What Is Critical Thinking?
CRITICAL THINKING: AN EXTENDED DEFINITION
Petress, Ken
<
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3673/is_200404/ai_n9345203>
Critical thinking is a pervasive academic literature term that is seldom clearly or comprehensively defined. The definitions that are available in various sources are quite disparate and are often narrowly field dependent.
"Definitions tend to so broad they are not always helpful in the sense of defining a concrete entity."1 For a term that is often expressed by many as crucial to solid thinking and clear expression, a more accepted, comprehensive, and clear understanding of the term seems useful. This article offers for thought and debate a brief literature review related to critical thinking. This …show more content…
Michael Scriven and Richard Paul offer the following definition of 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.11
Scriven and Paul explain critical thinking as a process, not an end. Their list of sources of information/insight excludes explicit mention of experimental results and research, an omission that needs correction. Their "disciplined" requirement suggests that critical thinking is a learned skill; it is methodical, and it is thought out, not random.
Educator, Diane F. Halpern posits the following definition of critical thinking:
Critical thinking is the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a positive outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, ands goal directed - the kind of thinking involved in problem solving, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and …show more content…
* Critical thinkers need to become facile with abstract thought and to be able to share abstractions in coherent ways with others.
* Critical thinkers need to be able to detect, describe/report, and use relationships (ie: cause-effect; co-cause, co-effect, symbiosis) between phenomena. * Critical thinkers need to be able to sort/categorize what they observe, experience, research, and experiment with. Such sorting/categorization frequently produces new knowledge.
5
* Critical thinkers must be willing to submit their ideas and experiments to peer review; be able to accept - in many cases, even solicit- challenges and criticism to their work; and must submit their findings to repeat tests.
* Critical thinkers need to demand and use adequate time to solved problems and to think about what is done.
Several of these characteristics have appeared in only a few lists from other disciplines; while these may seem discipline centered, they do apply to many other fields of endeavor as well.
The Advanced Technology Environmental Education Center advances the following characteristics of critical thinkers:17
* Draw conclusions from a set of facts (ie: data)
* Correlate results and plan action
Petress, Ken
<
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3673/is_200404/ai_n9345203>
Critical thinking is a pervasive academic literature term that is seldom clearly or comprehensively defined. The definitions that are available in various sources are quite disparate and are often narrowly field dependent.
"Definitions tend to so broad they are not always helpful in the sense of defining a concrete entity."1 For a term that is often expressed by many as crucial to solid thinking and clear expression, a more accepted, comprehensive, and clear understanding of the term seems useful. This article offers for thought and debate a brief literature review related to critical thinking. This …show more content…
Michael Scriven and Richard Paul offer the following definition of 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.11
Scriven and Paul explain critical thinking as a process, not an end. Their list of sources of information/insight excludes explicit mention of experimental results and research, an omission that needs correction. Their "disciplined" requirement suggests that critical thinking is a learned skill; it is methodical, and it is thought out, not random.
Educator, Diane F. Halpern posits the following definition of critical thinking:
Critical thinking is the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a positive outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, ands goal directed - the kind of thinking involved in problem solving, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and …show more content…
* Critical thinkers need to become facile with abstract thought and to be able to share abstractions in coherent ways with others.
* Critical thinkers need to be able to detect, describe/report, and use relationships (ie: cause-effect; co-cause, co-effect, symbiosis) between phenomena. * Critical thinkers need to be able to sort/categorize what they observe, experience, research, and experiment with. Such sorting/categorization frequently produces new knowledge.
5
* Critical thinkers must be willing to submit their ideas and experiments to peer review; be able to accept - in many cases, even solicit- challenges and criticism to their work; and must submit their findings to repeat tests.
* Critical thinkers need to demand and use adequate time to solved problems and to think about what is done.
Several of these characteristics have appeared in only a few lists from other disciplines; while these may seem discipline centered, they do apply to many other fields of endeavor as well.
The Advanced Technology Environmental Education Center advances the following characteristics of critical thinkers:17
* Draw conclusions from a set of facts (ie: data)
* Correlate results and plan action