Concrete thinking is the ability to reason through problems based on evidence from the five senses. Children begin to develop this ability by about age seven. A child who has this ability will understand that if someone pours water from a tall, thin glass into a short, fat one, the amount of water is the same. A child who has not yet reached this stage will say that there is more water in the tall, thin glass despite having just witnessed water being poured from one glass to the other, but a more developed thinker will realize that no water was lost or added during the pouring process.
Abstract thinking, which begins at about age twelve, is the ability to think about ideas and to consider problems without the aid of physical props. A child can’t use blocks or beads to reason through algebraic equations, for example, although this method works perfectly for addition and subtraction. This development, which isn’t complete until about age eighteen, occurs at a different pace for every individual.
Abstract thinking enables critical thinking, which includes skills such as deductive thinking (the ability to reason from known facts or principles) and the ability to consider alternate points of view.
Engaging young people in conversations about current events or other debatable topics stimulates abstract thinking by forcing them to consider the difference between reality and the way they think the world should be: no one “should” be poor, but many people are. However, many students don’t get this practice. Instead of being challenged to grapple with tough issues, they are often shielded from them. School assignments only ask students to locate the evidence to support an assertion in a text, and matching claims to evidence is a frequently tested skill on many standardized tests.
However, matching claims to evidence only demonstrates recognition and memory, not understanding. In order to become good abstract thinkers, students need to practice putting other people’s ideas into their own words; otherwise, they are just parroting. That’s why teaching kids to memorize definitions doesn’t mean they can use the words correctly.
We are failing to teach children to think abstractly. Most American students know that Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I have a dream,” for example, but far fewer have a meaningful idea of what that dream was. I teach kids who doggedly repeat the same quote from a book but can’t paraphrase it or explain its significance. Others can summarize a plot in great detail, but they cannot tell me what they think about it beyond, “It’s okay, I guess.”
Some students get upset when they disapprove of a character’s actions. They get stuck on what the character “should” do, attempting to rewrite the book instead of considering why the author decided to give us the text we have. My attempts to engage them in conversation often turn into mini-lectures, and sometimes my words turn up, awkwardly verbatim and slightly off-target, in their essay drafts.
One of my longstanding pet peeves is with the forms many teachers use to teach students to outline their essays as part of the writing process. The tutoring platform Wyzant offers an typical example of this format:
As you can see, this outline contains all the parts a good essay should have. Students are supposed to fill it in with their ideas, arguments, and research. However, many of them write something like this:
Introduction
School uniforms have always been argued about
School uniforms should not be required.
Why school uniforms should not be required.
They are ugly.
Students should get to wear their own clothes.
School uniforms should not be required.
Kids whose outlines look like this get stuck, often at about this point, because they have neither introduced nor supported their claim that school uniforms are a bad idea. The outline contains the writer’s argument, certainly, but it neither offers supporting evidence nor explains why the people who support school uniforms might think they were a good idea.
Many students who write outlines like this report that they earn good grades on them and don’t understand why their essays earn poor ones. The problem for teachers is that students often write something that looks like an outline but lacks enough ideas to power an essay. These students have skipped the brainstorming process, the all-important step of thinking about the topic abstractly to generate ideas.
The best approach, in my opinion, is for teachers to require revisions of such outlines. I realize that adding another set of papers to grade is not anyone’s favorite idea, but the brevity the outline form encourages makes it an effective way to teach even the weakest writers to articulate complex ideas in writing, connect them to relevant evidence, and justify their use of that evidence by explaining its relevance to their thesis--the “so what?”
Explaining the “so what?” forces students to think abstractly so they can explain what they see in a text in their own words. It should appear on an outline directly following quotes or other evidence. It forces students to stop writing formulaically and instead think. At the same time, teachers can check for abstract thinking without having to read very much. This practice teaches students that good writing--and good essay grades--are not based on the instructor’s opinion, but on clear, logical standards that can be met if one works through the process.
Elizabeth Breau, Ph.D. (she/her), is an award-winning writing coach and private English tutor. Her book, History According to SAT: A Content Guide to SAT Reading and Writing, won a silver medal in the teen category from the Nonfiction Authors Association. You can reach her at www.elizabethbreau.net.
Comentários