Strategies for critical thinking in learning

Created By
Antung Firmandana

Critical thinking is an important and vital topic in modern education. All educators are interested in teaching critical thinking to their students. Many academic departments hope that its professors and instructors will become informed about the strategy of teaching critical thinking skills, identify areas in one's courses as the proper place to emphasize and teach critical thinking, and develop and use some problems in exams that test students' critical thinking skills.

The Purpose
The purpose of specifically teaching critical thinking in the sciences or any other discipline is to improve the thinking skills of students and thus better prepare them to succeed in learning.

Definition
Critical thinking is the process of applying reasoned and disciplined thinking to a subject. To do well in your studies you need to think 'critically' about the things you have read, seen or heard. Acquiring critical thinking skills helps us to develop more reasoned arguments and draw out the inferences that we need to use in our assignments, projects and examination questions.

The stages and skills involved in critical thinking
1.Process - Take in the information (i.e. in what you have read, heard, seen or done).
2.Understand - Comprehend the key points, assumptions, arguments and evidence presented.
3.Analyze - Examine how these key components fit together and relate to each other.
4.Compare - Explore the similarities, differences between the ideas you are reading about.
5.Synthesize - Bring together different sources of information to serve an argument or idea you are constructing. Make logical connections between the different sources that help you shape and support your ideas.
6.Evaluate - Assess the worth of an idea in terms of its relevance to your needs, the evidence on which it is based and how it relates to other pertinent ideas.
7. Apply - Transfer the understanding you have gained from your critical evaluation and use in response to questions, assignments and projects.
8.Justify - Use critical thinking to develop arguments, draw conclusions, make inferences and identify implications.


Raymond S. Nickerson (1987) some of the characteristics of a good critical thinker:
1.uses evidence skillfully and impartially  
2.organizes thoughts and articulates them concisely and coherently  
3.distinguishers between logically valid and invalid inferences  
4.suspends judgment in the absence of sufficient evidence to support a decision  
5.understands the difference between reasoning and rationalizing  
6.attempts to anticipate the probable consequences of alternative actions  
7.understands the idea of degrees of belief  
8.sees similarities and analogies that are not superficially apparent  
9.can learn independently and has an abiding interest in doing so  
10.applies problem-solving techniques in domains other than those in which learned 11.can structure informally represented problems in such a way that formal techniques, such as mathematics, can be used to solve them  
12.can strip a verbal argument of irrelevancies and phrase it in its essential terms  
13.habitually questions one's own views and attempts to understand both the assumptions that are critical to those views and the implications of the views  
14.sensitive to the difference between the validity of a belief and the intensity with which it is held  
15.aware of the fact that one's understanding is always limited, often much more so than would be apparent to one with a no inquiring attitude  
16.recognizes the fallibility of one's own opinions, the probability of bias in those opinions, and the danger of weighting evidence according to personal preferences


Problems
All education consists of transmitting to students two different things:
(1) the subject matter or discipline content of the course ("what to think"), and
(2) the correct way to understand and evaluate this subject matter ("how to think").

Enter with an open mind:
1.Define your destination, what you want to learn
2.Think about what you already know about the subject
3.What resources are available to you, and what is your timeline?
4.Gather information
5.Ask questions
6.Organize what you have collected into patterns to understand it
7.Ask questions (again!)
8.Think in terms of how you would demonstrate your learning for your topic