Lesson Plan

Cognitive Bias Menu

Grade Level: 6-12

Length: 45-60 minutes

DE Domain: CB

Students experience common cognitive bias through classroom demonstrations, and begin to recognize the biases in themselves.

Cognitive biases impact all of us, adults and young people alike, and they often lead our decisions in unintended directions. Decades of research have shown that by recognizing cognitive biases in ourselves and others, we can at least partially mitigate their impact on our decision-making. The menu of activities in this resource provide opportunities for students to learn about cognitive biases while experiencing them firsthand.

CB.1 – Identify cognitive biases and heuristics and the role they play in our decision-making and our views of the world.

Rather than a singular lesson, this classroom implementation resource offers a menu of options for introducing Cognitive Biases in the classroom. In this resource, we provide short mini-demonstrations on different cognitive biases. At the end, we also offer question prompts to weave throughout your regularly planned curriculum, as well as tools and strategies that can be used to capture, track, and potentially continue student learning in the area of recognizing and resisting Cognitive Biases.

Lesson:

Introduction:

This week we will have some opportunities to observe the hard-wiring of our brains in action to learn about how cognitive biases impact our thinking. Throughout the week we will be doing short experiments to collect some information on how our brains think. We will be noticing and talking about some patterns that may emerge and will take some time to notice times when these biases impact our learning or decision-making.

Anchoring Bias Demonstration (~10 minutes over 2 days)

Representativeness Heuristic Demonstration (~5 minutes)

Availability Heuristic Demonstration (~5 minutes)

Confirmation Bias Demonstration (~10 minutes)

Sunk Cost Demonstration (~5 minutes)

 

Questions to ask during or after regular instruction to support recognition of cognitive biases:

  • What factors may have influenced your thinking?
  • Can you explain how you arrived at that concussion?
  • Based on what you now know about cognitive biases, did you notice any in yourself or others today?
  • How confident do you feel that your thinking is not being influenced by factors you may not have considered?

 

Differentiation:

Begin the lesson with an article introducing cognitive biases in general.

Optional extensions:

Build a class glossary of common cognitive biases that show up frequently in students’ lives.

Have students keep decision journals where they can begin to record which biases they notice in themselves and when.

After independent or group work, conduct a quick cognitive bias check-in. Ask, “did you notice any biases that might have influenced your thinking in this task?”

After introducing a specific bias, brainstorm ways this might show up for students in their lives or in the classroom.

In a group discussion, have students write their ideas down first before sharing to prevent anchoring.

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