Critical Thinking

INSTRUCTIONS
INSTRUCTIONS
This assessment has been designed to measure your skills in: critical thinking, reasoning
about statistics, making decisions under risk or uncertainty, and written communication.
You will submit an essay no longer than three-pages in length, based on the scenario and
questions described here. Your own personal experiences and values are important and
will influence what you write, but, you should base your essay on the evidence provided in
the documents and your assessment of them.
Your essay should be in either Arial, size 11 or Times New Roman, size 12. Further, your
essay should use one-inch margins, use 1.5 or double spacing, and contain no more than
2,000 words.
Please do not write on any of the documents or other pages provided in this
assessment.
As you’ll see in the scenario, your essay will be guided by five questions. From a certain
point of view, your essay is really just five answers to five questions, though your answers
should be written as clear paragraphs, using appropriate sentence structure.
When you answer each question, you should make sure you cover each of these points:
1) the reasons for your answer to the question, 2) the evidence you found in the documents
to support your reasons, 3) any criticisms or support you have for the material within the
documents themselves, and 4) any comments or suggestions you have about the questions
Karan has asked (for example, do any of her questions contain assumptions that you’d like
to address?).
The page(s) that you submit should have each of Karan’s questions copied, with your
answer following her question. Please just copy and paste her questions from those found
here.
Check that you have all five of the associated documents (labeled A through E) before you
begin, and please remember not to write on any of these pages.
Although much of the information presented in these documents and exercises is accurate, nothing presented here
should be understood to reflect your own medical circumstances. No information here is intended to serve as medical
advice for you or anyone.
SCENARIO AND QUESTIONS
SCENARIO
Your friend Karan is worried because two of her aunts recently had their mammograms
come back positive. Karan’s aunts are sisters of her father; her father’s family is African
American. Karan’s mother describes herself as mixed (Karan’s grandfather on her mother’s
side is white, her grandmother on her mother’s side is black). Karan’s other grandmother
(her dad’s mom) died from breast cancer several years ago, and her aunts, in their late 30s,
have been tested every year. Karan is only 22, but she’s still worried. She has asked you to
look over some web pages that she’s printed and do your best to explain what you think
about them. She has read them, and thinks she understands what they say, but, she values
your objectivity and opinion and wants your advice. Your friend will make up her own mind
in the end, but, she really does trust your judgment. She hasn’t told you what she thinks
she’s going to do, and she has asked you to just be honest with what you think. She has
given you a list of five questions and would like you to answer all of them. You know Karan
well; she prefers straightforward, honest language and neither medical terms nor slang.
KARAN’S QUESTIONS
Question 1: According to what I’m seeing in some of these pages, I can’t really tell if
African American women get cancer as often as white women do, or, when they do, whether
they tend to die from it more often. I have a white grandfather, so are my chances better or
worse than other African Americans? How would I find out?
Question 2: If 70,000 people in my age group get cancer, and 15% of those are breast
cancers, then more than 10,000 people in my age group get breast cancer. But, my aunts’
mammograms came back positive and my grandma died from breast cancer, so, aren’t my
chances of having breast cancer more than 15%?
Question 3: Potential abnormalities are found 6% to 8% of the time, but mammography
is between 85% and 90% accurate. Does this mean that, using 7% and 87% as my middle
averages of those numbers, that the rate of abnormalities is really between 5.1% (6% × 85%)
and 7.2% (8% × 90%)? How should I interpret those statistics?
Question 4: It looks like breast cancer incidence rates for African Americans were really
high in the 1980s, but then have dropped in every decade since. Doesn’t this suggest that
women are healthier now than they were in my aunts’ generation? This is good news for
me, right?
Question 5: On one website, I saw that the overall accuracy rate of a mammogram was
85% for women who do have cancer and 83% for women who don’t. I don’t understand
that. If I got a mammogram and the result was positive, does that mean my chances of
really having cancer are between 83% and 85%? It also said that 1 in 8 women, in their
lives, would be diagnosed with breast cancer. Could you explain to me what my actual
chances of having cancer are, given these statistics, if my test comes back positive? Please
include a drawing, or graph, or some other way to help me picture my chances.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR PROMOTIONAL DISCOUNT DISPLAYED ON THE WEBSITE AND GET A DISCOUNT FOR YOUR PAPER NOW!