HS Comments on the Fly

As promised many moons ago, I am announcing another RAQ page. This one is about “horrid math woes.” Basically, it’s about some students taking too long to complete a Saxon math lesson.

My husband pointed me to this blog entry over at Healthbolt about cognitive bias and how it affects our decision-making abilities. I guess a lot of the time we’re just deluding ourselves, which is probably not really surprising if I really think about it.

I thought I had a lot of decision-making stuff taken care of with Logic and critical thinking curricula. I was wrong. I should have covered this with my son. I can still cover it with my daughter, but I’ve never heard of most of this stuff so teaching it won’t really be all that easy. Drats.

Here’s an excerpt to pique (not peak) your interest:

A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality. Here are the 26 most studied and widely accepted cognitive biases.

1. Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
2. Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
3. Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
4. Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.

See? They’re rather in depth — or at least unfamiliar to me for the most part.

You know, we only did the first semester of Memoria Press’s Logic and maybe that’s why we missed some of this stuff. But my son quickly perused the Book 2, thinking it would look like Book 1, and promptly rejected it, I believe, because it had a bit of a different look to the content. That’s fine with me … you can lead a horse to water, etc. Book 1 was quite good; in fact, it was what I’d been looking for for a number a years. Book 2’s likely good also, but I no longer have it to comment upon. Easy come, easy go.

Anyway, I digress as usual. The list of 26 cognitive biases is well worth covering in this homeschool since how we make decisions in life is so important.

Oh, yeah, and my son did use the instructional DVDs for Logic 1 a little. I think it depends on the student if they can stand the repetitive nature of reading the lesson and then listening to it all over again on the DVDs. A younger student would probably want the instructional DVDs.