Developing Critical Thinking Skills: A Scientific Study on the students of Higher Education in Odisha.

Dr.Sudhansu Kumar Dash

1.      Introduction                                                                  

Much of what we remember and believe is simply wrong. Our brains seem to constantly generate false observations, memories, and beliefs and yet we tend to take the truth of our experiences for granted. The present study concentrates on the many ways in which our human brains deceive us and lead us to conclusions that have little to do with reality. One will also learn strategies that can be used to combat the mind’s many deceptions. This study explores what is called metacognition: thinking about thinking itself and attempts to  cover the way we perceive the world around us. Everything we think we see, hear, and experience is not a direct recording of the outside world; instead, it is a construction. Information is altered, distorted, compared, and confabulated ultimately to be woven into a narrative which is our assumptions about the world. Our experiences and thoughts are also altered through our egos and the many emotional needs, humans constantly feed. Furthermore, everything we think and experience becomes a memory, which is further constructed, altered, and fused. We rely upon our memories as if they were accurate recordings of the past, but the evidence shows that we should be highly suspicious of even the most vivid and confident memories. We don’t recall memories as much as we reconstruct and update them, altering the information every time we access it. Our brains also filled in gaps by making up information as needed. Additionally, a host of logical flaws and cognitive biases plague our thinking, unless we are specifically aware of and avoid those fallacies. In this study the researcher explores logical fallacies and cognitive biases in detail, learning how they affect thinking in often subtle ways, which are mental shortcuts we tend to take in thinking. These shortcuts maybe efficient in most circumstances, but they can also lead us astray. Our brains have other interesting strengths and weaknesses that can further inform our thinking. We are generally very good at pattern recognition—so good that we often see patterns that are not actually there. However, many of us are inherently poor at probability and statistics, and this innumeracy opens us up to deception and errors in thinking. Perhaps our greatest weakness is our susceptibility to delusion, the ability to hold a false belief against all evidence. Secondly how our brains distort reality to discuss how you can specifically use critical thinking skills and tools to combat the deceptions of your mind. The philosophy and practice of critical thinking and science are the tools that humans have slowly and carefully nurtured over many millennia to compensate for the many flaws in our brains.

Critical thinking includes the component skills of analyzing arguments, making inferences using inductive or deductive reasoning, judging or evaluating, and making decisions or solving problems. Background knowledge is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for enabling critical thought within a given subject. Critical thinking involves both cognitive skills and dispositions. These dispositions, which can be seen as attitudes or habits of mind, include open- and fair-mindedness, inquisitiveness, flexibility, a propensity to seek reason, a desire to be well-informed, and a respect for and willingness to entertain diverse viewpoints. There are both general- and domain-specific aspects of critical thinking. Empirical research suggests that people begin developing critical thinking competencies at a very young age. Although adults often exhibit deficient reasoning, in theory all people can be taught to think critically. Instructors are urged to provide explicit instruction in critical thinking, to teach how to transfer to new contexts, and to use cooperative or collaborative learning methods and constructivist approaches that place students at the center of the learning process. In constructing assessments of critical thinking, educators should use open-ended tasks, real-world or “authentic” problem contexts, and ill-structured problems that require students to go beyond recalling or restating previously learned information. Such tasks should have more than one defensible solution and embed adequate collateral materials to support multiple perspectives. Finally, such assessment tasks should make student reasoning visible by requiring students to provide evidence or logical arguments in support of judgments, choices, claims, or assertions.

The research encounters many examples of pseudoscience in which various attempts at new discoveries went wrong. The scientific blunders also discuss great scientific mistakes in history and the lessons that can be learned from them. The research attempts to apply critical thinking, knowledge of science, and knowledge of the mechanisms of self-deception to everyday practice. Then, one will discover the role of science and critical thinking in democracy, the need for high-quality science education, and how to skeptically approach the media and will partly be a primer on how not to get scammed or fooled. By the end of the study, one will have a thorough understanding of what constitutes critical thinking and why we all so desperately need it. Left to our own devices—what psychologists call the default mode of human thinking—we will be subject to the vagaries of perception and memory and slaves to our emotional needs and biases. The skills taught in this study will help one operate on the metacognitive level so that one is  able to think about the process of one’s own thinking.

The human brain is the universal tool by which we understand our selves and the universe in which we live. By understanding the nature of human cognition and the methods of thinking clearly and critically, we can avoid common errors and make the best use of our minds. The research study focuses on metacognition, or thinking about thinking itself, and it endeavors to give you the skills of critical thinking. Developing critical thinking skills is empowering and liberating and it is a defense mechanism against the world that we live in.

1.1. Logic in Critical Thinking

 Science and belief permeate our lives; they permeate our culture and our civilization. We buy products every day that involve claims—either explicit or implicit—and we need to be able to evaluate those claims in order to make good purchasing decisions. We use critical thinking in order to think about how we run our civilization. We have to purchase health-care products and decide what foods to eat and what lifestyle changes to make in order to stay healthy. These claims are based upon evidence and logic, and we need critical thinking to be able to evaluate them properly. One of the premises of this study is that we are our brains. In essence, the brain is an organ that can think and is self-aware. It is not only the most complicated organ that we know about, but it may in fact be the most complicated thing in the universe that we know about. The brain can remember, feel, believe, calculate, extrapolate, infer, and deduce. It does everything that we think of as thinking. The brain is our universal tool and greatest strength. Most people believe that our intelligence is our greatest advantage over all the other creatures on this planet. However, the brain is also strangely deceptive and is the root of many of our flaws and weaknesses. This course will also explore human nature. Humans possess logic, but we are not inherently logical creatures. In addition to being logical, we are also highly emotional creatures; we tend to follow our evolved emotions and rationalizations. Our thoughts tend to follow a pathway of least resistance, which is not always the optimal pathway. Logic and critical thinking are, therefore, learned skills. While we have some inherent sense of logic, we are overwhelmingly emotional creatures. We have the capacity for logic, but logic and critical thinking are skills. We’re not born as master critical thinkers that need to be developed and practiced.

1.2. Flaws in Human Thinking

Delusion:

It is a fixed, false belief that is vigorously held even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.

Heuristic:

 A cognitive rule of thumb or mental shortcut that we subconsciously make that may be true much of the time but is not logically valid.

Logic:

It is a formal process or principle of reasoning.

Metacognition:

Thinking about thinking; examining the processes by which we think about and arrive at our own beliefs.

Methodological naturalism:

These are the philosophical assumptions that underlie scientific methodology; specifically, the assumption that all effects have natural causes.

Pseudoscience:

It is a practice that superficially resembles the process of science but distorts proper methodology to the point that it is fatally flawed and does not qualify as true science.

Scientific skepticism:

 It is a comprehensive approach to knowledge that emphasizes critical thinking and science. Skepticism combines knowledge of philosophy of science, scientific methods, mechanisms of self deception, and related fields to approach all claims to truth in a provisional and systematic way.

 The inherent tendency of humans is to make many errors in thinking. One example is flaws in logic, which are called logical fallacies, in which we tend to make logical connections that are not valid, or real. Our thinking is also plagued with many false assumptions. Our heads are filled with knowledge that we think is true but is, in fact, false. Either these bits of knowledge are simply wrong, or that fall short of the truth. Our memories are also massively flawed. We tend to naively assume that our memories are an accurate, passive recorder of what has happened, but our memories are actually plagued with numerous flaws that make them highly unreliable. In psychology, heuristics are patterns of thinking. They’re mental shortcuts that we tend to take that may be right much of the time but are wrong often enough that they quite frequently lead us astray. We compensate for all of these flaws in our brain’s functioning by using metacognition, or thinking about thinking itself. A process called scientific skepticism involves systematic doubt—questioning everything that you think, the process of your thinking, and everything that you think you know.

1.3. The Necessity of Thinking about Thinking

One component of critical thinking is basing your beliefs on actual evidence as opposed to wishful thinking, for example. The goal is to arrive at conclusions that are likely to be reliable as opposed to conclusions that are unreliable, but we also want to have a sense of how reliable our conclusions are. The scientific method is scientific skepticism—not just doubt, but a positive set of methods for examining reality. Essentially, science is a   systematic way of comparing our ideas to external, objective data. In short, the goal of science is to lead us to conclusions that are actually true as opposed to conclusions that we simply wish are true. However, not all science is valid. Some science is so flawed that we call it pseudo science. Science follows scientific methodology. It is not a set of beliefs, but it is a set of methods, and there are ways of defining that as well as distinguishing good science from bad science. The scientific method is based upon methodological naturalism, which is the philosophical term for the notion that natural effects have natural causes. In trying to model and understand the world, you cannot refer to supernatural or miraculous causes that don’t have any testable cause in the natural world. All conclusions in science are provisional; there is no such thing as absolute metaphysical certitude. Not only do we have to assess what is likely to be true but also how confident we can be about that belief, knowing that we’ll never quite reach absolute certainty. All of our beliefs are open to revision. When new data comes in, or may be just a better way of interpreting data, we have to be open to revising what we thought we knew. Human beings are subject to delusions. Sometimes our thinking goes so far a way that we can invent our own reality or become swept up in the beliefs of others. One common manifestation of this is a public panic. It’s helpful to consider thinking as a process and to focus on the process rather than on any particular conclusion. Once we emotionally invest in a conclusion, humans are very good at twisting and rationalizing facts and logic in order to fit that desired conclusion. Instead, we should invest in the process and be very flexible when it comes to any conclusions. In addition, we are currently living not only in the age of information with the Internet, but we are living in the age of misinformation. There are many rumors that now spread faster than wildfire; they spread with the speed of electrons through the Internet. Whether they’re innocent or malicious, myths are spread through the Internet in order for the people behind the myths to try to steal other people’s money, lure them into a scam, or even influence their voting. We live in a capitalistic society, which means that every day we’re subject to marketing claims that are highly motivated to misrepresent the facts or to give us a very specific perspective. Such claims try to influence our thoughts and behavior by engaging in persuasive speech and maybe even deception. As consumers, every day we have to sort through deliberately deceptive claims to figure out which ones are reliable and which ones aren’t. Furthermore, many companies use pseudo science or even antiscientific claims to back up their marketing and products, and that can seem very persuasive to someone who isn’t skilled in telling real science from pseudoscience.

Thinking critically is a process, and the first component is to examine all of the facts that we are assuming or that we think are true. Many of them may not be reliable, or they may be assumptions. We may not know whether they’re true, but reassume they’re true. We also need to examine our logic. Is the logic we are using legitimate, or is it flawed in some way? Perhaps it’s systematically biased in a certain direction. In addition, we should try to become aware of our motivations. People are extremely good at rationalizing beliefs when they are motivated by a desire to believe a certain conclusion. Understanding our motivations will help us to deconstruct that process and will give us the skills to discover conclusions that are more likely to be true, as opposed to the ones that you just wish to be true. Critical thinking also means thinking through the implications of a belief—that different beliefs about the world should all be compatible with each other. We have a tendency to compartmentalize, to have one belief walled off from all of our other beliefs, and therefore we insulate it from refutation. If we think about what else has to be true if a certain belief is true and whether both make sense that is a good way to tell how plausible or how likely to be true a belief is. Additionally, we should check with others:

It’s also important to be humble, which means knowing your limits. We tend to get into trouble when we assume we have expertise or knowledge that we don’t have or when we don’t question the limits of our knowledge.  Critical thinking is, in fact, a defense mechanism against all the machinations that are trying to deceive us whether for ideological, political, or marketing reasons. Critical thinking also liberates us being weighed down by the many false beliefs, and perhaps mutually incompatible beliefs that we tend to hold because of our emotional makeup.

2. Rationale of the study

The study intends explore the ways in which critical thinking has been defined by researchers and to investigate the development of  critical thinking skills. It also attempts to study how teachers can encourage the development of critical thinking skills in their students so as to review best practices in assessing critical thinking skills.

3. Review of literature

Educators have long been aware of the importance of critical thinking skills . More recently, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has identified critical thinking as one of several learning and innovation skills necessary to prepare for education and the workforce. In addition, the newly created Common Core State Standards reflect critical thinking as a cross-disciplinary skill vital for college and employment social life and politics. Despite widespread recognition of its importance, there is a notable lack of consensus regarding the definition of critical thinking.

The literature on critical thinking has roots in two primary academic disciplines: philosophy and psychology (Lewis & Smith, 1993). Sternberg (1986) has also noted a third critical thinking strand within the field of education. These separate academic strands have developed different approaches to defining critical thinking that reflect their respective concerns. Enumerating the qualities and characteristics of this person rather than the behaviors or actions the critical thinker can perform (Lewis & Smith, 1993; Thayer-Bacon, 2000). Sternberg (1986) has noted that this school of thought approaches the critical thinker as an ideal type, focusing on what people are capable of doing under the best of circumstances. Accordingly, Richard Paul (1992) discusses critical thinking in the context of “perfections of thought”. This preoccupation with the ideal critical thinker is evident in the American Philosophical Association’s consensus portrait of the ideal critical thinker as someone who is inquisitive in nature, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded, has a desire to be well-informed, understands diverse viewpoints, and is willing to both suspend judgment and to consider other perspectives (Facione, 1990). Those working within the philosophical tradition also emphasize qualities or standards of thought. For example, Bailin (2002) defines critical thinking as thinking of a particular quality—essentially good thinking that meets specified criteria or standards of adequacy and accuracy. Further, the philosophical approach has traditionally focused on the application of formal rules of logic (Lewis & Smith, 1993; Sternberg, 1986). One limitation of this approach to defining critical thinking is that it does not always correspond to reality (Sternberg, 1986). By emphasizing the ideal critical thinker and what people have the capacity to do, this approach may have less to contribute to discussions about how people actually think.

The cognitive psychological approach contrasts with the philosophical perspective in two ways. First, cognitive psychologists, particularly those immersed in the behaviorist tradition and the experimental research paradigm, tend to focus on how people actually think versus how they could or should think under ideal conditions (Sternberg, 1986). Second, rather than defining critical thinking by pointing to characteristics of the ideal critical thinker or enumerating criteria or standards of “good” thought, those working in cognitive psychology tend to define critical thinking by the types of actions or behaviors critical thinkers can do. Typically, this approach to defining critical thinking includes a list of skills or procedures performed by critical thinkers (Lewis & Smith, 1993).

Philosophers have often criticized this latter aspect of the cognitive psychological approach as being reductionist—reducing a complex orchestration of knowledge and skills into a collection of disconnected steps or procedures (Sternberg, 1986).  Bailin (2002) argues that it is a fundamental misconception to view critical thinking as a series of discrete steps or skills, and that this misconception stems from the behaviorist’s need to define constructs in ways that are directly observable. According to this argument, because the actual process of thought is unobservable, cognitive psychologists have tended to focus on the products of such thought—behaviors or overt skills (e.g., analysis, interpretation, formulating good questions). Other philosophers have also cautioned against confusing the activity of critical thinking with its component skills (Facione, 1990), arguing that critical thinking is more than simply the sum of its parts (Van Gelder, 2005). Indeed, a few proponents of the philosophical tradition have pointed out that it is possible to simply “go through the motions,” or proceed through the “steps” of critical thinking without actually engaging in critical thought (Bailin, 2002). Those working in the field of education have also participated in discussions about critical thinking. Benjamin Bloom and his associates are included in this category. Their taxonomy for information processing skills (1956) is one of the most widely cited sources for educational practitioners when it comes to teaching and assessing higher-order thinking skills. Bloom’s taxonomy is hierarchical, with “comprehension” at the bottom and “evaluation” at the top. The three highest levels (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) are frequently said to represent critical thinking (Kennedy et al., 1991). The benefit of the educational approach is that it is based on years of classroom experience and observations of student learning, unlike both the philosophical and the psychological traditions (Sternberg, 1986).

4. Objectives

1. To explore the ways in which critical thinking has been defined by researchers,

2. To investigate how critical thinking develops

3. To study how teachers can encourage the development of critical thinking skills in their students,

4. To review best practices in assessing critical thinking skills.

5. Methodology

This research uses a qualitative approach to investigation. Survey research method is followed for conducting the study. Secondary data is collected from the colleges and universities of odisha. The study uses a large, nationally representative data set, which enables the researcher to explore potential heterogeneity in returns to critical thinking  skills along various dimensions by sex, age, education, social group and geographic variables, using inductive or deductive reasoning, judgment or evaluation.

6. Universe of the study

The study included randomly selected faculty from colleges and universities across Odisha,. Faculty answered both closed and open-ended questions in a 40-50 minute interview. By direct statement or by implication, most faculties claimed that they permeated their instruction with an emphasis on critical thinking and that the students internalized the concepts in their courses as a result. Yet only the rare interviewee mentioned the importance of students thinking clearly, accurately, precisely, relevantly, or logically, etc. Very few mentioned any of the basic skills of thought such as the ability to clarify questions; gather relevant data; reason to logical or valid conclusions; identify key assumptions; trace significant implications, or enter without distortion into alternative points of view. Intellectual traits of mind, such as intellectual humility, intellectual perseverance, intellectual responsibility, etc, were rarely mentioned by the interviewees. Consider the following key results from the study:

7. Analysis

The question at research in this paper is the current state of critical thinking in higher education. Sadly, studies of higher education demonstrate three disturbing facts: Most college faculty at all levels lack a substantive concept of critical thinking. Most college faculties don’t realize that they lack a substantive concept of critical thinking, believe that they sufficiently understand it, and assume they are already teaching students it.  Lecture, rote memorization, and (largely ineffective) short-term study habits are still the norm in college instruction and learning today.

 These three facts, taken together, represent serious obstacles to essential, long-term institutional change, for only when administrative and faculty leaders grasp the nature, implications, and power of a robust concept of critical thinking  as well as gain insight into the negative implications of its absence  are they able to orchestrate effective professional development. When faculty have a vague notion of critical thinking, or reduce it to a single-discipline model (as in teaching critical thinking through a “logic” or a “study skills” paradigm), it impedes their ability to identify ineffective, or develop more effective, teaching practices. It prevents them from making the essential connections (both within subjects and across them), connections that give order and substance to teaching and learning.

This paper highlights the depth of the problem and its solution a comprehensive, substantive concept of critical thinking fostered across the curriculum. As long as we rest content with a fuzzy concept of critical thinking or an overly narrow one, we will not be able to effectively teach for it. Consequently, students will continue to leave our colleges without the intellectual skills necessary for reasoning through complex issues.

The study demonstrates that most college faculties lack a substantive concept of critical thinking. Consequently they do not (and cannot) use it as a central organizer in the design of instruction. It does not inform their conception of the student’s role as learner. It does not affect how they conceptualize their own role as instructors. They do not link it to the essential thinking that defines the content they teach. They, therefore, usually teach content separate from the thinking students need to engage in if they are to take ownership of that content. They teach history but not historical thinking. They teach biology, but not biological thinking. They teach math, but not mathematical thinking. They expect students to do analysis, but have no clear idea of how to teach students the elements of that analysis. They want students to use intellectual standards in their thinking, but have no clear conception of what intellectual standards they want their students to use or how to articulate them. They are unable to describe the intellectual traits (dispositions) presupposed for intellectual discipline. They have no clear idea of the relation between critical thinking and creativity, problem-solving, decision-making, or communication. They do not understand the role that thinking plays in understanding content. They are often unaware that didactic teaching is ineffective. They don’t see why students fail to make the basic concepts of the discipline their own. They lack classroom teaching strategies that would enable students to master content and become skilled learners.

Most faculties have these problems, yet with little awareness that they do. The majority of college faculty considers their teaching strategies just fine, no matter what the data reveal. Whatever problems exist in their instruction they see as the fault of students or beyond their control.

Research demonstrates that, contrary to popular faculty belief, critical thinking is not fostered in the typical college classroom. In a meta-analysis of the literature on teaching effectiveness in higher education, Lion Gardiner, in conjunction with ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education (1995) documented the following disturbing patterns: “Faculty aspire to develop students’ thinking skills, but research consistently shows that in practice we tend to aim at facts and concepts in the disciplines, at the lowest cognitive levels, rather than development of intellect or values."

Numerous studies of college classrooms reveal that, rather than actively involving our students in learning, we lecture, even though lectures are not nearly as effective as other means for developing cognitive skills. In addition, students may be attending to lectures only about one-half of their time in class, and retention from lectures is low. Studies suggest our methods often fail to dislodge students’ misconceptions and ensure learning of complex, abstract concepts. Capacity for problem solving is limited by our use of inappropriately simple practice exercises. Classroom tests often set the standard for students’ learning. As with instruction, however, we tend to emphasize recall of memorized factual information rather than intellectual challenge. Taken together with our preference for lecturing, our tests may be reinforcing our students’ commonly fact-oriented memory learning, of limited value to either them or society.

Faculties agree almost universally that the development of students’ higher-order intellectual or cognitive abilities is the most important educational task of colleges and universities. These abilities underpin our students’ perceptions of the world and the consequent decisions they make. Specifically, critical thinking – the capacity to evaluate skillfully and fairly the quality of evidence and detect error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias – is central to both personal success and national needs. Process-oriented instructional orientations “have long been more successful than conventional instruction in fostering effective movement from concrete to formal reasoning. Such programs emphasize students’ active involvement in learning and cooperative work with other students and de-emphasize lectures .

Gardiner’s summary of the research coincides with the results of a large study (Paul,  1997) of 38 public colleges and universities and 28 private ones focused on the question: To what extent are faculty teaching for critical thinking?

8. Findings

Though the overwhelming majority of faculty claimed critical thinking to be a primary objective of their instruction (89%), only a small minority could give a clear explanation of what critical thinking is (19%). Furthermore, according to their answers, only 9% of the respondents were clearly teaching for critical thinking on a typical day in class. Though the overwhelming majority (78%) claimed that their students lacked appropriate intellectual standards (to use in assessing their thinking), and 73% considered that students learning to assess their own work was of primary importance, only a very small minority (8%) could enumerate any intellectual criteria or standards they required of students or could give an intelligible explanation of those criteria and standards. While 50% of those interviewed said that they explicitly distinguish critical thinking skills from traits, only 8% were able to provide a clear conception of the critical thinking skills they thought were most important for their students to develop. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority (75%) provided either minimal or vague allusion (33%) or no illusion at all (42%) to intellectual traits of mind. Although the majority (67%) said that their concept of critical thinking is largely explicit in their thinking, only 19% could elaborate on their concept of thinking. Although the vast majority (89%) stated that critical thinking was of primary importance to their instruction, 77% of the respondents had little, limited or no conception of how to reconcile content coverage with the fostering of critical thinking. Although the overwhelming majority (81%) felt that their department’s graduates develop a good or high level of critical thinking ability while in their program, only 20% said that their departments had a shared approach to critical thinking, and only 9% were able to clearly articulate how they would assess the extent to which a faculty member was or was not fostering critical thinking. The remaining respondents had a limited conception or no conception at all of how to do this.

9. Recommendations

If we understand critical thinking substantively, we not only explain the idea explicitly to our students, but we use it to give order and meaning to virtually everything we do as teachers and learners. We use it to organize the design of instruction. It informs how we conceptualize our students as learners. It determines how we conceptualize our role as instructors. It enables us to understand and explain the thinking that defines the content we teach.When we understand critical thinking at a deep level, we realize that we must teach content through thinking, not content, and then thinking. We model the thinking that students need to formulate if they are to take ownership of the content. We teach history as historical thinking. We teach biology as biological thinking. We teach math as mathematical thinking. We expect students to analyze the thinking that is the content, and then to assess the thinking using intellectual standards. We foster the intellectual traits (dispositions) essential to critical thinking. We teach students to use critical thinking concepts as tools in entering into any system of thought, into any subject or discipline. We teach students to construct in their own minds the concepts that define the discipline. We acquire an array of classroom strategies that enable students to master content using their thinking and to become skilled learners. The concept of critical thinking, rightly understood, ties together much of what we need to understand as teachers and learners. Properly understood, it leads to a framework for institutional change If we truly understand critical thinking, we should be able to explain its implications:

·         for analyzing and assessing reasoning

·         for identifying strengths and weaknesses in thinking

·         for identifying obstacles to rational thought

·         for dealing with egocentrism and sociocentrism

·         for developing strategies that enable one to apply critical thinking to everyday life

·         for understanding the stages of one’s development as a thinker

·         for understanding the foundations of ethical reasoning

·         for detecting bias and propaganda in the national and international news

·         for conceptualizing the human mind as an instrument of intellectual work

·         for active and cooperative learning

·         for the art of asking essential questions

·         for scientific thinking

·         for close reading and substantive writing

·         for grasping the logic of a discipline.

10. Summary and conclusion

Critical thinking is believed to include the component skills of analyzing arguments, making inferences by using inductive or deductive reasoning, judging or evaluating, and making decisions or solving problems. Background knowledge is believed to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for enabling critical thought within a given subject. Critical thinking entails cognitive skills, or abilities, and dispositions. These dispositions, which can be seen as attitudes, or habits of mind, include open- and fair-mindedness, inquisitiveness, flexibility, a propensity to seek reason, a desire to be well-informed, and a respect for and willingness to entertain diverse viewpoints. There appear to be both general and domain-specific aspects of critical thinking, which suggests two main conclusions. First, instruction should represent a fusion of preparation in general critical thinking principles, as well as practice in applying critical thinking skills within the context of specific domains. Second, transfer of critical thinking skills to new contexts is unlikely to occur unless students are specifically taught to transfer by sensitizing them to deep problem structures and are given adequate opportunities to rehearse critical thinking skills in a variety of domains. Critical thinking skills relate to several other important student learning outcomes, such as metacognition, motivation, collaboration, and creativity. Metacognition (or thinking about thinking) supports critical thinking in that students who can monitor and evaluate their own thought processes are more likely to demonstrate high-quality thinking. In addition, the ability to critically evaluate one’s own arguments and reasoning is necessary for self-regulated learning. Motivation supports critical thinking in that students who are motivated to learn are more likely to persist at tasks that call for critical thinking. In turn, learning activities and assessment tasks that call for critical thinking may spark student motivation because they are more challenging, novel, or interesting. Students possessing critical thinking dispositions, such as willingness to consider diverse perspectives, may make better collaborators, and opportunities for collaboration may promote higher-order thinking. Finally, creativity requires the ability to critically evaluate intellectual products, and critical thinking requires the open-mindedness and flexibility that is characteristic of creative thinking.

Although learning progressions of critical thinking skills and dispositions do not yet (and may never) exist, at least one researcher has tied the progression of critical thinking skills to cognitive development in general and metacognition in particular. Empirical research in the area of metacognition suggests that people begin developing critical thinking competencies at a very young age and continue to improve them (or not) over the course of a lifetime. Many adults exhibit deficient reasoning and fail to think critically. However, in theory, all people—from all intellectual ability levels and from the very young to the very old—can be taught to think critically. Empirical evidence suggests that children are, in fact, much more capable of critical thought than once predicted.

If teachers are to be successful in encouraging the development of critical thinking skills, explicit instruction in critical thinking needs to be included in the curriculum, whether that instruction occurs as a stand-alone course, is infused into subject-matter content, or both. Cooperative or collaborative learning methods hold promise as a way of stimulating cognitive development, along with constructivist approaches that place students at the center of the learning process. Teachers should model critical thinking in their instruction and provide concrete examples for illustrating abstract concepts that students will find salient.

Assessing critical thinking skills poses challenges that are similar to those in other measurement contexts. Standardized instruments that use multiple-choice items to measure limited aspects of critical thinking may meet reliability standards, but these standardized instruments are vulnerable to criticisms of construct underrepresentation. Performance-based assessments (PBAs), which are seen as more valid representations of the construct, are susceptible to low reliability and a lack of generalizability across tasks when task development and administration cannot be standardized. When such standardization cannot be assured, PBAs should not be used to compare students to one another or to track student progress or growth over time. On the other hand, when PBAs are used for low-stakes, classroom assessment purposes, the need for strict standardization can be relaxed.

Educators are urged to use open-ended problem types and to consider learning activities and assessment tasks that make use of authentic, real-world problem contexts. In addition, critical thinking assessments should use ill-structured problems that require students to go beyond recalling or restating learned information and also require students to manipulate the information in new or novel contexts. Such ill-structured problems should also have more than one defensible solution and should provide adequate collateral materials to support multiple perspectives. Stimulus materials should attempt to embed contradictions or inconsistencies that are likely to activate critical thinking. Finally, such assessment tasks should make student reasoning visible by requiring students to provide evidence or logical arguments in support of judgments, choices, claims, or assertions.

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