Construction of Critical Thinking Skills by the infusion approach in “Probability and Statistics in Daily Life”

Abstract

International audienceThis paper presents a teaching experiment that combined the explicit teaching of critical thinking with the content of an existing mathematics unit called “Probability and Statistics in Daily Life”. The original unit was designed to teach probability and statistics through real-life scenarios at the high-school level. I took the original mathematical content and “infused” it with a progression of critical thinking skills, so that both the mathematics and the critical thinking competencies developed hierarchically, growing more and more complex as the unit progressed. This paper illustrates the mutual benefits of this “infusion” to both the teaching of statistics and of critical thinking. The paper discusses the problem of transfer of critical thinking skills and shows some promising elements in that sense, deriving from the analysis. Finally, it also discusses some educational implications of the work done, the limitations of the unit’s first run and the improvements that may yet be made