Read this short excerpt from a chapter of the book Specifications Grading by Linda B. Nilson. This book is written for teachers and is talking about ways to grade student work, i.e., how to identify work that shows "higher-level thinking" vs. "lower-level thinking". However, I think it is also useful for students, as a model of how you can think about topics in a higher-level way.
The most important part to focus on are the sections on "Perry's Stages of Undergraduate Cognitive Development" and "Wolcott and Lynch's Thinking Performance Patterns". Make sure you can understand what are the key differences between each level of thinking, i.e., what sets apart lower levels of thinking from higher levels of thinking.
Once you have done the reading, select a topic about which there are some open questions. This could be a topic from some academic subject (such as another class you are taking or have taken; it could even be a problem from this class, if you have completed some of the later modules already), a real-world topic or current event (e.g., when I taught this class in 2020, a lot of students wrote about Covid-related topics like masks and travel bans for this module), or something from your personal life. It must be some topic in which you can identify a "problem". A "problem' might be a disagreement about what would be the best thing to do, or a disagreement about what the facts/reality are, etc. You should be able to state this problem as a question—either a question about facts (e.g., "why does this thing happen?"), or a question about what should be done (e.g., "what should we do about this?").
Your task is to analyze the problem in multiple ways, from different levels. You may choose to use either "Perry's Stages of Undergraduate Cognitive Development", or "Wolcott and Lynch's Thinking Performance Patterns". (Or you can try both, if you're feeling ambitious.) Choose one of them, and write an analysis of the problem at each level. For example, if your chosen problem is about whether or not people should always wear masks outside, and you choose to analyze it per Perry's levels, then you should write four versions of your analysis of this problem: a version based on the dualism thinking pattern, a version based on multiplicity, a version based on relativism, and a version based on commitment. If you instead use Wolcott and Lynch's levels, you will write five versions of your analysis: one as a Confused Fact-Finder, one as a Biased Jumper, one as a Perpetual Analyzer, one as a Pragmatic Performer, and one as a Strategic re-visioner. For each version, you should clearly state what the characteristics of that thinking style are (e.g., "A biased jumper approaches a problem by doing X, Y, and Z...") and state how your example analysis fits those characteristics.
Please be aware that I am not just asking you to provide four or five progressively more nuanced explanations, or four or five explanations with progressively more and more evidence or examples. Each of the thinking styles described in the reading has specific features, and your analyses should match them. Thus, for each analysis, you should be able to say, e.g., what are the features of how a "confused fact-finder" approaches a problem, and how your analysis meets those features. Basically you are providing example analyses: you start with a question, and then you show how a "confused fact-finder" would try to answer the question, how a "biased jumper" would try to answer the question, etc. I expect the examples to fit more or less the below criteria, which reflect my understanding of the Nilson reading:
There is no minimum or maximum word limit; you simply need to write enough to demonstrate the different thinking styles.
When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "Thinking about science".
by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-04-17. CC-BY-4.0.