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Hi Mike,

While I don't have any references for the critical thinking skills discussion, there is evidence that training can increase various types of soft skills. Taylor, Russ-Eft, and Chan published a meta-analysis in JAP in 2005 on the effectiveness of behavior modeling training for these kinds of skills (negotiating, interpersonal skills, assertive communication, etc.). I use role plays in small groups in my classes to allow students to practice managerial skills discussed in the course readings and provide feedback to help them hone them, essentially using social learning and behavioral modeling.

Amy E. Crook, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Management
College of Business Administration
Belmont University
Office: Massey 322C
Phone: 615-490-8796
Email: amy.crook@belmont.edu

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael A McDaniel/AC/VCU
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 10:09 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [OB-LIST] Should business schools spend scarce resources on attempts to teach skills that are not trainable?

There was a recent exchange on this e-mail list about workshops/courses designed to increase critical thinking skills. I know of no evidence that one can train such skills.  Perhaps there is some evidence and I am simply not aware of it. If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

This note concerns trends in management skills education on topics that  do not appear to be supported by any evidence that the skills can be trained.  For example, one can find training or courses designed to increase ethical behavior, practical intelligence, emotional intelligence, "soft skills", leadership, and critical thinking. Perhaps there is some evidence of which I am not aware that demonstrate that these skills can be improved meaningfully with training.  If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

University education becomes more expensive with each passing year.  In many universities, tuition increases are constrained. In many universities, business school budgets face pressure. Given financial pressure, should business schools spend scarce resources on teaching skills that are not amenable to meaningful change?

Best wishes,

Mike  

There was a recent exchange on this e-mail list about workshops/courses designed to increase critical thinking skills. I know of no evidence that one can train such skills.  Perhaps there is some evidence and I am simply not aware of it. If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

This note concerns trends in management skills education on topics that  do not appear to be supported by any evidence that the skills can be trained.  For example, one can find training or courses designed to increase ethical behavior, practical intelligence, emotional intelligence, "soft skills", leadership, and critical thinking. Perhaps there is some evidence of which I am not aware that demonstrate that these skills can be improved meaningfully with training.  If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

University education becomes more expensive with each passing year.  In many universities, tuition increases are constrained. In many universities, business school budgets face pressure. Given financial pressure, should business schools spend scarce resources on teaching skills that are not amenable to meaningful change?

Best wishes,

Mike  

Michael A. McDaniel, Ph.D. Professor - Human Resources and Organizational Behavior Department of Management, Research Professor, Department of Psychology Virginia Commonwealth University 301 West Main Street, PO Box 844000 Richmond, VA 23284-4000 http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mamcdani/ voice: 804.827.0209 e-mail: MAMcDani@vcu.edu

The Management Department of the VCU School of Business offers a Ph.D. in Business. Participating faculty with research interests in OB and HR include: Ron Humphrey, Sven Kepes, Michael McDaniel, & Doug Pugh. We are currently recuiting two faculty in OB/HR, open rank. Interested parties should contact Doug Pugh Students with interest in the doctoral program, should contact Doug Pugh.

Hi Mike

I've now had a little more time to apply some critical thinking to this.  And it seems that from my limited searching (see below) the evidence that critical thinking can be trained isn't that strong.  Though, given the low quality of most of the studies I guess we don't have much strong evidence that it can be trained – but nor do we have much strong evidence that it can't.  So it's an absence of evidence either way rather than any clear indication that it can't be trained.

I agree with you that there are in general important ethical issues around trying to train skills when there is good quality and a reasonable quantity of relevant evidence that they are not trainable.

You also raise the more general question of what it is that business school education is supposed to do and what evidence there is that it does it.

Cheers

Rob

Abrami P. C., Bernard R. M., Borokhovski E., Wadem A., Surkes M. A., Tamim R., Zhang D. Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: a stage 1 meta-analysis. Rev. Educ. Res. 2008;78:1102–1134.

Behar-Horenstein, L. S., & Niu, L. (2011). Teaching Critical Thinking Skills In Higher Education: A Review of the Literature Journal of College Teaching and Learning 8(2), 25-42.

Bensley, D. A., Crowe, D. S., & Bernhardt, P. (2010). Teaching and assessing critical thinking skills for argument analysis in psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 37, 91-96.

Halpern, D. F. (1998). Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains: Dispositions, skills, structure training, and metacognitive monitoring. American Psychologist, 53, 449–455.

Penningroth, S. L., Despain, L. H., & Gray, M. J. (2007). A course designed to improve psychological critical thinking. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 153–157.

Rob B Briner | Professor of Organizational Psychology | School of Management | University of Bath

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael A McDaniel/AC/VCU
Sent: 03 October 2012 16:09
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [OB-LIST] Should business schools spend scarce resources on attempts to teach skills that are not trainable?

There was a recent exchange on this e-mail list about workshops/courses designed to increase critical thinking skills. I know of no evidence that one can train such skills.  Perhaps there is some evidence and I am simply not aware of it. If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

This note concerns trends in management skills education on topics that  do not appear to be supported by any evidence that the skills can be trained.  For example, one can find training or courses designed to increase ethical behavior, practical intelligence, emotional intelligence, "soft skills", leadership, and critical thinking. Perhaps there is some evidence of which I am not aware that demonstrate that these skills can be improved meaningfully with training.  If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

University education becomes more expensive with each passing year.  In many universities, tuition increases are constrained. In many universities, business school budgets face pressure. Given financial pressure, should business schools spend scarce resources on teaching skills that are not amenable to meaningful change?

Best wishes,

Mike  

Mike, In-Sue,

A relevant line of research here is training programs designed to improve working memory. Check out this work by Randall Engle at Georgia State U. They find that training can improve performance on the specific tasks used in  the training but that there is no transfer to any other tasks requiring working memory. Engle made a presentation on this research at APS in May.

 My bet is that the same will apply to critical thinking and the other skills people are attempting to train.

Frank

I agree with Bradley regarding our lack of good longitudinal work. To this end, I am currently in year one of a planned 3 year longitudinal study that will measure the emotional intelligence and professionalism of our MBA students from start to finish of our program. I am using existing measures of general emotional intelligence and am building a situational judgment test that more specifically measures emotion management in business scenarios to determine if our students increase their baseline emotional intelligence (not explicitly taught in our courses) vs. their business-specific emotional intelligence. If there are other faculty who are interested in measuring such predictors and outcomes in your school's MBA programs, let me know as I'd be open to collaborating and sharing my materials.

Sincerely,

Amy E. Crook, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Management
College of Business Administration
Belmont University
Office: Massey 322C
Phone: 615-490-8796
Email: amy.crook@belmont.edu

How about teaching logic? That requires critical thinking. Anke J

Hi Mike

I've now had a little more time to apply some critical thinking to this.  And it seems that from my limited searching (see below) the evidence that critical thinking can be trained isn't that strong.  Though, given the low quality of most of the studies I guess we don't have much strong evidence that it can be trained – but nor do we have much strong evidence that it can't.  So it's an absence of evidence either way rather than any clear indication that it can't be trained.

I agree with you that there are in general important ethical issues around trying to train skills when there is good quality and a reasonable quantity of relevant evidence that they are not trainable.

You also raise the more general question of what it is that business school education is supposed to do and what evidence there is that it does it.

Cheers

Rob

Abrami P. C., Bernard R. M., Borokhovski E., Wadem A., Surkes M. A., Tamim R., Zhang D. Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: a stage 1 meta-analysis. Rev. Educ. Res. 2008;78:1102–1134.

Behar-Horenstein, L. S., & Niu, L. (2011). Teaching Critical Thinking Skills In Higher Education: A Review of the Literature Journal of College Teaching and Learning 8(2), 25-42.

Bensley, D. A., Crowe, D. S., & Bernhardt, P. (2010). Teaching and assessing critical thinking skills for argument analysis in psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 37, 91-96.

Halpern, D. F. (1998). Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains: Dispositions, skills, structure training, and metacognitive monitoring. American Psychologist, 53, 449–455.

Penningroth, S. L., Despain, L. H., & Gray, M. J. (2007). A course designed to improve psychological critical thinking. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 153–157.

Rob B Briner | Professor of Organizational Psychology | School of Management | University of Bath

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael A McDaniel/AC/VCU
Sent: 03 October 2012 16:09
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [OB-LIST] Should business schools spend scarce resources on attempts to teach skills that are not trainable?

There was a recent exchange on this e-mail list about workshops/courses designed to increase critical thinking skills. I know of no evidence that one can train such skills.  Perhaps there is some evidence and I am simply not aware of it. If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

This note concerns trends in management skills education on topics that  do not appear to be supported by any evidence that the skills can be trained.  For example, one can find training or courses designed to increase ethical behavior, practical intelligence, emotional intelligence, "soft skills", leadership, and critical thinking. Perhaps there is some evidence of which I am not aware that demonstrate that these skills can be improved meaningfully with training.  If you have such evidence, please send it to me.

University education becomes more expensive with each passing year.  In many universities, tuition increases are constrained. In many universities, business school budgets face pressure. Given financial pressure, should business schools spend scarce resources on teaching skills that are not amenable to meaningful change?

Best wishes,

Mike  

I have been reading these comments with great interest.  It is quite amazing how we accept the teaching of things that have no evidence at all, yet question others which are claimed to lack evidence.  Many are willing to accept mystical beings judging our fate as sinners or saints despite there being no evidence existing to support such claims other than faith; at the same time people are less inclined to accept critical thinking can be taught, even if we have faith in it (the irony in rationality being that many who don't have faith in the latter, have strong faith in the former). Notwithstanding, I think if people look beyond OB into education research and  pedagogy you will find evidence that 'teaching' critical thinking is a worthwhile endeavour, as are related concepts such as reflectivity and reflexivity.  Most of our universities have education departments, I assure you if you ask someone in there to provide you with research on the impact of critical thinking in adult education they will kindly oblige. Moreover, don't let the scarcity of evidence in the effectiveness of teaching critical thinking in OB be confused with the poor conceptualization and operationalization of the concept in OB. 

All my best,

T. S. Pitsis

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Bruce Hoag
Sent: 04 October 2012 10:15
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] Should business schools spend scarce resources on attempts to teach skills that are not trainable?

Just a comment regarding the "lack of evidence" that critical thinking can be taught.

Colleagues,

This is a very interesting discussion and I hope we all gain some new insights from it. The original question "should business schools spend scarce resources on attempts to teach skills that are not trainable?," I believe, should be complemented or supplemented with the question Should schools of business spend scarce resources on attempts to teach obsolete stuff? In some cases we teach dated theories and models; we rely heavily on lecturing which is considered as the least effective method, etc. We cannot teach critical thinking skills, among others soft skills, because the structure of most business schools, the traditions, methods, etc. would not support the teaching of many soft skills.

I attended a 1990 workshop on teaching critical thinking which was done by Steven Brookfield and was attended by over 70 people, I think. I believe I was the only business faculty in the group. One of Brookfield's book is "Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting," (1987), San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. I think there is a 1990 something edition of this book. This was a great experience!

Thanks,

Ivan

I've been following the conversation. It's morphed from how to teach critical thinking skills, which was contested in its foundation. However, in another slant: It seems to me that lots of students are already able to perform critical thinking skills fairly well. After all, they've gotten into college, probably got through some level of high school. I'll concede that absolutely doesn't make them rocket scientists, but they've shown they can navigate some complex tasks.

But my casual observations of students (and Americans) is that they're often  just plain lazy about using those skills. It's too easy in our sound-bite culture to depend on raw emotions and slogans rather than analyze complex and contradictory facts. This seems especially obvious to me in this fun-packed election year. I think what we can to as instructors is to provide students with opportunities to practice these skills and get them in the habit of using them on a daily basis. As should we all!

Thanks for an interesting e-conversation.