ABE Reading: Critical Reading

Today, we honed our critical reading skills.

What is Critical Reading?

The idea of critical reading stems from the idea of critical thinking. The word critical means accomplishing your activity, whether it's reading or thinking,  with skillful judgement. So how do we skillfully judge what we read? Well, we must not only read what is written, but also read what is not written. Some people know of this as reading between the lines.

I began this lesson by reviewing the resources available on The Critical Thinking Community site. I suggest you check them out, but here's a particularly strong graphic from their site about skills of critical thinkers:

Today, in class we focused on some of the elements of a text (inferences, implications, and assumptions), and we judged these elements on accuracy, completeness, fairness, clarity, and precision. If you asked me, we developed some intellectual perseverance, at least, and some fairmindedness and intellectual integrity, too.

Exercises

One thing I love about teaching adults is I don't have to censor my reading topics. :) So today we read about marijuana prohibition / legalization, and we looked at charts on economics. If you are following along at home, here's the article we read first:

This Is Your Brain on Legal Drugs: Let's End the Drug War With a Minimum of Casualties by Following the Science, by Arianna Huffington

We then reviewed the critical elements: assumptions, inferences (conclusions), and implications. A review of all these can be found on the Critical Thinking Community site I referenced above, but here's a basic wrap-up:

• Assumptions - beliefs that something is true or certain
• Example: Teenagers are technology wizards.
• While this statement might be true sometimes, we cannot assume that all teenagers are good at technology.

• Inferences - deductions or conclusions based on reasoning, logic, or assumptions
• Example: There are fire trucks parked outside and smoke coming from the neighbor's house.
• We can infer that the neighbor's house is on fire.

Here's a "ladder of inference" worksheet that shows how inferences are made (start at bottom and move up):

• Implications - underlying suggestions of a word or piece of writing
• Example: Murder versus manslaughter
• The word murder implies intentional killing. The word manslaughter implies accidental killing.

I'll try to find some videos for next time. 

After we reviewed the critical elements, we went back to the Huffington Post article and identified assumptions, inferences, and implications in it and discussed them. Then, we shifted focus to graphs on the economy via The Atlantic's article called The Most Important Economic Stories of 2013- in 44 Graphs, and we did the same activity -- targeting assumptions, inferences, and implications of the graphs. It was a great class day!

Until next time.

Jc