At work, we decide which marketing campaign to launch. In our personal lives, we decide which schools our children should attend or what medical treatment to pursue. As members of society, we evaluate claims about the economy, science, health, safety, and much more, before deciding what to support and what to share with others.
Making better decisions requires drawing better conclusions.
Critical Thinking Requires Causal Literacy
Making good decisions requires drawing the most accurate conclusions possible. That’s not something people learn by being thrown in and told to think critically. It requires particular skills. The examples below and the learning goals of causal literacy will show you why.
Generative AI makes this more urgent.
Critical thinking, and specifically causal thinking, have always been important. Generative AI makes them even more important. Generative AI essentially combs through vast amounts of text to produce conclusions. But some of that text consists of unwarranted causal conclusions. As AI takes on more mundane tasks, more of what people need to do is critical thinking.
Causal Literacy in Action
Did the marketing campaigns reduce sales?
A company launches a new marketing campaign and then its sales go down. Did the new marketing campaign cause sales to decrease? Should the company go back to its old marketing approach? Maybe. Did anything else happen at the time that might have caused sales to decrease? Think hard about all the other things driving sales. How big an effect would those other changes have had? Maybe the luck of what else changes means you can’t tell the effect of the new marketing campaign on sales, but at least you won’t draw wrong conclusions.
Do charter schools improve academic performance?
Charter school students perform better than traditional public school students. Would my children learn more in a charter school? Would our state’s children learn more with more charter schools?
Students who go to charter schools or traditional public schools could be from different backgrounds and have different experiences outside school. Why do some students go to charter schools and not others? Are there examples of similar sets of students attending charter and traditional public schools? In what ways do the students need to be similar for the comparison to be useful enough? Lotteries to get in to charter schools provide good evidence, but lottery winners and losers are comparable. But lotteries only tell us the effect of charter schools among students who enter them.
Causal Evidence for Personal Lives
Oster’s readers generally don’t come to become causally literate. They come because they want the best possible answers to pressing questions. But teach them she does.
Addressing wide-ranging claims about the benefits of breastfeeding, Oster explains why the higher IQs of breastfed babies do not show that breastfeeding increases cognitive ability, but instead show that families who breastfeed differ substantially in many other ways. She wasn’t the first person to make this point, but she was the one who brought it to a wide audience. She discusses many kinds of evidence, including randomized trials and natural experiments. She assesses the generalizability of the evidence, synthesizes it, and highlights when we just don’t know.
Academics and other experts often do a poor job of providing comparable evidence about many of the questions people care about. But experts doing more is not enough. No expert can answer questions specific to our own circumstances. And there are too many charlatans and too many well-intentioned experts making innocent mistakes. We all need to arm ourselves.
