ABSTRACT. The knowledge economy and the digital age have changed the nature of work and management. More people than ever before need to master critical and ethical thinking skills. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how scenarios may be used as a vehicle for enhancing students’ critical and ethical thinking skills and to take a critical thinking approach to evaluating data-based conclusions and arguments. This paper proposes a set of 15 scenarios from the fields of medicine, school admissions, institutional rankings, criminology, business, quality control and pharmaceutical research. These scenarios were chosen for their relevance to statistics education. Individuals who wish to sharpen their critical and ethical thinking skills may benefit from this paper.
JEL codes: I23; D83
Keywords: critical thinking; ethical thinking; teaching with scenarios; assessment; loaded questions; education; deceptive school rankings; miscarriage of justice; misuse of statistics; healthcare statistics; correlation and causality
How to cite: Friedman, Hershey H., Linda W. Friedman, Martin R. Frankel, and Taiwo Amoo (2019). “Enhancing Critical and Ethical Thinking with Scenarios,” Psychosociological Issues in Human Resource Management 7(1): 7–29. doi:10.22381/PIHRM7120191
Received 24 July 2018 • Received in revised form 21 September 2018
Accepted 23 September 2018 • Available online 15 October 2018