7 Student Perspective: Critical thinking and issues facing animal agriculture

The authors of this abstract were skeptical of students’ knowledge of issues facing animal agriculture and equally their ability to critically evaluate social media references with regards to animal agriculture. The observations for which the surveyed samples offer is to conceptualize what students deemed vital areas of interest in correlation to animal agriculture, how they consolidate their knowledge from where their information was obtained, and what constituted their reasoning to make those conclusions. Therefore, undergraduate animal science majors enrolled (n=49) in a junior-level animal science course were asked to define critical thinking (CT) and use this thought process to identify what they perceived as current issues facing Animal Agriculture (AA). Most students believed critical thinking involves further evaluation of a thought/concept or information through brainstorming or thinking ‘outside of the box’. While others believed that critical thinking involved using their knowledge to come up with a solution. Though students were on the path of consolidating knowledge and experiences, none mentioned using fact finding searches for additional information to formulate an opinion/answer. This gives rise to questions of whether students approach topics of interest solely through personal understanding, or if they utilized sources from higher education such as scientific literature to refine their understanding of topics to make conclusions. Additionally, the surveyed students were asked to use their critical thinking skills and list, in order of importance, five issues pertaining to Animal Agriculture (AA). As would be expected, there were variations of recorded issues, yet they indicated a level of sophistication congruent with educated groups while other topics yielded little to no significance within the field of AA and categorized as emotional or socially driven. Though the data provided a wide spectrum of current AA issues, nine central themes evolved. The highest responses were general topics of Economy (29.24%), Environment (21.64%), and Production Sustainability (11.7%). Lesser chosen themes included Animal Activism (9.94%), Animal Health (8.77%), and Animal Welfare (6.43%), with Uninformed Population (4.09%) and Food Safety (1.75%) the least likely to be listed. It is informative that the students exhibited qualities congruent to the belief that critical thinking entails brainstorming concepts as is evident to the wide variety of topics listed of AA Issues, however, many also deviated from the question and listed societal issues rather than those specific to AA which parallels previous research of which students utilize unreliable media sources (Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) for their source of global information. Therefore, it could be observed that students identified issues in AA that were relevant, but we must be cognitive the amount of time they spend accessing invalid or unreliable sources, which often are overlooked or misrepresented by media sources and could foster an environment of poor critical thinking process.