Brain Hacks: A course on rational thinking for high schoolers

Can you trust what you see on the news? How reliable are your memories? How do scientists sift through the data to differentiate fact from fiction? Our brains trick us every day, presenting feelings as facts and making us think we know and remember things that we actually don’t.

I designed and taught Brain Hacks, a course to teach high schoolers how to be skeptical of their own minds, and the information they absorb. Students learned about the tools that scientists use to design experiments and make logical deductions, and that the “facts” we see all around us aren’t always as reliable as they seem.

Rational Thinking

I chose to explore the topic of rational thinking with the central question, “how do our brains trick us?”

Rational thinking is a crucial scientific ability that is often touched on in science classes, but is rarely covered in depth. Skills such as interpreting data, designing experiments, and understanding how our brains can trick us, are typically left for budding scientists to “learn by osmosis,” even though reliable research hinges on them. Since many SST students have plans to pursue higher education in science and engineering, I felt that these skills would benefit them both in the classroom and in everyday life.

My main goal for the course was to show students the ways in which our brains can mislead us, and to emphasize that human brains do not think rationally by default.

Course topics included

• Memories: our memories are unstable, and can be manipulated accidentally or intentionally.
• Cognitive biases: human brains are hardwired to take shortcuts that limit our ability to think logically.
• Interpreting data: the way in which information is presented can distort our perception of it.
• Troubleshooting and the scientific method: troubleshooting is making small predictions and thinking of ways to prove or disprove them; the scientific method is the same process on a larger scale.
• Designing experiments: scientists use the strategies of controlling, blinding, and repeating to break down problems and uncover the truth.

The School for Scientific Thought

I created this course for the School for Scientific Thought (SST) at UCSB.

The purpose of the SST program is to engage high school students in a specialized science topic that isn’t covered in school, while also introducing the students to a university setting and to role models in science and engineering. Graduate student instructors design and teach courses in which they have particular expertise. The program runs for five consecutive weekends, with one two-hour session each week.

Overcoming Instructional Challenges

The SST program does not include exams or homework, which makes sense for the nature of the course and the relatively short time frame. However, this makes assessing the accomplishment of learning objectives less straightforward.

To overcome this challenge, I experimented with “minute papers”, an activity where the instructor posts two to three questions in the last few minutes of class and the students write their responses. Minute paper questions are usually fairly open ended, for example “what do you think the main point of today’s lesson was?” or “what was the most confusing topic? Did it get cleared up, or are you still confused?”

The minute papers turned out to be a great way to assess which topics students were getting, and which ones needed more attention in the next class.

Demystifying abstract concepts with concrete activities

I attempted to make the class as active as possible by designing activities for students to both explore new topics and practice what they had learned.

My most successful lessons were

• The Anti-Debate: students identified cognitive biases by coming up with their own biased arguments, then trying to trick their classmates
• Mystery Tubes: students practiced making models and testing hypotheses with a devious classroom puzzle
• Law of Small Numbers: students experienced how statistics mislead when there is not enough data, by sampling colored candies

Improving my teaching

This course let me practice setting and assessing learning objectives. My most important learning objective was for students to become more skeptical of their own minds, and in this I believe the class succeeded. Students completed an exit survey for the course and their responses were enthusiastic and encouraging:

What was the most interesting topic you covered in your SST course?
“The way your brain tricks you. I wasn’t expecting nor did I ever imagine all the ways we are tricked.” –student exit survey

This was my first time teaching a large group of high schoolers, and I learned a great deal about classroom management. It can be tough to curate a supportive learning environment with limited classroom time, but I did my best to learn the students’ names quickly, and I tried to work with their personalities to make everyone comfortable. For example, I tried to engage the more outgoing students during whole-class activities, and gave more attention to the quieter students when they worked in small groups.

My overarching classroom philosophy is that students work best when they feel respected. I always share my learning goals with the students, and emphasize that my role is to facilitate their learning, not to judge them. In this respect I found that high schoolers were no different from the college students I typically work with.

Because of my mechanical engineering background, the topics I typically explain to students are very concrete and physical (e.g. forces, velocities). I enjoyed unleashing my creativty to design active, concrete classroom experiences to illustrate core principles. Given more class time, I would create more of these experiences.

Future work

It is difficult for humans to identify cognitive biases in external information, and it’s significantly harder to maintain skeptisism of our own minds. A few months after the SST course, I attended a workshop on backward design. Starting with the learning objective “students will identify specific cognitive biases in their own thinking,” my peers and I came up a class activity: students in a class could tweet or post biases that they found themselves using, with the requirement that they post once a week, or some predetermined number of times over the length of the course. I hope to be able to use this and other exercises I developed in future learning objects on rational thinking.