Research Skills and Critical Thinking

(A Guide for the Research Skills Academy)

Date:

Jun 01, 2025

Author:

Mark Galassi <mark@galassi.org>

Author:

Karina Higginson <karinajhigginson@gmail.com>

Author:

Albert Kerelis <ajkerelis@reed.edu>

License:

This is a free book. You may adapt and redistribute it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0) described at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Caution

This web book is a work in progress.

Contents:

• The Academy
  • The Schedule
  • What is Research?
  • Transfer of metaphor
  • What Students Should Produce in this Time
  • The Slant of the Lectures
  • Computing, Platforms, and Software Freedom
• Nuance and the Avoidance of Platitudes
  • How To See More of the Painting
  • Platitudes
    • The Platitude Sickness: Taking Out the Trash of Corporate Speak
    • Another Rant Against Platitudes
    • Mark’s Personal Experience
• Reading Effectively
  • Lesson ideas for this chapter
  • Reading to Understand Vs. Reading to Critique
    • Understanding with Grace
    • Critiquing with Wanton Abandon
    • Notes Are Your Best Friend
  • Reading non-fiction versus reading fiction
  • Handling Jargon
    • Suspension of Not-getting-it-ness
    • The Dream of Full Understanding?
    • Remembering this when you are the writer
  • An Exercise
  • Building Connections
  • Where Is This Source Coming From?
  • Building Blocks: Prefixes and Suffixes
    • Latin Prefixes
    • Greek Prefixes
    • Latin Suffixes
    • Greek Suffixes
• Data Visualization
  • The Big Picture
  • The Data can Lead you Astray
  • Data Visualization Software
  • The !Kung of the Kalahari Desert (Bubble Chart)
  • A Fingerprint of a Soccer Player’s Effectiveness (Radar Chart)
  • Foreigners Living in Milan (Bumpchart)
  • A Treemap of Orchestra Hierarchies
• Research Step by Step
  • How do we get to our research question?
  • Finding some early sources
  • Traditional Library Research, Step by Step
  • Noticing Trends
  • Getting Quantitative
• Cognitive Errors and Selection Effects
  • Cognitive Biases
    • Selection Effects and the “Hidden Prior”
    • Causation Versus Correlation
    • Confirmation Biases
  • What kind of mind set avoids these cognitive problems?
  • Implicit Bias and Underrepresentation
    • Implicit Bias
    • Underrepresented and Underserved Groups
  • Groupthink and red team exercises
• Workshop skills
  • The Ballad of Jack Thompson
  • Keeping Research Tidy
    • Citations
    • Source Management Software
    • Adding Sources
    • Annotating Sources
  • Time management
    • Planners
    • Knowing Your Work Style
  • Communication and Collaboration
    • Collaboration with peers
    • Collaboration with mentors
    • Effective use of email
    • A good start is not enough
• Products - written and verbal
  • The Written
    • The thing being shown
    • Legal writing
    • Nominalizations and “zombie nouns”
    • Academic/business writing
  • The Presented
    • Problems to Overcome
    • The Solution - a reasonable baseline
• Academic awareness
  • What is an academic field
  • A tour of academic fields
  • Well-informed career choices
• Relevant Ethics
  • The Big Picture of What We Do
  • Respect and Codes of Conduct
    • Workplace Behavior
  • Plagiarism: Don’t Do It.
    • What is Plagiarism?
    • Putting Yourself in Their Shoes
    • Scary Campfire Stories
    • The Beauty of Citations: Sharing is Caring
  • Established Ethical Guidelines in Certain Fields
• The research project cemetary
• Thought-provoking books and media
  • Books: non-fiction
    • History
    • Politics
    • Art
    • Miscellaneous
    • Computer science, AI, math
    • Psychology
    • Writing and literary criticism
    • Philosophy
    • Medicine and epidemiology
  • Articles, article collections, blogs
  • Audio/visual
    • Lectures
    • Interviews
    • Podcasts
  • … And what about fiction?
• Research examples
  • Things to have handy before you do research
  • Worked examples
    • Taxation, disposable income, quality of life
    • The King Henry I Eclipse
    • The fivethirtyeight data sets and examples
    • President Biden’s comment on the Marijuana suspension of Richardson
  • Partially worked examples
    • Poverty, scarcity mindset, efefective altruism, moral ambition
  • Unworked examples
    • Instant messaging and privacy
    • Texas mask mandate mystery
    • Seychelles Islands vaccine mystery
    • Julia Galef’s hidden prior experiment
• Sample syllabuses
  • Hyperaccelerated Research Skills Academy 2025
    • Tutorial 1 - Nuance and the Avoidance of Platitudes
    • Tutorial 2 - Giving Talks
    • Tutorial 3 - Written Communication
    • Tutorial 4 - Cognitive Errors and Selection Effects
  • Galassi and Reeder 2024
    • Week 1
    • Week 2
  • Higginson and Kerelis 2023
    • Lesson 1: The History of Critical Thinking
    • Lesson 2: Keeping Research Tidy
    • Lesson 3: Good Writing: What it is, How to recognize it, and How to do it
    • Lesson 4: Progress
    • Lesson 5: Measurement, Method, and Parsimony
    • Lesson 6: Cultivating Curiosity
    • Lesson 7: Epistemology, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism
    • Lesson 8: Introduction to Absurdism
    • Lesson 9: Energy and Thermodynamics!!
    • Lesson 10: Poetry and the space between life and death
    • Lesson 11: The Surrealist Art Movement and Imagination
    • Lesson 12: Gender and Queer Theory Primer
• Appendix: logistical details
  • Linux
    • Arch Linux
    • Debian
    • Fedora
• Appendix: List of articles for discussion
  • Media bias diagram
  • Pushing at an open door
  • Selection effects
  • Taxation policy
  • Rennaissance Capital
• Bibliography

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page