Project Need Assesment

How might we teach students to think more critically about the information he/she receives from the mass media?

1. Narrowing Down the Topic:

• students: current college students (freshman)
• information: e.g. news, reviews, critiques, recommendations, 
• mass media: tv, newspaper, radio, blog, twitter, etc.
• critically: evaluate with logic and commonsense before perceiving it as correct
• refined topic sentence: How might we teach college freshmen to logically evaluate the information (text, image, sound, video, etc.) they receive from both traditional and new media?

2. Need Assessment:
Not being able to think critically creates serious problems. Academically, a scholar with a fixed mind is less likely to make a breakthrough in his/her discipline, as he/she accepts what he learns in school and the mind is no longer flexible enough to refine the known laws and principles. Personally, critically thinking can allow a person to be more perceptive, thus less likely to to be deceived by the carefully phrased, manipulative messages that mass media is delivering on a daily basis (need data). An early exposure of critical thinking could be valuable for such thinking habits to be established.

3. Target Audience:
Current college students (preferably freshman who just graduated high school and entered a new phase of his/her life) are a group of young people who are brilliant, bright and ambitious and whose future are full of possibilities. However, they are also facing a point which could also affect the entire life path. They are, for the first time, given the freedom to control their own lives, and are suddenly exposed to all kinds of information at the arrival at campus. Teaching them to evaluation the information critically could potentially benefit them personally, academically and professionally.

4. Goals:

• being able to identify the points in a statement where something might not be true
• being able to construct certain methods/experiments to confirm/evaluate certain statement
• being able to avoid apparent logical fallacy when making a critical point