Unlocking the Mystery of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking. We all endorse it. We all want our students to do it. And we claim to teach it. But do we? Do we even understand and agree on what it means to think critically?

According to Paul and Elder’s (2013a) survey findings, most faculties don’t know what critical thinking is or how to teach it. Unless faculty explicitly and intentionally design their courses to build their students’ critical thinking skills and receive training in how to teach them, their students do not improve their skills (Abrami et al., 2008).

This common blind spot is understandable. The critical thinking literature is quite abstract and fragmented among different scholars who don’t seem to talk to each other:

• Stephen Brookfield (2012), the critical theory and adult education specialist, focuses on assumptions.
• Diane Halpern (2003), who’s been awarded for her teaching and research, takes the perspective of a cognitive psychologist.
• Richard Paul and Linda Elder (2013b), founding leaders of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, hail from philosophy and education psychology, respectively.
• Peter Facione (2013), a leadership consultant and former university executive, worked intensively with philosophers in the Delphi Group.
• Susan Wolcott (2006), an accounting professor, created a developmental model of complex thinking.

If you want to avoid the whole mosaic, you can also make a case that the higher levels of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of cognitive operations and Perry’s (1968) advanced stages of undergraduate cognitive development represent critical thinking.

Can you find common ground? Yes. In general, the scholars listed above agree that critical thinking entails an interpretation or analysis, usually followed by evaluation or judgment. It requires that learners have mastered some subject matter to think about, so it can’t be done in a knowledge vacuum. It is difficult and unnatural, and it takes time and effort to learn. And it involves not only cognition but also character and metacognition/self-regulated learning. This means that learners must be willing to pursue “truth” to wherever it may lie, persist through challenges, evaluate their own thinking fairly, and abandon faulty thinking for new and more valid ways of reasoning. These are intellectual “virtues” that don’t come easily to people and must be cultivated read more...