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Karen
Gocsik
Darmouth
Composition Center
Teaching Critical Thinking
Developing Critical Thinking Through Writing: A Brief
Explanation
Elements of Critical Thinking
Kinds of Critical Thinking: Bloom's Taxonomy
Example: Professor Christian Jernstedt's Psych 22: "Learning
about Learning"
Additional Ideas for Teaching Critical Thinking Through Writing
Developing Critical Thinking Through Writing: A Brief Explanation
When developing the courses that we teach, most of us are concerned with designing a course that will sharpen our students' thinking skills. In part, we accomplish this aim by presenting our students with interesting reading material, lectures, and class discussions. As students read more and hear more, we reason, they will gain knowledge and discover new contexts for their ideas. They will also (we hope) come to think more critically.
However, reading assignments and lectures by themselves do not insure that our students will improve their critical thinking skills. Many students read and listen passively, simply absorbing information. They do not reliably challenge the thinking of the writers they are reading -- or of the professors they are listening to. Nor do they reliably use the material they read to challenge their own ideas.
However, when students write, they cannot remain passive players in the learning game. Even the simplest writing task, such as a summary of an article, requires that students make important critical choices: What information is most important to this argument? What might be left out? More complex writing assignments ask students to make more difficult choices about a topic -- choices that eventually bring them to the questions: "What is it that I think about this subject? How did I arrive at what I think? What are my assumptions, and are they valid? How can I work with facts, observations, inferences, and so on, in order to convince others of what I think?"
In order to help students answer these questions for themselves, professors might want to employ critical thinking pedagogy in their classrooms. When we talk about critical thinking pedagogy, we are not referring simply to pedagogy that challenges our students to think and reason more carefully than they do. Nor are we referring to instruction in the fundamentals of argument. (If you are interested in this discussion, please link to Teaching Argument.) Rather, we are referring to a particular system of teaching whose aim is to break down a student's critical thinking into discrete activities, and then to show students how to reflect carefully on each of these activities in order to sharpen their thinking skills.
Elements of Critical Thinking
The "discrete activiites" that comprise critical thinking are categorized differently by different learning theorists. For the sake of simplicity and utility, we are categorizing the elements of critical thinking as including:
 | Observations. From a series of observations, we can come to establish:
| Facts. From a series of facts, or from an absence of fact, we make:
| Inferences. Testing the validity of our inferences, we can make:
| Assumptions. From our assumptions, we form our:
| Opinions. Taking our opinions, we use the principles of logic to develop:
| Arguments. And when we want to challenge the arguments of others, we employ:
| Critical Analysis (through which we challenge the observations, facts, inferences, and so on, in the arguments that we are analyzing).
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At first glance, these categories seem obvious. Shouldn't our students already understand that "observation" is not at all the same as "fact"? That inference differs from opinion? As we consider the matter more closely, however, we understand that our students don't always understand these distinctions, and that their writing might be considerably improved if they did. Defining these terms clearly (and pointing out the essential differences between them) is therefore the first step in providing our students with a critical vocabulary for their own thinking processes.
To begin, we need to make our students aware of what their own premises and biases are. We must then move them to challenge these premises and biases. Finally, we must move them to challenge the premises and biases of others. In short, we move our students to experience some shift in their cognitive processes.
One way to facilitate this shift is to create writing assignments that require our students to move back and forth between observation and inference, facts and assumptions -- all the while marking where they are in the critical process. The primary aim is to encourage students to observe themselves and others in the critical process. We want students to be able:
| To know the difference between reliable and unreliable observations and statements of facts;
| To be persistent enough to observe objectively and thoroughly, and to collect sufficient factual or textual evidence;
| To see patterns or relationships in what they have observed or discovered in their reading;
To infer and to assume carefully;
| To form opinions even while keeping an open mind;
| To create arguments understanding that they are not the last word, but part of an ongoing debate in a scholarly process.
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Kinds of Critical Thinking: Bloom's Taxonomy
In addition to familiarizing students with the elements of critical thinking, we will also want them to engage in a variety of kinds of critical thinking. Again, "kinds of critical thinking" have been categorized differently by different learning theorists. But one of the most influential of the critical thinking models is Bloom's Taxonomy of Higher Thinking. Bloom categorized thinking into the following six processes:
| Knowledge: To know something means to have a fact or bit of information at your disposal. One can "know" something without understanding it or being able to put it into a higher context. For example, we might know that the theory of relativity is E=MC2 without having any idea at all what this equation actually means.
| Comprehension: To comprehend a fact or piece of information is to understand what it means. For example, we might understand that E=MC2 actually refers to a formula that...
| Application: To apply information means to find some practical use for it. In other words, to what use can we put Einstein's theory of relativity? What other ideas does it help us to understand?
| Analysis: To analyze means to break information down into the sum of its parts and to see how those parts work together. Returning to Enistein's theory, we need to understand Energy, and Mass, and Speed of Light, and how they all work together before we can understand precisely how and if the theory works.
| Synthesis: To synthesize means to take the knowledge you have and connect it with other knowledge. For example, how can we understand the theory of relativity in relationship to other theories?
| Evaluation: To evaluate means to be able to judge. Is information good or bad? Sound or unsound? We might ask these questions of the theory of relativity, its applications, and so on. And evaluation is to be able to judge it for good or for bad: is the theory of relativity a good theory (meaning a "sound" theory)? Have its applications also been good? And so on.
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All of this is important because, according to Bloom, students must master one level of thinking before they can move on to the next. We can't expect our students to evaluate knowledge if we haven't first required them to understand it, apply it, analyze it, and so on. Courses that employ critical thinking pedagogy take Bloom's theory into account, giving students practice in some of the "lower" critical thinking skills before moving them on to the more difficult tasks of the higher thinking processes.
Example: Professor Christian Jernstedt's Psych 22: "Learning about Learning"
Professor Jernstedt's course is aimed at developing students' critical thinking skills within the conventions of the discipline of psychology. His commitment to critical thinking pedagogy is apparent in his list of goals for the course, quoted here from his course guide:
| To know: an acquaintance with and a comprehension of the major laboratory findings about learning
| To apply: an ability to make meaningful and useful applications of laboratory findings about learning to life situations
| To recognize: an ability to recognize instances of learning in life situations about which there are applicable laboratory findings
| To extrapolate: an ability to make a reasonable extension of your knowledge about learning to situations for which you know of no directly applicable laboratory findings
| Each of these goals implies a fifth goal: to communicate what you know clearly, logically, and accurately, in writing.
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Clearly, Professor Jernstedt is taking his students through the steps of critical thinking. In order for students to practice each of these five critical activities, Professor Jernstedt asks students to write frequently throughout the term. His writing assignments are of two types. First, students write in-class briefs, in which they analyze real-life learning problems by applying to these problems the concepts they have been studying. Second, they write two self-analyses, in which they analyze some aspect of their own learning behavior, first by applying the concepts common to conditioning theory, and then by applying the concepts common to cognitive theory.
In the briefs, students are presented with real-life problems, such as a student's inability to motivate herself to keep her room clean; a student's failure to improve his reading skills; a student's inability to be on time; and so on. Students are then asked to consider these problems in light of the concepts they have been discussing in class, and to try to come up with a solution. Students are asked to write their briefs based on a problem-solving heuristic, included in Professor Jernstedt's course guide:
Given: A set of learning principles
A situation in which learning has occurred or is
occurring in the natural environment
Beforehand: Develop a list of the key distinguishing features
of each learning process that you have learned about.
Apply the key: The "key" is the term or concept that will
"unlock" the situation.
Compare the "fit" of each key to the given
situation.
Choose which key best fits the situation.
Recall the Content: List the relevant principles that apply to
the chosen learning process.
Present Conclusions: State the Hypothesis or apparent
conclusion.
Diagram the conclusion.
Present Reasons: Present the evidence from the situation and
the learning principles that support the
conclusion.
Present the logical argument that relates the
evidence with the principles.
Discuss Implications:Consider the discrepancies between
principles and situation.
Deal with situation facts that do not fit
the principles.
Deal with elements of the principles that
are not present in the situation.
Consider the appropriate extrapolations
from the chosen principles.
"If X is present or operating then Y
should also be observed" OR "There
are N other ways in which X can
occur" OR "The Y process can be
modified or influenced in N ways"
etc.
As the course proceeds, the problems presented for analysis become more complex. Indeed, part of Professor Jernstedt's aim for the course is to bring students to the point where they are dealing with problems that have no answers. Students can infer various solutions, but they cannot come up with simple conclusions. He believes that these sorts of situations are not only realistic, but that they provide students with solid intellectual training, encouraging them to move into "fuzzy,"
"grey" areas of thinking, discouraging them from rushing to judgment or dwelling in the easy answers of black and white thinking.
Throughout the course, students receive a considerable amount of help in the writing process.
| First, Professor Jernstedt provides students with a rather substantial (120 pages) guide to the course. Included in this guide are several sample briefs and self analyses that students might use in order to better understand the tasks they are being asked to complete.
| Second, Professor Jernstedt holds optional x-hours in which he helps students to write successful briefs by showing them how to problem-solve the real-life learning problems that they are being presented. These x-hours are held as workshops, in which students brainstorm the answers to various dilemmas, guided through the process by the professor. Professor Jernstedt reports that 2/3 of all students attend the first x-hour; subsequent x-hours are attended by virtually all students. He attributes this success to word of mouth: Dartmouth students will indeed attend x-hours or study sessions if these sessions are carefully designed to be useful.
| Finally, Professor Jernstedt provides his students with help in writing the self-analysis papers. The course is staffed by undergraduate assistants who have taken and done well in this course. These assistants are available to meet with students to review the drafts of their papers and to provide feedback in the writing and revision processes.
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In closing, Professor Jernstedt's course works as well as it does in part because of the way he uses writing to improve his students' critical thinking skills, focusing in particular on developing his students' ability to apply the concepts they've been studying in class. Professor Jernstedt also requires his students to look critically at how they move from fact and observation, to inference, assumption, and argument. Exercising students' critical thinking skills makes students better learners and better analyzers of their own learning experiences -- which, after all, is the goal of the "Learning about Learning" course.
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