Reboot in Forbes

Large swaths of the population are finding it more difficult to listen to – let alone seek out – someone who does not agree with them. The ability of citizens and leaders to compromise and find common ground has always been central to a robust and thriving democracy. That requires listening to and engaging with ideas one might not understand or agree with. This is a central tenet of critical thinking: The ability to expand your perspective by looking at problems in different ways, from different vantage points. This is particularly important when working with others. Urban Rural Action is reducing polarization with critical thinking by helping people see other points of view through dialogue and the building of media literacy skills.

This summer, the Reboot Foundation surveyed more than 500 Americans and explored the intersection of conspiracies, science knowledge, critical thinking and media literacy. The survey found that about 25 percent of participants were open to believing at least one of the conspiracy theories we tested. People who rely heavily on social media for their information were more likely to believe. The survey also probed the participants’ exposure to media literacy principles in school, and found that people who had some media literacy education were 26 percent less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Other research backs this up. Simply, news-literacy and better critical thinking give people a fighting chance against conspiracy believers.

A new Reboot paper, Teaching Critical Thinking in K-12: When There’s A Will But Not Always A Way, examines the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and found that the teaching of critical thinking skills is inconsistent across states and tends to drop as students get older. While 86 percent of 4th grade teachers said they put “quite a bit” or “a lot of emphasis” on deductive reasoning, that figure fell to only 39 percent of teachers in 8th grade. Deductive reasoning is one of the key skills in critical thinking, as it requires students to take a logical approach to turning general ideas into specific conclusions.