Critikid

I don't get how this builds media literacy. The timer doesn't give them any time to do lateral reading. Except for the "obviously untrue" examples like the one about fairies, whether they get the answer right or wrong is mostly based on whether they already know about the topics or just have a lucky guess.

This is a great idea! The one thing I question is the speed requirement. As a critical thinking educator, I usually try to teach kids to slow down and think about things more carefully. People have a tendency to make fast decisions, relying on heuristics and jumping to conclusions. This can be useful in some situations such as emergencies but can be detrimental when time is available and accuracy is required.

Thank you for sharing this! I'm a critical thinking educator for kids and teens, and love to see that its value is being widely recognized.

Anyway, I wanted to leave my thoughts on this quote:

"Critical thinking often involves recognizing reasoning strategies in the abstract, and that’s hard. For instance, a student might learn in class about the difference between correlation and causation — but then fail to recognize one being mistaken for the other the next time they see it in the real world."

I deal with this problem by teaching through stories, as these make abstract concepts concrete. I follow up with a few other examples, and then ask students to come up with an example of their own.

But, very importantly, I also give examples where something might look like an error/fallacy but isn't. One problem I find with critical thinking education is people start over-identifying fallacies.

In the correlation/causation example, I would emphasize that, while correlation does not guarantee causation, it may be a reason to investigate further. (Too many people act as if correlation studies are useless because they've heard "Correlation is not causation" so many times.)