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When I was pursuing my baccalaureate twenty years ago, answers to exam questions required answers spanning pages of answer booklets. There were no multiple choice or short answer questions at that time.
The responses allowed examiners to assess 1) the extent and depth of the student’s knowledge in the field, 2) the organization of thoughts and logical reasoning, 3) grammar and comprehension, 4) l ‘aggregation of knowledge and the advancement of convincing arguments in support of the proposed answers, etc.
This education system required students to read widely, analyze the things they read carefully, critically examine theories, question the status quo and come up with better alternatives, and ultimately develop a capacity more rigorous analytical thinking.
Fast forward, and with the ever increasing number of students in our higher education institutions, the examination mode has radically changed to multiple choice, filling in gaps and answering short answer questions. Of course, this is a system that some Western countries – especially North America – are adopting as well.
However, it should be noted that Ghanaian institutions have not adopted all facets of this evaluation system. In North America, a number of student assessments come from lab work and critical thinking assessments. Critical thinking can involve analyzing written materials or data from industry, forcing students to rely on knowledge gained in classes and labs to carefully assess the situation. This process ends with a written report and oral presentation (exam) to (by) the class.
The student assessment approaches mentioned above lead to more or less the same educational outcomes.
Unfortunately, many Ghanaian university professors have left out the computational and / or mapping laboratory training, as well as the very important component of critical thinking in educational development. Of course, some professors will argue that the number of students – and other responsibilities – make it impossible to capture these elements in their curricula, but others have at least attempted to achieve this goal – albeit modestly – by putting students in groups.
The consequence of a failure in critical thinking training is the de-stocking of graduates who think narrowly and cannot reason clearly in a logical manner. They find freelance work tedious to do because they lack the ability and confidence to make sound judgment against available resources.
The lack of this important cognitive resource is fully exploited by public officials. This is because we are unable to hold public officials accountable by relying on convincing reasoning. It is a generally accepted fact that many Ghanaians simply – and in fact fully – believe what they hear others say in the media. You don’t expect the average educated Ghanaian, for example, to read a one-page article that should take up to 10 minutes to digest. He prefers someone to read and pass the content on to him. The same goes for performing simple calculations, by oneself, to assess the veracity of the figures that the media, officials or politicians present with regard to the contentious national projects.
This lack of critical thinking skills is amply demonstrated in these two examples:
- The year of birth of Auditor General Daniel Yaw Domelevo
A simple Google search: “what day is 1st June 1961 ”? The answer appears as “Thursday”. The Auditor General’s (AG) middle name is “Yaw”. The GA, was undoubtedly born in 1961 and is expected to retire on the 31st of May 2021. Any critical thinker will dismiss the SSNIT content of this story as inconsequential and propaganda.
There is no doubt in my mind that, at a minimum, the chairman of the audit committee knows in his heart that the AG was born in 1961. Let’s not forget, however, that these guys – including the folks at the presidency – are politicians. Politicians don’t care about the truth; So it is very important that we arm ourselves with the proper knowledge to fight against untruths, disinformation and propaganda.
It is disturbing to witness the naive and unseemly spread and discussion in the media of this lie since this news broke about the GA’s birth year. The media, instead of putting a summary end to this question, rather engaged in back and forth and counter-arguments concerning the age of the GA. Interviewing a few students and recent graduates about their views on this controversy produced results that raised an eyebrow; some of them could not come to a simple and satisfactory conclusion on the year of birth of the GA.
Did the Speaker of Parliament, Bagbin, really win the presidential election?
This was another controversy that raised disturbing questions. You will be shocked to learn that many Ghanaians to this day believe the speaker of parliament got the job by consensus. This bizarre lie was perpetuated by the majority leader of parliament, Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu, after the events in parliament. Misinformation has been amply given a false leg to support the lack of training of some media outlets to ask logical questions. It was shocking to see, in one instance, the lack of in-depth questions from a reporter who interviewed the majority leader on the issue. It would be clear to any logical thinker that the majority leader had a purely political mind and was peddling untruths.
There were 275 ballots. These ballots were sorted for Bagbin and Oquaye – the ballots are sorted based on a visual inspection of the candidate who obtained the vote cast on that ballot. There was a ballot which the clerk and his team placed in the middle of the 2 lots of sorted ballots. This single ballot was supposed to be a rejected (spoiled) ballot. The team then proceeded to count that of Professor Oquaye and obtained 136 votes before the uprooting of the other pack (Bagbin). This result simply translated to 138 votes for Bagbin.
Meanwhile, in said interview, the Majority Leader said the count revealed a spoiled ballot in Professor Oquaye’s pack, suggesting that apart from Bagbin’s, we wouldn’t know how many spoiled ballots. were also there. This statement was totally false and illogical and should have been reported by the reporter, but he did not. Ballot sorters weren’t so stupid to randomly place rejected ballots into any package. What then was the essence of sorting?
It was surprising, however, that the press houses used extracts from this interview in their discussions with the media. The political lie perpetuated by the majority leader has taken hold of people’s minds to this day. This is very unfortunate in the context of independent reflection and decision-making processes on national issues.
With the ever-increasing political machinations and deception of the two main political parties, it is safe to say that Ghana needs many more critical thinkers to better interrogate national issues for the betterment of our democracy. Critical thinking must have a value in our teacher training.
The author: Dr Samuel Bansah, Ph.D., is a lecturer at KNUST College of Engineering and Hydrogeoscientific. It can be reached at [email protected]
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