This post is a summary of five articles. The first was published in October of 2015 at http://www.idahoednews.org/voices/students/reading-develops-critical-thinking-skills/. The second was published at http://researchnetwork.pearson.com/wp-content/uploads/DigitalAge-CriticalThinkScience-v2.pdf. The third was published at https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/the-importance-of-teaching-critical-thinking. The fourth was published at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885902/. The fifth was published in 2014 at http://lifehacker.com/how-to-train-your-mind-to-think-critically-and-form-you-1516998286
When was the last time you read a book? The chances you did not read one during the last year have radically increased. For adults it is roughly one in four, 24% according to the Pew Research Center. For teens, it is about the same, 22% of 13-years-olds and 27% of 17-years-olds versus 8% and 9%, respectively, three decades ago according to the National Center for Education statistics. That is especially unfortunate considering literature can help young adults develop important critical-thinking skills. For instance, U.S. News and World Report recently listed book clubs among five useful tools for developing critical-thinking skills before college. "Students who read for understanding find it far easier to think critically than those who rush to finish," writes the story's author, Megan Moll, a professional science and math. "Analyzing a book requires you to delve deeper and ponder complex questions." My own experience with literature bears this out. In his novels "Jurassic Park" and "Lost World," Michael Crichton did not just take me on an entertaining roller-coaster ride. My favorite author reignited my childhood passion for prehistoric animals, sparked my intense in science, and continually fuels my own creativity. His novels underscore the importance of critical thinking. Jurassic Park gave me a perspective on how humans interact with the biological world and what we can do to alter things, especially with genetic engineering. Sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, Letters About Literature encourages students in grades 4-12 to write a letter to an author, living or dead, whose book affected them personally. Meanwhile, if you or your students have not found a book that is personally affected them, I urge you to resolve that. The benefits of literature are legion. Reading improves vocabulary, organizational skills, and the ability to read, comprehend and analyze text. Plus it can provide people with historical perspective, encourage sympathy for other human beings and promote appreciation for diversity and understanding of other cultures. Moreover, literature can help students develop critical-thinking skills.
In today's world, students need to learn critical thinking skills in the classroom so that they can use them outside of the classroom. Though many definitions of critical thinking skills exist, most have in common the active, intellectual processes of conceptualizing, evaluating, reasoning and problem solving. There is widespread agreement that critical thinking skills are becoming essential for all. Educational technology offers teachers more and more opportunities to engage, improve and assess students's critical thinking skills within a discipline-specific course. The power of technology to move students away from passively listening to lectures to actively engaging, and grappling with, material is tremendous. The crucial next step is to effectively integrate technology with instruction to improve learning outcomes.
There are several reasons that critical thinking is not being focused on, and the need to have better scores on assessment is just one of them. Issues such as how to define critical thinking, how to teach and whether critical thinking should be taught or learned through social interaction plague educators who think about enhancing the critical thinking of their students. This major intellectual and practical skill seems to be a skill that the majority of students and the workforce are not only lacking in function, but also in understanding what the concept is. Critical Thinking is where students are taught how to learn, as well as how to analyze information. The educator's role as facilitator also encoudages a peer review process, even in the youngest of children, and helps students to learn appropriate responses to conflicting evaluations and opinions. Activities such as writing essays and utilizing questions that adhere to Bloom's Taxonomy higher order thinking are examples of ways to engage students in critical thinking in the classroom. The development of critical thinking skills is not only applicable to core subjects such as reading, math, language, science and social studies, but also in music education by examining musical environment, comparing and contrasting different era or pieces of music, and self-evaluation of performamce. Having students track patterns in information forces them to look at the information as a process instead of simply information to be memorized and helps them develop skills of recognition and prediction.
Increasingly, stakeholders express concern that college graduates can not adequately solve problems and think critically. As a set of cognitive abilities, critical thinking provide students with tangible academic, personal and professional benefits that may ultimately addresss these concerns. As a instructional method, writing has long been perceived as a way to improve critical thinking. Writing is a vehicle for improving student learning, but too often is used as a means to regurgitate content knowledge and derive prescribed outcomes. Writing improves thinking because it requires an individual to make his or her ideas explicit and to evaluate and choose among tools necessary for effective discourse. Building on existing research and on the basis, we conclude that writing positively influences critical thinking performance. Further study of writing in education will be necessary verify these results and discover the breadth and depth of how writing affects critical thinking.
Critical thinking may sound like an obnoxious buzzword, but it is actually a useful skill. Critical thinking just means absorbing information and using that to form your own opinion. This does not always come naturally to us, but it is something you can train yourself to do better. Train youself to pay attention to the right details. We've exposed to so much information and so many different opinions that it is really easy to get lost in the details. Start by listening to your gut. If something doest not sound true, that is your first warning sign. From there, you can start looking for holes in an argument. Here are just a few ways to do that. Think about who benefits from a statement. Question the source. Look for obvious statements. Watch for qualifying phrases. Know and confront your own biases. Confront your biases to see the world from another point of view. Take other pople's perspective along with their advice to defeat your own bias. Practice any way you can. Improve your powers of observations by taking field notes like a scientist.
