MaxLighthouse

Thinking Critically

If there is one thing professors like to see in student essays, it is evidence of critical thinking. Students, however, often do not know what critical thinking is, or what it looks like, or how to do it, and so their essays are a form of learning by trial and error.

To be able to think critically about a topic, you must have something to think about. Since critical thinking requires a reasonable level of content knowledge, and since we don’t know specifically what you are working on, we can only provide very general guidelines here.

The critical thinking process is a question-guided process. Students often have difficulty in: asking appropriate question about their topic; finding and/or developing appropriate answers to those questions, and; presenting their findings in appropriate ways.

Critical Thinking Guidelines

Ask Questions

The following general procedure may help you ask and answer questions about your material:

1. Write down everything you know about the topic. When you can’t think of anything more, take time to research and look for further ideas, explanations and  details that you may have missed. Ask yourself, “Is there anything else?” Be as inclusive as you can at this stage.
2. Re-organize the material into categories or groupings, by asking, “How do these things fit together? What elements are related and how are they related? What general groupings are there?”
3. Ask, “What is the significance of all this? What can it be used for? What are its implications? Is there anything that doesn’t fit, or that doesn’t agree with the facts, or with other theories on the topic, or with my personal experience?” You may want to write an explanation of your answers in a paragraph.

Push Past Your Limits

Remember, when you are doing these activities, that the interesting ideas are the ones you haven’t thought of yet. Always push yourself past the point at which you think you have said everything that needs to be said. Always ask questions that you can’t answer, and always ask more questions than you can answer.

Don’t Just Think — Write

Write down every thought you have. There are a number of reasons for this:

• you don’t want to forget what you thought;
• you will be able to retrace the steps you took to get an idea, so you can learn to deliberately apply the same steps in the future when you are faced with a similar problem;
• you will have a pile of raw material with which to work — good ideas often come from apparently trivial or insignificant ideas.
• Also, you will find that writing down ideas will encourage you to think more.

 Information and help from an excellent site:

NOTE: This next part is pretty complicated. If you read it and feel you can’t understand it, don’t just give up and walk away. If you realy try to understand it, but feel totally frustrated…

…scroll down to this symbol   and continue from there .

Critical thinking is not just a matter of accumulating information. A person with a good memory and who knows a lot of facts is not necessarily good at critical thinking. A critical thinker is able to figure out consequences from what he knows, and he knows how to make use of information to solve problems, and to seek relevant sources of information to inform himself.

Critical thinking should not be confused with being argumentative or being critical of other people. Although critical thinking skills can be used in exposing fallacies and bad reasoning, critical thinking can also play an important tole in cooperative reasoning and constructive tasks. Critical thinking can help us acquire knowledge, improve our theories, and strengthen arguments. We can use critical thinking to enhance work processes and improve social institutions.

Good critical thinking might be seen as the foundation of science and a democratic society.

• Science requires the critical use of reason in experimentation and theory confirmation.
• The proper functioning of a democracy requires citizens who can think critically about social issues to inform their judgments about proper governance and to overcome biases and prejudice.

 Why study critical thinking?

Although most people would agree that critical thinking is an important thinking skill, most people also do not know how to improve their own thinking. This is because critical thinking is a meta-thinking skill. It requires careful reflection on the good principles of reasoning and making a conscious effort to internalize them and apply them in daily life. This is notoriously hard to do and often requires a long period of training.

Explaining critical thinking :

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

It is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness. It entails the examination of those structures or elements of thought implicit in all reasoning: purpose, problem, or question-at-issue, assumptions, concepts, empirical grounding; reasoning leading to conclusions, implications and consequences, objections from alternative viewpoints, and frame of reference.

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Learning critical thinking

Critical thinking is a thinking skill. Like the acquisition of many other skills, there are three main factors involved in learning critical thinking :

• theory (understand what critical thinking is and how it works)
• practice (use critical thinking in your school work and in your daily life)
• attitude (accept that critical thinking is difficult, but work at making it part of your normal way of thinking and of looking at the world)

People differ in their natural talent in good reasoning. Psychologists have also discovered persistent biases and fallacies in human reasoning. Theory, practice and attitude can help us improve our critical thinking.

However, to improve critical thinking skills it is necessary to internalize the principles one has learned in normal reasoning, and to apply such principles in daily life.

Good critical skills require not just practice and knowledge of theory. Persistent practice can bring about improvements only if one has the right kind of motivation and attitude.

NOTE:

CHECK YOURSELF:

The following attitudes will not help you improve your thinking :

• I prefer people telling me what to do and how to do it rather than figuring it out myself.

• I do what I feel like doing. I don’t like to think a lot about my decisions.

• I don’t usually review the mistakes I have made.

• I hate looking things up myself.

• I don’t like teachers who leave things vague and discuss problems rather than giving answers.

• I don’t like to be challenged or criticized.

• I don’t think about why someone else might disagree with what I think.

To improve one’s thinking one must recognize that the importance of reflecting on the reasons for belief and action. One must also be willing to engage in debate, to make mistakes, to break old habits, and to deal with complex language and abstract ideas.

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WHAT LEVEL OF CRITICAL THINKING ARE OUR ASSIGNMENTS?

Too many school assignments are ”Level Zero” (the chart calls it Foundation, Basic Knowledge.) 

Look at the blue chart below:

Many students prefer level zero because it requires so very little thinking. Some teachers prefer level zero because it is easy to teach and to grade. We’re going to try to do most of our assignments in the Level 1-3 range.

vocabulary:

• COGNITIVE comes from cognition: the mental process of knowing, including awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.