Abstract
Today, various actors are exploiting and misusing online social media to spread disinformation and to create false narratives. This paper summarizes an education and training approach targeted to help people think more critically about potential disinformation. The approach we outline emphasizes the development and maturation of general critical-thinking skills, in contrast to technical skills (e.g., social network analysis). However, it also offers opportunity to apply these skills in a scaffolded, adaptive environment that supports the learner in putting concepts into use. The approach draws on the situated-learning paradigm to support skill development and reflects empirically-based best practices for pedagogy for critical thinking. This analysis and review provides context to inform the design of a learning environment to enable targeted practice of critical thinking skills. The paper outlines the high-level design, describes several specific “experiential lessons” and overviews a few technical challenges that remain to be overcome to make the training feasible for wide-scale use.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research via contracts N68335-18-C-0724, N68335-20-C-0085, and N68335-20-C0952. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of Defense or Office of Naval Research. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.
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Massey, L., Smith, R., Whitaker, E.T., Wray, R. (2021). Designing Learning Experiences to Encourage Development of Critical Thinking Skills. In: Sottilare, R.A., Schwarz, J. (eds) Adaptive Instructional Systems. Design and Evaluation. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12792. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77857-6_5
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