I strongly believe that rational thinkers exercise their skills in familiar fields of experiences. Definition of rational thinkers, according to Robert Ennis, is when a person exhibit certain proficiencies, tendencies, and good habits. Under proficiencies, Ennis listed observing, inferring, generalizing, conceiving and stating assumptions and alternatives, offering a well-organized or well-formulated line of reasoning, evaluating statement and chains of reasoning, and detecting standard problems.
From what I have been taught thus far, this is a problem solving method for technical engineering class. Initially when I am given a problem, say for example a problem in Heat Transfer, I would first ask series of questions. Questions like, is the system I am solving a compressible or incompressible? Can I apply control volume analysis over the system? If I do, what assumptions am I making? These are questions I would ask and need to know in order to solve the problem or at least make it simple enough to be able to use an equation that I know to solve for it. I think this is a very technical procedure and without knowing these equations or knowledge, once cannot solve it. One can only solve it, when one is familiar with this field. I agree with John McPeck, when he says, “…that all such thinking, beyond the trivial, manifests itself as an application of one or more of the disciplines. Further he says: “There is no such thing as thinking critically in general”. I believe that students must learn the process of what it means to make valid mathematical and scientific assumptions.
It is very interesting that one of the class I took, my Professor insisted that I use following outline when submitting my HW. The outlines were:
1) State what is KNOWN:
2) State what I am trying to FIND:
3) State ASSUMPTIONS:
4) State known PROPERTIES
5) Write your ANALYSIS:
6) Write COMMENTS:
No comments:
Post a Comment