IT’S TIME TO CLOSE THE GAP
Void in critical thinking skills holding bright students back because university demands a different type of learning,
Chris Grafos was driving from Toronto to Ottawa in the spring of 2013 on what should have been an enormously happy road trip to Canada’s national Library and Archives.
“I’m an historian so going to the Archives is like the Super Bowl to us.”
Instead, says Grafos, he was preoccupied with the poor results his secondyear history students had received on their exams, which he had just finished grading the previous day.
Then a PhD candidate at York University who had been working in small groups with students as a teaching assistant for several years, Grafos says 40 per cent had failed the winter exam and their final exam marks weren’t much better.
“I started to think, ‘Why is this the case?’ I got to know these students. I knew a little bit about their ambitions, their goals. I found that a lot of them were very bright, but yet their performance on exams didn’t match their potential,” he recalls.
Grafos had identified previously that it was a gap in critical thinking skills that was holding these bright students back, but it was his consternation on that drive to Ottawa that inspired him to launch a program in 2017 geared to closing that gap.
His company, Bridges-EDU, offers academic mentoring and a variety of courses for students in Grades 11 and 12 as well as first- and second-year university students that boost those critical thinking skills on everything from writing a university-level essay to dissecting academic texts. He also has a university prep class for students about to start undergraduate classes.
Working one-on-one, often using video conferencing to connect with students all over the GTA, Grafos also helps students apply to university, including nailing critical personal statements and essays.
So why do students need help in this area?
It’s always been a big leap from high school to university, but is there something about the way students learn and live today that’s making them less equipped for the demands of postsecondary education?
We already know that the helicopter parenting of the past two decades has held kids back on the life skills and coping front, with university professors reporting record levels of phone calls from hovering parents asking for special treatment for their adult children.
But Grafos says the critical thinking gap is another thing altogether, and it stems from a mismatch between the way kids are taught and evaluated in high school and what’s expected of them in university.
“In high school, it is more likely that students will get rewarded for descriptive content in their essays and on exams,” Grafos says. That means hitting upon the factual details and arriving at the “right” answers, a concept adhered to strictly in an era of standardized testing.
“But in university, it is analytical thinking that gets rewarded. The questions that students are asked to consider, they get more complex,” he says. That includes examining an issue or problem from a variety of points of view and other skills that will only get more critical as students enter the fast-moving employment markets of the future, where many of the jobs don’t even exist today.
In Ontario, the OAC year — or Grade 13 — once gave students the opportunity to adapt to the deeper and more complex understanding they’d need to demonstrate at the university level, Grafos says.
“I think that OAC was a year of maturation and development that benefited students,” he says. Grafos was part of the double cohort that partook in the final year of OAC 15 years ago.
“The OAC classes were smaller, I got pushed a lot more and I was certainly encouraged toward analytical thinking in a way that was a little different than in the larger Grade 12 university-stream classes,” Grafos says.
Dr. Judith Poe, a chemistry professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga who is in her 49th year of teaching, says it’s difficult to pin changes in the ways students are learning to the end of the OAC year. Many other notable changes happened over the same time, she says, chief among them is the prominence the internet has gained as a learning tool in the past decade and a half.
“With the advent of the internet, students tend to assume that everything is known and so they resist the acquisition of new knowledge and new methods of doing things, assuming that on the internet they can find everything that is needed,” Poe says.
That can contribute to a lack of risktaking in a student’s thinking and analysis, she says.
If private programs such as Bridges-EDU are popping up, she says, it’s a sign that publicly funded high schools and publicly subsidized universities need to do a better job of communicating.
But there are a lot of things that are being done to address the issue, Poe says. “I’m working collaboratively with a Peel region high school developing problem-based learning materials for the high schools to use in the teaching of chemistry. This is to get students more into the open-ended thinking.” She says the hope is that the program will then be expanded across the board.
“We want our students to be able to handle information sources both efficiently and critically. We want them, not only in humanities but also in science, to be able to develop arguments and logically defend them.”
Joe Musicco, a professor at Sheridan College in both the advertising and marketing diploma program and the Pilon School of Business, says that while he wouldn’t go as far as to say that critical thinking skills are impoverished, he concurs that students simply aren’t being groomed to exercise them in high school.
Musicco says he finds that many students leave high school hyper-focused on their grades and less on the quality of their overall learning. Increasingly competitive standards for getting into university, as well as the practice of standardized testing, have contributed to “an incredible fear of failure” that’s not particularly conducive to taking chances in stretching one’s thinking.
“They’ve come up through a high school system that encourages them to find the right answer,” Musicco says, “and not necessarily an answer that is nuanced or shows depth of reflection.”