Education goes far beyond the subjects we typically teach in school. Life skills like focus and perspective taking are essential to building human potential. Mind in the Making will be a powerful new resource for teachers and families.

— Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the ongoing search for valid and reliable knowledge to guide our beliefs, decisions, and actions.

Like the other essential life skills, critical thinking develops on a set course throughout childhood and into adulthood, but its use must be promoted. And like the other skills, critical thinking draws on executive functions of the brain. It is similar to the scientific method because it involves developing, testing, and refining theories about “what causes what” to happen.
 

The following articles are about Critical Thinking:

Once Upon A Time ... Tales of Executive Functions at Work

Featured article

April 22, 2012

 

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on April 15, 2012.

Once upon a time, we had 27 children living in our house. They were very well behaved. In fact, I never heard any of them speak and I only knew a couple of their names. They usually wore the same clothes every day and even though they lived with us for about seven years, I don’t think anyone aged.

In the glorious days before homework ruled our evening household schedule, our elder daughter, Leslie, would come home from nursery school and see to the lives of all 27 children single-handedly. She knew precisely what each child was doing, and helped him or her carry on with many adventures. Occasionally, we would come into her bedroom and see their world for a moment in time, a panorama of drama and action sprawled before us from one end of her rug to under her bed. Through our naïve adult eyes, the whole community seemed frozen in motion. Leslie knew otherwise.

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Skill: Focus and Self Control
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Why Your Child Is Not Foolproof

Featured article

April 01, 2012

 

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on April 1, 2012.

 One of my favorite stories that I like to tell the students in my college courses is what life was like when I was a student at Vassar. During my freshmen year in 1978, when I wanted to call my friends or family back in Chicago, I went down to my dorm lobby, sat in a smelly wooden phone booth and waited for the pay phone to ring per a pre-arranged time.  If we were still typing a paper after midnight, we carried our typewriters downstairs to typing rooms so we didn’t wake others on our hall.  And when it came time to write a senior thesis, no correction tape was allowed; every page had to be typo-free and so did every carbon page behind it.

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Skill: Critical Thinking
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Give the Gift of Curiosity to a Child for the Holidays

Featured article

December 21, 2010

There it was again. That word. I was reading an account of the acquisition of Newsweek magazine by Sidney Harman, "the 92-year-old-stereo-equipment magnate" in the January issue of Vanity Fair. The author of this article, John Heilpern, acknowledged the cynicism that this acquisition has engendered -- since Harman is elderly and since he has never worked in journalism before -- concluding, nonetheless, that this could just succeed and marveling at Harman's "clear-eyed" optimism.

What would he like inscribed on his tombstone? Heilpern asked Harman. "Still curious," was Sidney Harman's response. And that's the word: curious.

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Skill: Critical Thinking
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The Moral Life of Babies: New York Times article

Featured article

May 05, 2010

 

Paul Bloom and his colleagues at Yale University are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies. In this forthcoming New York Times Magazine article, Bloom gives a fascinating account of this groundbreaking work. You can read the article online.
 
Click here to see one of our favorite experiments from Paul Bloom, Kiley Hamlin, and Karen Wynn: "Helpers and Hinderers."
 
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Skill: Making Connections
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Why I Am Concerned About Learning

Featured article

April 16, 2010

by Ellen Galinsky

Curiosity, according to Laura Schulz of MIT, is fueled by having two ideas that are at odds with each other.  Her research shows that when this happens, children typically will explore and experiment until they figure things out. That’s my story too. Having two images of learning that disturbingly conflicted with each other has led to eight years of exploration—so far.
 
The first image was from interviews I conducted with children a few years ago as background for a study we were planning on children and learning. In my travels around the country, I interviewed groups of children from the third through the twelfth grades, asking them about their experiences in learning—at home, in their neighborhoods, in school, in church, anywhere. Despite the fact that these children came from very different backgrounds and communities—they told me very similar stories.
 
They described learning as “learning stuff”—as the acquisition of facts, figures, and concepts. The learning experiences they described were primarily imposed—and their motivation was primarily extrinsic rather than also being intrinsic. 
 
I asked the children to finish this sentence: “It is important to learn so I can….”  And the children I interviewed all over the country said:
 
Get good grades.
Go to good schools.
Get a good job.
Support myself—have a good house—have a nice car.
 
Their reasons echo those of 81,499 students in a nationwide study conducted by the High School Survey of Youth Engagement from the University of Indiana. When asked why they go to school, 73% said because they want to get a degree and go to college, 69% said because of their friends, and 58% said because it’s the law. 
These are valid reasons, but there’s a major problem, too. In the High School Survey, only 39% said they go to school to learn. Likewise, I heard little connection to learning in the children I interviewed. Even worse, I found that there was little, if any, fire in their eyes when they talked about learning.
 
So I pushed. I asked children to finish the sentence, “When I am learning, I feel….” Those few children who had experienced a broader connection to learning said things like:
 

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Skill: Focus and Self Control
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Daily Kid



Here is a list of Mind in the Making researchers and educators filmed to date

Community Schools: “Mind in the Making and Community Schools: Crossing Boundaries and Creating Strong Linkages for Children Birth through Eight and their Families,” is a collaborative project with The Children’s Aid Society’s National Center for Community Schools and the Institute for Educational Leadership. (Read more)

Learning Communities: Throughout the country, groups of parents, educators, and other family support and health professionals have joined together to learn more about the research on children’s learning from birth through the early elementary school years, and about how to use this research to promote better outcomes for children. (Read more)

Learning Modules for Educators: Mind in the Making Learning Modules for Educators is an 11-part, facilitated learning process designed to bridge the gap between research and teaching practice. (Read more)

Seven Skills Modules: We have created new Modules from the book, called the Mind in the Making Seven Essential Skills Modules. (Read more)

Experiments in Children's Learning DVD: This two-volume series of 42 videos take viewers on a series of virtual “field trips” to laboratories in the U.S. and abroad. (Read more)
View a crosswalk of the experiments to the seven essential life skills

Download a companion Catalogue to Mind in the Making: Experiments in Children's Learning

Have you seen the Marshmallow Test?

What does eating marshmallows have to do with how your kid does on the SAT?
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