benefits of critical thinking and book talk

An approach to developing critical thinking abilities in early years

by Dr Mary Roche

Shape Copy 5 Created with Sketch. Quality

benefits of critical thinking and book talk

A lot has been written about critical thinking – what it is, how to do it, who should do it and why. There have been many different definitions and explanations as to its reasons and purposes. These can include pragmatic reasons such as the need for workers with critical thinking skills in the new knowledge economy.

Other reasons are to do with how the ability to think critically can lead to living a meaningful life or more social cohesion resulting in increased equality, inclusion and democratic values. So, what is critical thinking, and when should we begin the process of becoming critical?

For me, critical thinking means thinking for yourself, examining all possible sources and making your mind up in the light of the evidence. It is the opposite of passively receiving knowledge or mindless herd-thinking. It means being able to sift through information and arguments, recognising that there can be several legitimate perspectives and stances. It involves being able to express one’s ideas coherently and logically. It means knowing the difference between opinion and fact and being able to support and explain the position taken after critical reflection.

Another way is to begin asking open-ended questions. Closed questions only have a right or wrong answer, for example ‘How many hours in a day?’ or ‘How many buttons does your coat have?’ Open-ended questions, however, allow for speculation, evaluation and leave scope for more than one answer being correct. For example, we could ask open questions about favourite traditional stories. Was Goldilocks silly or rude to go into the bears’ house uninvited? Why, I wonder, were the Little Red Hen’s friends so reluctant to help her? What would you have done if you were Cinderella? Is the wolf always a baddie?

I argued in Roche (2015) that critical thinking is necessary for reflecting on and making sense and meaning of our lives and our world. Without it we risk being mere receivers and consumers of others’ knowledge. In an age of powerful digital knowledge distribution, being able to think for oneself is crucial for an enlightened and active citizenry. Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us and can be of huge benefit to humankind, but we are also only just beginning to understand some of the risks associated with the misrepresentation of truth and facts via contemporary digital media. This brings us to recognising that critical thinking is essential for critical literacy.

For example, Noriko Arai, a mathematician at the National Institute of Informatics in Japan, conducted a multiple-choice reading skill test on 15,000 high school students. The results indicated that many of the students tested ‘lacked the ability to visualise an image from a written sentence, essentially to think for themselves’. Arai argues that these results are concerning as AI is weak at tasks that humans could easily excel at, including reading comprehension, interpretation and meaning making. Young people place their future employment prospects at risk if they do not excel in these human strengths. This is a global concern and Australia is not immune, as demonstrated by the recent debates over declining PISA scores.

While critical thinking is not new, all students will now need to develop increasingly sophisticated higher order thinking skills to thrive in a world of smart technologies. For this to occur, children need to start developing critical thinking skills from their earliest years. This can begin very simply.

Small children can be encouraged to give reasons for their answers to questions. If we ask a toddler whether she wants a red or a yellow lollipop, she might say ‘yellow’. When asked why, if she replies with something like ‘Because I like yellow – my teddy is yellow’, then she has backed up her choice with a valid reason. This kind of interaction could be seen as a simple example of practising early critical thinking.

It would seem, then, that children need to be helped to develop healthy scepticism and critical engagement with all kinds of texts. Teaching children to think for themselves can begin as early as toddlerhood and can continue into primary school and beyond. That’s where, I believe, an approach called ‘Critical Thinking and Book Talk’ (CT&BT, Roche, 2010) can play a role. It is premised on the idea of developing young children’s ability to make meaning from the texts and images of picture books as they discuss them together.

Developing the Critical Thinking and Book Talk approach

Since the mid-1990s I have been discussing picture books with children at all levels of primary school, as well as with teachers at in-service courses and with parent groups. One thing is common to all groups: everybody loves a read aloud. Whether the audience is composed of the smallest kindergarten children, the senior classes, teachers, parents or grandparents, a calm atmosphere – a sense of tranquillity and relaxation often descends when people are engaged by a good story and visually stimulated by wonderful artwork.

Listening to literature being read aloud is probably one of the most valuable and pleasurable experiences beginning readers and writers can have. The process has many advocates: literacy experts like Michael Rosen, Teresa Cremin, Mem Fox and Jim Trelease support read alouds as a part of every child’s day both at home and at school.

Neuroscientists and paediatricians like Hutton et al (2015) suggest that interaction and discussion during or following read alouds stimulate high levels of brain activity. Promoters of the Philosophy for Schools movement have also discussed the benefits of doing philosophical and critical thinking with children.

Read alouds offer adults a chance to model good reading and thinking strategies and to expose young learners to a rich variety of literature. When this exposure is accompanied by supportive and engaging discussions, children can extend their world view and develop important critical thinking skills.

Read aloud and CT&BT are not the same thing, however. A read aloud is simply that – the teacher or adult reads a story aloud. CT&BT (Roche, 2010) takes that process a stage further. We finish the read aloud and immediately discuss the book. This process is grounded in the idea that a read aloud can be a powerful entry point into classroom dialogue, discussion and critical thinking.

I call my approach Critical Thinking and Book Talk to distinguish it from Circle Time (Mosley 1998), the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere, and from the Irish process known as ‘Thinking Time’ (Donnelly 1994).

I focus solely on picture books as discussion starters. But all these programs share some features, such as democratic practice and social construction of knowledge.

The concept of CT&BT is grounded in values of reciprocal care, courtesy and respect for others’ views. No conclusions are sought. Children are expected to listen to each other with attention, contribute to the discussion if they wish and provide reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with others.

When they are engaged in the process of listening to a story being read aloud, looking closely at the images and then engaging in discussion together about the story, children are not just developing their literacy or their critical thinking. They are developing cognitively, socially and emotionally. They are learning to be part of a community of enquiry; to be reflective; to co-construct knowledge with their peers and teacher; to make meaning, to develop moral judgement.

Fisher (2006: 33-4) speaks about how engaging in this form of classroom discussion develops in children ‘the habits of intelligent behaviour’. The children negotiate the rules with the teacher. They basically follow the golden rule of ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’, i.e. listen actively and respectfully, think hard, don’t interrupt, speak respectfully, agree and disagree with courtesy, always providing a reason for why you agree or disagree. These are all essential skills for their future lives, particularly an AI-influenced future in a knowledge economy.

I have given examples from my own work with very young students during my teaching career (Roche 2000, 2007, 2011, 2015) where the children saw problems with some traditional stories very quickly.

Some 5-year-olds said:

‘The little red hen needs to get new friends. Simple.’
‘Goldilocks is so stupid. She shouldn’t have gone into the house: worse things than bears could have been in there.’
‘There’s a lot of violence in them stories.’

As my research advanced, I chose several sophisticated picture books for discussion. These included Mike and Dosh Archer’s ‘Yellow Bird Black Spider’, as we will see below. My approach to teaching critical thinking positions it as the opposite of receiving information passively which is, sadly, what happens in many didactic classrooms. Because it involves active engagement with ideas, there is some effort involved. It does not automatically mean that you reject the thinking of others. Instead, you look at the issue and evaluate their responses and arrive at your own conclusions as to whether you agree or disagree with their ideas. But you must be prepared to provide reasons for your judgements.

Sometimes, more than one answer is acceptable. I have had many experiences where children could not reach consensus on something and realised that several people could hold a correct or partially correct view. This happened, for example, when discussing ‘Yellow Bird Black Spider’, in which an anarchic yellow bird flouts convention and is reprimanded by a conservative black spider (Roche, 2007, 2015).

Most children are happy when the bird tires of the spider’s nagging and eats him. They argue that the bird has the right to be different, to be himself. However, one day a young girl in my group said, ‘but what about the spider’s right to be himself?’ And, suddenly, we all realised that perhaps this was a contest of two rights where the problem could have been resolved by dialogue. Each had to accept that the other had rights. This is a very empowering realisation for children.

The idea that the teacher does not hold all the answers is equally liberating for the teacher. As I reflected on this incident, I realised that I had been uncritically siding with the yellow bird group all along. The children had taught me to think more critically. This happened more and more often as we continued with the work.

This is just one example of what critical thinking looks like in practice, and these are the types of thought processes that teachers can look out for to see if their students are beginning to think critically. Watch out for (and model) tentative suggestions such as ‘well maybe’, ‘what I wonder is’ or ‘what if’.

Teachers need to be careful too, that they don’t tell children what the book is about. I discussed ‘Yellow Bird’ with several groups of 8-year-olds. Only one group felt that the dominant message in the book was about freedom. Their explanations were stunningly sophisticated. It was very tempting to take the book into the next group and say ‘X class said they think this book is all about freedom. Do you agree?’ However, that would have been a denial of the principles underpinning the teaching approach. That would have involved me imposing the views of another group on the children – essentially telling them what to think. It is important that each class group can think in ways that are appropriate for them and make their own meaning of the book. If they wish, after several readings with different groups, teachers could discuss various interpretations with different classes.

Planning for the session

There are many factors to be considered when organising a CT&BT session.

A list is provided below, however it is far from exhaustive and you can create your own as you go along.

Bear in mind the outcomes you are hoping for

These include engagement, pleasure, active NSW Department of Education 19 Future EDge thinking, co-construction of knowledge and active dialogue. What we are seeking to achieve has to do with ‘promoting meaningful interactions among people’ (Hoffman, 2010: 13) and ‘learning to be curious, sceptical, engaged, and noncomplacent’ (Luke, 1991: 143). Sipe’s and Bauer’s (2001) work with young children showed that kindergarteners can respond very knowledgeably to traditional fairy tales told in picture books. They suggest that literary understanding emerges as the young readers make both intertextual and real-life connections during interactive read alouds.

We need to keep in mind that readers are positioned by texts, and so texts need to be interrogated for any assumptions and underlying agendas. Hilary Janks (2010) argues that from the writer’s point of view the ideal reader ‘is the one who buys into the text and its meanings’. Teachers and parents can assist children to be critical about texts before buying in completely by engaging dialogically with it and them.

Choosing which book to use is important

The best picture books have relevance for the child’s life. This prompts them to think and talk about issues that have meaning for them. They are the kinds of books that are open to a variety of interpretations and responses: books that leave ‘gaps’ for readers to fill. Iser (2010) spoke of the virtual space created between the reader and the text and maintained that texts should have gaps in characters and events that engage readers in the kind of dynamic process of reading that leads to revealing the text’s meaning (Khrais, 2017).

You must like the story yourself or find it intriguing or puzzling or attractive in some way. Read it to make sure and to make yourself familiar with the ideas and concepts. Your enthusiasm will be infectious. Remember that a picture book is unique in that the pictures and the written text work together to tell the story. Sometimes they even tell different stories, such as Pat Hutchins’ ‘Rosie’s Walk’.

Make sure everyone can see the pictures

Use a visualiser if your school is lucky enough to have one. Alternatively scan or photograph the pages of the book and beam them onto the whiteboard via the data projector.

Set aside at least thirty minutes to allow engagement with the story

You cannot rush through a story and then expect children to engage seriously with it. Allow time for discussing the cover, the ‘peritext’ (endpapers) and predicting what the story might be about. Allow time also for reading the images. Children need to see the pictures, and they often see far more in them than adults do.

You could decide to read the entire story aloud first, and then perhaps reread and provide opportunities for the children to examine the pictures, encouraging what Jane Doonan called ‘close looking’. Many experts advise that children need adequate time to examine both text and images. For example, Goodman (1998) suggests that often teachers privilege the act of decoding text over the need for closely examining and making meaning from the pictures. A parent in a one-toone situation would find this step of ‘looking closely’ much easier.

As the children get used to being free to articulate what they think about a book, you could begin to nudge them to look beneath the surface more and more.

Can we tell what the author thinks about friendship/inclusion/home/ beauty/war/peace? How do we know? Is the author trying to tell us something or trying to get us to think in a certain way? How do we know that? These kinds of questions encourage children to look for underlying ideologies both covert and overt – the beginnings of critical literacy.

The messages are continued in the artwork. Do the colours in the illustrations convey meaning? How? Think of the opening spread in Anthony Browne’s ‘Gorilla’ (1983). At breakfast, Hannah is wearing red, but the rest of the picture is rendered in cold blues and black. Her suit-wearing Dad, seated opposite, is remote, emphasised by the newspaper he is reading. Contrast that with another image towards the end of the book. They are together, both wearing red, and the room is depicted in a warm yellow glow. What is Browne asking us to think and feel?

Every part of the book matters

Whichever approach you decide to use, do let the children have time to closely examine all of the pictures – including the covers front and back, the endpapers and the introductory pages. Many people skip over the opening pages in order to get to the ‘story’. If you search for examples of people reading stories aloud on YouTube, you will see what I mean. The readers rarely pay any attention to the cover, endpapers or front matter. Yet this peritextual, or paratextual, material often provides hints and clues about the story and frequently provides interesting areas for prediction and inference and animated discussion. The peritext is very important for setting the scene and providing clues and cues as to what the story is about. The covers and endpapers and title pages have been carefully chosen and considered by the design team in conjunction with author, illustrator and the publisher.

Prepare to document the session

For teachers, it might be useful to record what is said either by audiotaping or videoing (both of which need permission from participants and/or parents) or by writing down what is said very quickly. This allows you to later enjoy the ‘nuggets’ you may have missed in the heat of the moment. It also helps with assessing and evaluating the process. There is no requirement to do formal assessment on CT&BT in Irish schools, however good practice would include assessment for progress. In my resources section for the Irish National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) I provided some advice on assessment, for those who wish to do this.

Here is an example from practice with pre‑schoolers (This episode is available on the NCCA’s Vimeo page) In the clip I read ‘Penguin’ by Polly Dunbar (2007) to a group of 3-year-olds. I began by identifying new words like cover, front/back, author, illustrator, blurb, spine, endpapers and dedication. I pointed to the ‘front cover’ and we discussed what we saw. Lily was very excited and told me gleefully she had that book at home. Based on our discussion around the peritext, Evan was able to predict and even summarise quite a lot about the story before we even started to read it. You might be wondering just what this has to do with critical thinking. It is all to do with creating an invitational approach. In Roche (2015) I explained that by suggesting to these young children that they might listen to the story and look at the pictures and then decide for themselves afterwards if they considered that Polly Dunbar’s blurb worked well, or if the understanding they had in relation to the stars on the endpapers were probable, they are being invited into a dialogue. It is open ended and there are several possibilities for being ‘right’. When a parent or teacher says ‘I wonder why Polly Dunbar chose stars for the endpapers’ children can offer guesses, opinions and explanations. By the time they come to discuss the pictures and the story they are confident that their thoughts and ideas matter. They realise that artists and authors and publishers make choices and that everything they see in the book has been deliberately put there by someone. This is a very important lesson and could provide the foundation for critical and visual literacy. Yes and no answers can be avoided by carefully posing open-ended questions. Even where they occur you can gently nudge the child into providing a reason. This is important especially when children start a discussion with ‘I liked the part where’ because, by asking them for reasons, they are encouraged to think critically.

The children may not always respond to a story

They might be tired. There might be too many interruptions – roll call, milk delivery, ‘my teacher wants a loan of a black marker, please’, the intercom. They might not have got out to the playground because of the rain. If this happens, acknowledge it and try again another day.

How to do a Critical Thinking and Book Talk session

Simply seat the children in a circle and re-read or ask the children to recall the main points of the story. Invite questions or reactions. Then sit back and listen to what the children say. Wait your turn to talk.

Donnelly (1994) advocates the use of a ‘tip-around’ to allow all children to participate in the discussion. A child volunteers to begin the discussion and then ‘tips’ the next child lightly on the shoulder. The ‘starting’ child has the power to choose in which direction the discussion goes. I usually remind the participants at the end that if the discussion had started somewhere else, or had gone in the opposite direction, it would have been very different and completely new knowledge would have been created.

This idea of the creation of new knowledge, thinking thoughts that no-one has thought before, connecting new ideas with old and building up insights from listening to others is a very powerful experience for children. So is having the power to speak or not. In didactic classrooms silence is expected or even demanded. Here, in this dialogical setting, it is permitted. It can mean ‘I’m still thinking’ or ‘I’m happy to just listen’.

This involves recognising the child as a knower who has thoughts worth listening to. It also means recognising knowledge construction as a process. If we reify knowledge and see it as a ‘thing’ that can be transmitted or delivered from a knowing expert to a non-knower – in the sense of Freire’s (1972) ‘banking model’ – then we will be very unlikely to see any value of discussing picture books with children as a means of generating knowledge.

Such a stance would also mean that we would find it difficult to imagine teachers learning from what their pupils say. Yet the idea of ‘teacher as learner’ dates right back to Socrates. If we see knowledge as an always incomplete, partial, evolving and dynamic process that is socially constructed then we can engage in discussion as a form of ‘problemposing’ (Freire, 1972) and see our discussions as a way of becoming a community of enquiry. It is not just about having skills. This kind of work embraces knowledge, skills and dispositions – the cognitive and the affective domains. It encompasses the idea of working together to construct knowledge and make meaning together. Each group of children brings their own ways of knowing to the process.

Some focus more on making meaning from the story as a whole; others engage wholly with images.

For example, in Roche (2015) I described how Deirdre, a teaching friend, used a visualiser and a whiteboard as she read Anthony Browne’s ‘The Tunnel’ (1992) aloud. She said her class of 8 and 9-year-old boys took nearly two weeks to digest the book.

They actually only paid cursory attention to the story. The real engagement for them was studying the illustrations. They spent ages examining each picture, discussing it, going back to check details on previous pictures, explaining to me and to each other what they thought the various elements of the pictures meant. It was a real eye-opener for me. Up to now I always focused almost exclusively on the text and the narrative … the CT&BT approach has given us permission to linger! (extract from conversation with DL, 6 July 2013)

In a research review on using picture books in classrooms, Wolfenbarger and Sipe (2007) state that ‘our society is inundated with visual images. Sport team logos, automobile emblems, yellow arches, and other product packaging have become symbols to which children and adults attach recognition and meaning’ (citing Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). They suggest that visual images such as these logos ‘signal meaning without requiring an accompanying verbal text because they are linked to other visual media (television) and highly contextualized places and experiences (such as ordering fast food, eating cereal, attending sporting events).

Children have learned to expect pictures to have personal and social meaning’ (2007: 274). Wolfenbarger and Sipe (2007) also speak about Carger (2004) who worked with 8- and 9-yearolds in Chicago. Carger provided opportunities for the children to talk about picture books she read aloud. She found that the children developed as art critics and their command of English language flourished. She writes that the ‘students engaged in divergent thinking … [A]rt provoked them to reflect and to engage in authentic inquiry’ (2004: 280).

Most teachers have had training on decoding text during their courses on teaching reading. I doubt that most get anything like the same training in decoding images. Yet it is a vital part of critical literacy. Our society is bombarded with images through advertising, social media, television, cinema and packaging. Children need some skills in deciphering and decoding the constant stream of visual imagery coming at them. They can make a start in early years classrooms by examining picture book images with a knowledgeable teacher. Teachers could read work by Moebius and Doonan as a starting point for examining the picture book codes of line and shape, colour, positioning, size, perspective, viewpoint and framing. The more that teachers know about image construction, the more they can encourage children to examine images intelligently and critically. I have listed some of these resources in the appendix.

Be prepared to be amazed at the philosophical turn the discussion might take

Timetable the discussion as ‘discrete oral language’, ‘comprehension’, ‘literacy’, ‘Social Personal Health Education’, ‘Nature and Environment’ or ‘Civics’. Be creative! Look at what a 9-year-old child in 3rd class said after I read ‘Yellow Bird, Black Spider’ aloud:

I disagree with some people and I agree with others who said that freedom is doing whatever you want, but only in a way. You can only have freedom if you’re alone. Because if you were really free to think what you like and say what you like and do what you like it and there were other people around, it could be the baddest thing ever for them because you might want to do all bad things with your freedom … Freedom could be sometimes good but sometimes it could be the baddest thing ever. (7 February 2006)

That shows that the issues raised by the book far exceed a ‘literacy’ lesson. Bear in mind, however, that this class had been doing classroom discussions since Kindergarten. However, I did not tell them that the book was about freedom. I did not even think of linking with that concept at the time! This is really important. I used this book with several classes, yet only one group discussed freedom. I learned from listening to the children.

One class discussed rights. They all agreed that the yellow bird had the right to be himself, but as we saw earlier, one girl thought that the black spider also had the right to be himself – and a fair old ding-dong of an argument ensued as to whether it was a contest of two rights. Another class, in true black spider mode, thought it was a ‘stupid story cos birds don’t wear stripy socks or eat ice cream’.

Critical thinking is all about thinking for one’s self, challenging assumptions and stereotypes, asking questions and questioning answers. Philosophising is about pondering alternatives, asking ‘what if’, and ‘I wonder why’ and offering ideas such as ‘well, I think … because’. Try it out, the ‘read aloud’ factor alone makes it worthwhile. Remember that picture books are not solely for the infant classrooms. Properly chosen books can provide a stimulus for discussion to senior primary and beyond. These kinds of ideas are located within the notion of seeing literacy as more than decoding and encoding text.

For example, Jewett and Smith define literacy as social practice and argue that: [E]ffective literacy draws on a repertoire of practices that allow learners, as they engage in reading and writing activities, to act as code breakers, meaning makers, text users, and text critics …the fourth component, text critic, is not as widespread, especially in elementary classrooms. In this domain, learners critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral – that they represent particular points of views while silencing others and influence people’s ideas. In other words, the reader learns to look beyond the words on the page and into the province of how the text ‘works’ – linguistically, politically, culturally, and socially – to position the reader (2003: 69).

Leland et al (2013) argue that critical readers, who are able to size up the situation and draw their own conclusions, become agents of text. This is because, they say, readers have the power to make their own rational decisions about what to believe. However, those who do not engage in critical reading are far more likely to become ‘victims of text’ since they passively accept assumptions (Leland et al., 2013: 4). Children will not become ‘agents of text’ without a real effort by teachers and parents.

The why: recognising the other

The CT&BT teaching approach rests firmly on the assumption that the adult will recognise the child as a real person who is likeable and who deserves respect for their uniqueness – not generally a problem for a parent. The CT&BT dialogical approach is premised on real people talking to each other face-to-face. Its success depends on the interpersonal pedagogical relationship between the children and the teacher, and also between the children and their peers. It is a deeply affective approach.

This was brought home to me recently when I met some of my former research participants. They are all now in their early twenties and finishing university. When describing their memories of the process they returned again and again to how they had felt. They spoke about being proud of being listened to and about realising with some surprise that the children who attended learning support were just as able – and sometimes better able – to think and speak as they themselves were. Some of the shyer people spoke about how discussing things together gave them entries into approaching the ‘cool gang’ in the yard.

One very shy young woman spoke about how, even though she had the option to remain silent and was very anxious, she made herself contribute because she had a lot to say. She is now completing a degree in Development Studies, during the course of which she visited war-torn zones and refugee centres where she was tear-gassed and detained. She said she felt that the grounding she got in standing up for her beliefs and continuously practising agreeing or disagreeing without losing her cool during the weekly discussions throughout primary school helped her in those very difficult situations later. The CT&BT approach therefore needs the actual interpersonal relationship of real people talking to each other and tentatively exploring their co-creation of new knowledge (Lundie, 2016: 282).

Children who are exposed to the CT&BT approach have their sense of self-worth developed as they realise that they are recognised in class as people who are knowers and meaning makers. They soon see that they are valued as being capable of forming opinions and articulating them. They are aware that they are being provided with opportunities to think critically, to listen and evaluate the responses of others and to engage in co-constructing knowledge with their peers. They see that there is an emphasis on respect, courtesy and care. The children are being encouraged to develop their habits of intelligent behaviour, as we saw earlier, as they learn tolerance, understanding and empathy towards others. I realised this when a group I had previously worked with were about to leave primary school. They were invited to present a display of memories of primary school and most of them chose their CT&BT sessions as the highlight of their primary school life.

Teacher professional development

Teachers and parents must make themselves familiar with a wide range of picture books and be able to choose them with some discretion – especially if you have limited funds. Teachers will need to read and re-read the books themselves several times before introducing it to a class or child. You don’t just bring along a book, read it aloud and let the children have a chat. You will need to examine the pictures, doing what Doonan (1993) calls ‘close looking’, rather than merely skimming over the pictures so as to ‘get on with the text and the story’.

You will need to think too. This is essential. It is also very hard work. You can’t encourage critical thinking in children unless you can think critically yourself. However, you will need to be keenly aware that by pre-reading the book and studying the pictures you will form your ideas about the book. It is difficult to refrain from imposing these ideas on the children. You need to guide and facilitate, not dominate.

Developing the skill of listening attentively is important also. I am a talker, and the skill of staying quiet so as to really hear a child demanded huge effort and was something I struggled with for many years. Even when I thought I was being attentive to children, video evidence showed me that I was dominating the classroom talk. It took a lot of self-training to gradually change my practice. My PhD was a self-study action research project based on that process.

Critically studying picture books supports students’ understanding of their own thought processes

I have had experiences where children would frequently say ‘Hang on: I kind of disagree with myself now’ or ‘First I was thinking X and now I have kind of changed my mind and I think Y’. Sometimes children expressed surprise and they would say ‘Whoo! I never knew I knew that until I sort of thought it and said it at the same time’. One or two children have said ‘I’ll pass because I don’t really have any thought yet’ or ‘I don’t know enough yet. I need to think some more’. Sometimes, as I later transcribed my scribbled notes from discussions, I found myself intrigued by something a child said and I would type it out and discuss it with the child. They nearly always had an explanation. One of the practices I used in order to encourage reflection and metacognition was to type out several transcripts and present them to the children in booklet form for their perusal. This was often very enlightening. Some would hold fast to their views and others would say ‘Oh, I’ve been thinking about that since and I kind of disagree with myself now because now I know that …’.

In Roche (2007: 254) I described one such episode. The children were immediately engrossed and spent the first few minutes quickly scanning the pages for their own contributions. When they found their own name, they read their own contributions several times and eagerly showed them to each other. Only then did they read through the transcripts. The children then evaluated their own thinking.

C: Actually, it’s kind of good to read these again. I wouldn’t say what I said there again now though, because when you read what other people said you’d kind of get different feelings about what to say. K: I think the discussion on ‘Yellow Bird’ was pretty good. I’m kind of amazed at myself …at what I said. It’s actually quite sort of … grownup. J: I remember after doing that Thinking Time I kept thinking about my feelings and my mind and my soul and wondering about it and stuff. I like what I said here. I’d still agree with it.

Metacognitive activities that ask students to reflect on what they know, care about, and are able to do help learners develop an awareness of themselves. CT&BT helps to develop a culture of metacognition in a classroom. The very fact of having to justify their stances and explain their viewpoints, means that children are automatically being given opportunities to become metacognitive learners.

Maxine Greene suggests that activities that engage us in our own quests for answers and for meanings, also serve to initiate us into the communities of scholarship and, if our perspectives widen sufficiently, into the human community, in its largest and richest sense:

Teachers who are alienated, passive, and unquestioning cannot make such initiations possible for those around. Nor can teachers who take the social reality surrounding them for granted and simply accede to them. (Greene, 1978: 3)

Critical thinking in an AI future: some concluding thoughts

AI is here. It is all around us as we use the internet, hail taxis, check our smart watches or set the many devices in our homes to function in our absence. Whether it ultimately becomes a blessing or a curse for humanity remains to be seen. It will depend on how we understand its power and potential.

In an article for Irish Tech News in May 2018, Alison McGuire wrote about those speaking out about the threats posed by applications of AI. She mentioned Stephen Hawking who expressed a concern (via his AI-enabled voice) that thinking machines ‘could spell the end of the human race’. She also quoted Anja Kaspersen – former Head of Strategic Engagement and New Technologies at the International Committee of the Red Cross, and former Head of Geopolitics and International Security at the World Economic Forum – who spoke about the threat posed by ‘AI potentially becoming weaponisable’, but balanced those fears against the idea that ‘many AI applications have life-enhancing potential, so holding back its development is undesirable and possibly unworkable. This speaks to the need for a more connected and coordinated multi-stakeholder effort to create norms, protocols, and mechanisms for the oversight and governance of AI.

According to McGuire, ‘now we have arrived at the point where governments have decided to release directives with the intentions to regulate AI. I believe ethical behaviour is going to become even more of an issue as technological intervention in daily lives increases.’

So, what ethical behaviour will be needed? How will we educate people to have balanced rational views on the role of AI in their lives? How will we teach children to be sceptical and critical and questioning? In the conclusion to my book ‘Developing Children’s Critical Thinking through Picturebooks’ (Roche, 2015) I stated that I believe that we owe it to our children to help them become critical and caring citizens.

As caring parents and teachers in an age when AI – with all its benefits and risks – surrounds us, we want to help our children to be more aware of inequality and the risks of ‘fake news’. We want them to be tolerant, empathetic and courageous people who challenge injustice and are unafraid to speak out on behalf of those who are less fortunate. We would like our young people to engage creatively and morally with the world and so we encourage them to be people who think independently and who maintain their philosophical and intellectual curiosity throughout their lives. We want them to see literacy as empowering and liberating and to be competent and confident readers and writers. We want to gift them a lifelong love of reading that will provide endless hours of pleasure. And, thus, through reading and discussing picture books with them from their earliest days, we hope to provide them with what Luke (1991: 131) calls ‘equality of educational possibility’

… as teachers of literacy we need to look beyond a continual and exclusive concern with ‘new’ and better methods in order to rethink from a social and cultural perspective the consequences of our instruction, whether with elementary school children, secondary students, or adults and immigrant second language learners. Who gets what kind of competence from our teaching? To what ends? What kinds of literate subjects does our pedagogy produce? Fitted to what kind of society?

These are the kinds of questions that keep me going in my work to promote CT&BT as a form of dialogic teaching for improving critical literacy. I hope I have managed to convince readers that simply promoting books and reading is not enough: for CT&BT to be successful, teachers, parents and caregivers must engage in critical discussion with children using picture books as stimuli.

Mary Roche PhD is an Irish education consultant and academic, and the author of ‘Developing children’s critical thinking through picturebooks’ (Routledge 2015).

This article originally appeared in Future EDge , a publication from the Education for a Changing World initiative in NSW Department of Education.

Download The Sector's new App!

ECEC news, jobs, events and more anytime, anywhere.

Latest in Quality

Fill 1 Copy 8 Created with Sketch. Economics

Kiama Mayor thanks community for helping to clean up Jamberoo Preschool post floods

2024-04-15 09:51:02

by Freya Lucas

From design to daycare: Alex Sutherland is a young man with ECEC promise

2024-04-15 09:46:18

Fill 11 Copy 7 Created with Sketch. Provider

Bringing back ‘wildhood’ - The early learning team going back to basics

2024-04-15 08:32:44

by Jason Roberts

The learning and development opportunities early educators need in 2024

2024-04-05 08:17:41

Cathryn shares her trainee experience

2024-04-11 10:19:42

Next round of Fraser Foundation scholarships closes soon: Apply now

2024-04-08 09:58:02

Related News

‘But I’m not artistic’: how teachers shape kids’ creative development

by Dr Gai Lindsay

What children want you to know to help them feel safe

by Tim Moore, University of South Australia

Home » Reading Strategies » Book Talk: Creating Excitement About Reading

Book Talk: Creating Excitement About Reading

A book talk is a fun and interactive way to introduce new books to your class and generate enthusiastic discussion. A book talk is a great activity not only for the student who is presenting but also for their peers who are listening and learning about a variety of books. Introduce book talk in your classroom and get your students excited about reading!

What is a book talk, benefits of a book talk for your class, how to introduce a book talk into your classroom, steps to introduce book talk to your class, guidelines for students, presentation tips, book talk faqs.

A book talk is an activity used in many classrooms of all ages to generate excitement and discussion around books. It involves students giving a short (2-3 minute) presentation to the class about a book they have enjoyed.

A book talk is not designed to be a formal book report but is a more relaxed presentation. The idea is to ignite interest in the book amongst other students, by describing what they enjoyed most about the book. A good book talk should encourage other students to read the book in question.

The great thing about a book talk is that it benefits the entire class, not only the student who is presenting at the time. It exposes the students to a wide variety of genres and authors that they may not previously have been familiar with. A book talk can be the equivalent of a movie trailer, inspiring students to try an unfamiliar category of book.

The whole process of discussing books will also generate excitement for reading within the classroom. As Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer said “Readers enjoy talking about books almost as much as they like reading.”

The informal nature of the book talk will increase literacy skills without students even realizing it, and they will find this much less daunting than being sent to the library to choose a book from the hundreds available to them.

Several transferable skills will also be developed during this activity, including speaking skills when presenting, and listening skills when others are talking.

If you have never done a book talk before with your class, the best way to introduce it will be to demonstrate one yourself based on a book you enjoy. This way, the students will be able to easily understand the format and replicate it with their own books.

Watch this example from Ashley Strausser for inspiration, or share it with your class.

Try This Fun Twist

For something a bit different which will amuse your class, as well as help them to think critically, why not try demonstrating a bad example of a book talk? Show no enthusiasm, mumble while staring at the ground, and of course, make sure to give away the ending! Pupils can write a critique of your ‘terrible talk’ and you could even use this to come up with a class set of guidelines like the ones below.

Provide the class with a suggested reading list, such as this one from readbrightly.com. Don’t limit them to the provided list though, if they have a book of their own that they are passionate about, allow them to choose their own.
If you wish, you could set a theme for one of the book talks. You could choose a seasonal theme such as summer or celebrate a particular event you are discussing in class. This will encourage students to move even further out of their comfort zone when choosing a book.
As well as demonstrating a book talk yourself, you may wish to invite a guest in to talk about their favorite book. Having another member of staff give a different perspective may help the students to prepare their own presentations.
As a starter activity, you could ask students to work in groups and suggest books to their peers that they have read in the past and have enjoyed. Pupils are more likely to respond to recommendations from their peers than their teachers and this will lead to them feeling validated when their classmates take notice of their suggestions.

Choose a book that you really love. Your passion for your book will come across in your presentation and keep the audience engaged.

Your book talk should consist of three main sections:

Hook – Grab the audience’s attention! Make sure they are hooked from the start by including a quote or fact that will generate interest and make them want to keep listening for more! Have a look at the blurb on the back cover of your book; this is used to encourage people to buy the book, so it may give you some ideas.

Content – Share the content of the book. Provide information about the plot of the book , but be sure not to spoil the main points! Share the most compelling points of the story and what makes you like the story so much. Can you think of any other books which are similar that your classmates may have read?

Show them the book. Bring along a copy of the book to show the class. You could also use any other props which may be appropriate to help convey the storyline.

Cliffhange r – Keep them wanting more! End your book talk with a cliffhanger which will make the rest of the students want to find out more by reading the book themselves. Make sure you don’t spoil the ending though!

Give your class tips on making their presentation as engaging as possible. These could include:

Keep it short and sweet! The idea is to give a quick snapshot of the book and leave them wanting more!
Try to encourage pupils not to read directly from a card or memorize their talk. If they know their book well, they can talk from the heart, using their notes as a prompt. Other students are more likely to be engaged in this way.
Pupils should try to ask questions of other pupils in the class to encourage an interactive discussion. They could start their talk by asking if anyone else has read their book.

To make organizing a book talk with your class much easier, we have the perfect resource for you. Download our Book Talk Presentation Guide to take the hassle out of planning your book talk. It contains step-by-step instructions for pupils to follow, a self/peer assessment activity to help them plan, and a teacher’s marking rubric if you wish to assess the talks.

Join teachsimple.com for free today to gain access to this and thousands of other fantastic teaching resources.

That is entirely up to you! You may want to start by only doing one book talk per term, and increase it gradually as the students become more familiar with them. Monthly book talks work well with most classes.

In order to get your students excited about doing book talks, it is best to start them as ungraded, informal presentations. You can always progress to assessed talks once your pupils have successfully completed a few and are more familiar with the guidelines.

Yes! By giving the students a time frame to present, you will ensure they get to the point of their presentation, making it more engaging. 3-5 minutes will give them enough time to share what they need to, without starting to ramble!

Download unlimited teaching resources, join free today.

Elaine T. is a teacher with 17 years of experience teaching 11-18 year-olds in Scotland, UK.

We have a lot of interesting articles and educational resources from a wide variety of authors and teaching professionals.

Bell Work: How To Start Class Off Right

Why you need a weekly lesson plan template and where to get one.

Last Updated on July 17, 2023 by Teach Simple

NAEYC Login
Member Profile
Hello Community
Accreditation Portal
Online Learning
Online Store

Popular Searches: DAP ; Coping with COVID-19 ; E-books ; Anti-Bias Education ; Online Store

Conversations with Children! Asking Questions That Stretch Children’s Thinking

Teacher and students playing game with materials

This is the fifth and final article in this TYC series about asking questions that support rich conversations. During the past year, Conversations with Children! has documented and analyzed the many different types of questions teachers ask and the rich discussions with children that flowed from those questions. The series has explored children’s interests, considered their developmental needs, respected their cultural perspectives, and highlighted their language development and thinking.

Using an adaptation of Bloom’s Taxonomy to think about the types of questions teachers ask children, this article focuses on intentionally using questions that challenge children to analyze, evaluate, and create. This can increase the back-and-forth dialogues teachers have with children—stretching children’s thinking!

For this article, I spent the morning in a classroom of 3- and 4-year-olds, located in a large, urban elementary school in Passaic, New Jersey. All 15 children spoke both Spanish and English (with varying levels of English proficiency), as did their teacher and assistant teacher. The teachers in this classroom stretch their conversations with children, having extended exchanges in both languages by listening to and building on children’s answers.

Understanding Different Types of Questions

Bloom’s Taxonomy has long been used as a way to think about the types of questions we ask students. We have adapted it for young children. Although Remember has mostly right or wrong one-word answers and Create invites use of the imagination and answers that are complex and unique to each child, these levels are just guides. It is up to you to consider which types of questions are appropriate for each child you work with. The lower levels form the foundation for the higher ones.

identify, name, count, repeat, recall

describe, discuss, explain, summarize

explain why, dramatize, identify with/relate to

recognize change, experiment, infer, compare, contrast

express opinion, judge, defend/criticize

make, construct, design, author

A conversation about building with cups in the makerspace

A conversation between the teacher and two children began during planning time and continued as the children built in the makerspace.

During planning time

Teacher : I am excited to see how you will build with the cups. Do you have any idea how you will build with them? ( Analyze )

Child 1 : I will show you what I can do. ( He draws his plan on a piece of paper .)

Child 2 : I want to work with the cups too.

Teacher : Maybe you can collaborate and share ideas.

Child 2 : Yeah, we can work together.

Child 1 : We can build a tower.

Teacher : I wonder how tall it will be. I am very curious. I wonder, what will you do with the cups? ( Create ) I can’t wait to see!

Later, as the first child is building

Teacher : Can you describe what you did? ( Understand )

Child : I put these two and put these one at a time and then these two.

Teacher : How did you stack these differently? ( Analyze ) (The child doesn’t respond.)

Teacher : I noticed you stacked this one and this one in a diff erent way. How did you stack them differently? ( Analyze )

Child : (He becomes excited, pointing.) I show you!

Teacher : Please demonstrate!

Child : I knew what my idea was. (He shows the teacher how he stacked the cups.)

Teacher : Can you describe what parts of the cups were touching? ( Understand )

Child : The white part. Teacher: Oh, that is called the rim of the cup. How did you stack this one? ( Apply )

Child : I was trying and trying and trying!

Teacher : So you are stacking the rims together. And how is this stack different? ( Analyze )

Child : This one is the right way and this one is down.

Teacher : Oh, this one is right side up and this one is upside down!

A conversation about creating a zoo in the block area

The children were preparing for a visit to a local zoo. After listening to the teacher read several books about zoos, one child worked on building structures in the block area to house giraff es and elephants.

Teacher : I am excited to see how you are building the enclosures.

Child : It fell down and I’m making it different.

Teacher : So it fell down and now you’re thinking about building it a different way. Architects do that; they talk about the stability of the structure. How can you make it sturdier so it doesn’t fall? ( Evaluate )

Child : I’m trying to make a watering place for the elephant to drink water. I have to make it strong so he can drink and the water doesn’t go out.

Teacher : Maybe you can be the architect and draw the plans and your friend can be the engineer and build it. How do you feel about that? ( Evaluate )

Child : I’m gonna ask him.

A conversation about coding with robots

The children had been using the Ozobot Bit, a small robot that introduces children to coding, for many months. Because these robots are programmed to follow lines and respond to specific color patterns (e.g., coloring small segments of the line blue, red, and green will make the robot turn right), preschoolers engage in a basic form of coding just by drawing lines. In this conversation, the teacher helps a child develop his own code.

Teacher : So tell me: what do we have to do first? ( Understand )

Child : (He draws as he speaks.) You have to keep going.

Teacher : Why do we have to do it that way first? ( Apply )

Child : Because have to draw it ’fore it can go. And you don’t draw it, it don’t go nowhere. Wanna see?

Teacher : So if it’s not on the line, it won’t go anywhere. It only goes on the line.

Child : Yeah.

Teacher : Okay. So are there any rules you have to follow? What rules do I need to know? ( Apply , Analyze , Evaluate )

Child : You can’t stop it with your hand. . . . And if you want to make another one, first you have to turn it off and then you make another one. (He demonstrates with four markers how to code on the paper and then puts the robot on the line.) Now it going backwards.

Teacher : So how could you fix it so it continues? ( Analyze , Evaluate , Create )

Child : (He makes the black line on the paper thicker and retries the Ozobot, but it still stops and turns around.)

Teacher : How can you fix it? Try something else to solve the problem. What should we try next? ( Analyze , Evaluate , Create )

Child : I gonna do the whole thing again. (The child starts drawing the code.)

A conversation to stretch dramatic play

A child held a baby doll and a girl doll as the teacher entered the dramatic play area.

Teacher : Tell me about the baby. ( Apply )

Child : This girl has a baby. We going to the doctor because we all sick.

Teacher : How do you think the doctor will help you get better? ( Evaluate )

Child : The doctor has to check my heart and then he gonna check my mouth.

Teacher : So what can you do to help your friends get better after the doctor checks your mouth and heart? How will you take care of them and yourself? ( Apply , Analyze , Evaluate )

Child : They go to bed back home and go to sleep.

Teacher : And what will you do? Tell me more about that. ( Apply , Analyze , Evaluate )

Child : I’m going read them a book.

Teacher : Oh, that is such a good idea! Do you have a special book in mind? ( Understand , Apply )

Child : (She nods her head in affirmation and smiles broadly.) I have a special book. (She holds up My House: A Book in Two Languages/Mi Casa: Un Libro en Dos Lenguas , by Rebecca Emberley.)

Teacher : Will you read the book to me? I’ll pretend that I am sick and I am in the bed and you can read the book to me. (The child gives the teacher a small blanket.) You are giving me my blankie. You read and I’ll listen. ( Apply , Create ) (The child invents her own story as she turns the pages.)

As the teacher, it’s up to you, the one who knows your students best in an educational setting, to decide which questions are appropriate for which children during a particular interaction. It can be challenging to develop and ask questions that engage children in analyzing, evaluating, and creating, such as, “If you could come to school any way you wanted, how would you get here? Why?” But questions that each child will answer in her own way are well worth the effort!

Note : Thank you, Megan (teacher), Ms. Perez (assistant teacher), and all of the wonderful students who taught me so much about coding! In addition to being the teacher, Megan King is the author of the chapter “A Makerspace in the Science Area” in the book Big Questions for Young Minds: Extending Children’s Thinking . And a great big final thank-you to the five preschool classrooms that invited me into their worlds, sharing their questions and conversations with TYC readers.

Suggestions for Intentionally Stretching Conversations with Young Children

Make sure to allow plenty of wait time for children to process what you are saying, think about it, and answer. Give them at least a few seconds, but vary this according to the children’s needs.
Listen to the children’s responses. Use active listening strategies: make eye contact, encourage children to share their ideas, and restate or summarize what they say.
Ask another quesiton or make a comment after the child answers. If you aren’t sure how to respond, you can almost always say, “What else can we add to that?” or “Tell me more about that.”

Bibliography

Academic tools.

Friends PDF Preview
Author and Citation Info
Back to Top

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

Abrami, Philip C., Robert M. Bernard, Eugene Borokhovski, David I. Waddington, C. Anne Wade, and Tonje Person, 2015, “Strategies for Teaching Students to Think Critically: A Meta-analysis”, Review of Educational Research , 85(2): 275–314. doi:10.3102/0034654314551063
Aikin, Wilford M., 1942, The Story of the Eight-year Study, with Conclusions and Recommendations , Volume I of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers. [ Aikin 1942 available online ]
Alston, Kal, 1995, “Begging the Question: Is Critical Thinking Biased?”, Educational Theory , 45(2): 225–233. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00225.x
–––, 2001, “Re/Thinking Critical Thinking: The Seductions of Everyday Life”, Studies in Philosophy and Education , 20(1): 27–40. doi:10.1023/A:1005247128053
American Educational Research Association, 2014, Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing / American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education , Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Anderson, Lorin W., David R. Krathwohl, Peter W. Airiasian, Kathleen A. Cruikshank, Richard E. Mayer, Paul R. Pintrich, James Raths, and Merlin C. Wittrock, 2001, A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives , New York: Longman, complete edition.
Bailin, Sharon, 1987, “Critical and Creative Thinking”, Informal Logic , 9(1): 23–30. [ Bailin 1987 available online ]
–––, 1988, Achieving Extraordinary Ends: An Essay on Creativity , Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-2780-3
–––, 1995, “Is Critical Thinking Biased? Clarifications and Implications”, Educational Theory , 45(2): 191–197. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00191.x
Bailin, Sharon and Mark Battersby, 2009, “Inquiry: A Dialectical Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking”, in Juho Ritola (ed.), Argument Cultures: Proceedings of OSSA 09 , CD-ROM (pp. 1–10), Windsor, ON: OSSA. [ Bailin & Battersby 2009 available online ]
–––, 2016a, “Fostering the Virtues of Inquiry”, Topoi , 35(2): 367–374. doi:10.1007/s11245-015-9307-6
–––, 2016b, Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking , Indianapolis: Hackett, 2nd edition.
–––, 2021, “Inquiry: Teaching for Reasoned Judgment”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 31–46. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_003
Bailin, Sharon, Roland Case, Jerrold R. Coombs, and Leroi B. Daniels, 1999a, “Common Misconceptions of Critical Thinking”, Journal of Curriculum Studies , 31(3): 269–283. doi:10.1080/002202799183124
–––, 1999b, “Conceptualizing Critical Thinking”, Journal of Curriculum Studies , 31(3): 285–302. doi:10.1080/002202799183133
Blair, J. Anthony, 2021, Studies in Critical Thinking , Windsor, ON: Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2nd edition. [Available online at https://windsor.scholarsportal.info/omp/index.php/wsia/catalog/book/106]
Berman, Alan M., Seth J. Schwartz, William M. Kurtines, and Steven L. Berman, 2001, “The Process of Exploration in Identity Formation: The Role of Style and Competence”, Journal of Adolescence , 24(4): 513–528. doi:10.1006/jado.2001.0386
Black, Beth (ed.), 2012, An A to Z of Critical Thinking , London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Bloom, Benjamin Samuel, Max D. Engelhart, Edward J. Furst, Walter H. Hill, and David R. Krathwohl, 1956, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain , New York: David McKay.
Boardman, Frank, Nancy M. Cavender, and Howard Kahane, 2018, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life , Boston: Cengage, 13th edition.
Browne, M. Neil and Stuart M. Keeley, 2018, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking , Hoboken, NJ: Pearson, 12th edition.
Center for Assessment & Improvement of Learning, 2017, Critical Thinking Assessment Test , Cookeville, TN: Tennessee Technological University.
Cleghorn, Paul. 2021. “Critical Thinking in the Elementary School: Practical Guidance for Building a Culture of Thinking”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessmen t, Leiden: Brill, pp. 150–167. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_010
Cohen, Jacob, 1988, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2nd edition.
College Board, 1983, Academic Preparation for College. What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do , New York: College Entrance Examination Board, ERIC document ED232517.
Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association, 1943, Thirty Schools Tell Their Story , Volume V of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers.
Council for Aid to Education, 2017, CLA+ Student Guide . Available at http://cae.org/images/uploads/pdf/CLA_Student_Guide_Institution.pdf ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
Dalgleish, Adam, Patrick Girard, and Maree Davies, 2017, “Critical Thinking, Bias and Feminist Philosophy: Building a Better Framework through Collaboration”, Informal Logic , 37(4): 351–369. [ Dalgleish et al. available online ]
Dewey, John, 1910, How We Think , Boston: D.C. Heath. [ Dewey 1910 available online ]
–––, 1916, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education , New York: Macmillan.
–––, 1933, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process , Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
–––, 1936, “The Theory of the Chicago Experiment”, Appendix II of Mayhew & Edwards 1936: 463–477.
–––, 1938, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry , New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Dominguez, Caroline (coord.), 2018a, A European Collection of the Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions Needed in Different Professional Fields for the 21st Century , Vila Real, Portugal: UTAD. Available at http://bit.ly/CRITHINKEDUO1 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
––– (coord.), 2018b, A European Review on Critical Thinking Educational Practices in Higher Education Institutions , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http://bit.ly/CRITHINKEDUO2 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
––– (coord.), 2018c, The CRITHINKEDU European Course on Critical Thinking Education for University Teachers: From Conception to Delivery , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http:/bit.ly/CRITHINKEDU03; last accessed 2022 07 16.
Dominguez Caroline and Rita Payan-Carreira (eds.), 2019, Promoting Critical Thinking in European Higher Education Institutions: Towards an Educational Protocol , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http:/bit.ly/CRITHINKEDU04; last accessed 2022 07 16.
Ennis, Robert H., 1958, “An Appraisal of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal”, The Journal of Educational Research , 52(4): 155–158. doi:10.1080/00220671.1958.10882558
–––, 1962, “A Concept of Critical Thinking: A Proposed Basis for Research on the Teaching and Evaluation of Critical Thinking Ability”, Harvard Educational Review , 32(1): 81–111.
–––, 1981a, “A Conception of Deductive Logical Competence”, Teaching Philosophy , 4(3/4): 337–385. doi:10.5840/teachphil198143/429
–––, 1981b, “Eight Fallacies in Bloom’s Taxonomy”, in C. J. B. Macmillan (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1980: Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society , Bloomington, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, pp. 269–273.
–––, 1984, “Problems in Testing Informal Logic, Critical Thinking, Reasoning Ability”, Informal Logic , 6(1): 3–9. [ Ennis 1984 available online ]
–––, 1987, “A Taxonomy of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities”, in Joan Boykoff Baron and Robert J. Sternberg (eds.), Teaching Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice , New York: W. H. Freeman, pp. 9–26.
–––, 1989, “Critical Thinking and Subject Specificity: Clarification and Needed Research”, Educational Researcher , 18(3): 4–10. doi:10.3102/0013189X018003004
–––, 1991, “Critical Thinking: A Streamlined Conception”, Teaching Philosophy , 14(1): 5–24. doi:10.5840/teachphil19911412
–––, 1996, “Critical Thinking Dispositions: Their Nature and Assessability”, Informal Logic , 18(2–3): 165–182. [ Ennis 1996 available online ]
–––, 1998, “Is Critical Thinking Culturally Biased?”, Teaching Philosophy , 21(1): 15–33. doi:10.5840/teachphil19982113
–––, 2011, “Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part I”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 26(1): 4–18. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews20112613
–––, 2013, “Critical Thinking across the Curriculum: The Wisdom CTAC Program”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 28(2): 25–45. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20132828
–––, 2016, “Definition: A Three-Dimensional Analysis with Bearing on Key Concepts”, in Patrick Bondy and Laura Benacquista (eds.), Argumentation, Objectivity, and Bias: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), 18–21 May 2016 , Windsor, ON: OSSA, pp. 1–19. Available at http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA11/papersandcommentaries/105 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
–––, 2018, “Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: A Vision”, Topoi , 37(1): 165–184. doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9401-4
Ennis, Robert H., and Jason Millman, 1971, Manual for Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Level X, and Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Level Z , Urbana, IL: Critical Thinking Project, University of Illinois.
Ennis, Robert H., Jason Millman, and Thomas Norbert Tomko, 1985, Cornell Critical Thinking Tests Level X & Level Z: Manual , Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publication, 3rd edition.
–––, 2005, Cornell Critical Thinking Tests Level X & Level Z: Manual , Seaside, CA: Critical Thinking Company, 5th edition.
Ennis, Robert H. and Eric Weir, 1985, The Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test: Test, Manual, Criteria, Scoring Sheet: An Instrument for Teaching and Testing , Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.
Facione, Peter A., 1990a, Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction , Research Findings and Recommendations Prepared for the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association, ERIC Document ED315423.
–––, 1990b, California Critical Thinking Skills Test, CCTST – Form A , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
–––, 1990c, The California Critical Thinking Skills Test--College Level. Technical Report #3. Gender, Ethnicity, Major, CT Self-Esteem, and the CCTST , ERIC Document ED326584.
–––, 1992, California Critical Thinking Skills Test: CCTST – Form B, Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
–––, 2000, “The Disposition Toward Critical Thinking: Its Character, Measurement, and Relationship to Critical Thinking Skill”, Informal Logic , 20(1): 61–84. [ Facione 2000 available online ]
Facione, Peter A. and Noreen C. Facione, 1992, CCTDI: A Disposition Inventory , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
Facione, Peter A., Noreen C. Facione, and Carol Ann F. Giancarlo, 2001, California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory: CCTDI: Inventory Manual , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
Facione, Peter A., Carol A. Sánchez, and Noreen C. Facione, 1994, Are College Students Disposed to Think? , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press. ERIC Document ED368311.
Fisher, Alec, and Michael Scriven, 1997, Critical Thinking: Its Definition and Assessment , Norwich: Centre for Research in Critical Thinking, University of East Anglia.
Freire, Paulo, 1968 [1970], Pedagogia do Oprimido . Translated as Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.), New York: Continuum, 1970.
Gigerenzer, Gerd, 2001, “The Adaptive Toolbox”, in Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 37–50.
Glaser, Edward Maynard, 1941, An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking , New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.
Groarke, Leo A. and Christopher W. Tindale, 2012, Good Reasoning Matters! A Constructive Approach to Critical Thinking , Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 5th edition.
Halpern, Diane F., 1998, “Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer Across Domains: Disposition, Skills, Structure Training, and Metacognitive Monitoring”, American Psychologist , 53(4): 449–455. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.53.4.449
–––, 2016, Manual: Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment , Mödling, Austria: Schuhfried. Available at https://pdfcoffee.com/hcta-test-manual-pdf-free.html; last accessed 2022 07 16.
Hamby, Benjamin, 2014, The Virtues of Critical Thinkers , Doctoral dissertation, Philosophy, McMaster University. [ Hamby 2014 available online ]
–––, 2015, “Willingness to Inquire: The Cardinal Critical Thinking Virtue”, in Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education , New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 77–87.
Haran, Uriel, Ilana Ritov, and Barbara A. Mellers, 2013, “The Role of Actively Open-minded Thinking in Information Acquisition, Accuracy, and Calibration”, Judgment and Decision Making , 8(3): 188–201.
Hatcher, Donald and Kevin Possin, 2021, “Commentary: Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking Assessment”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 298–322. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_017
Haynes, Ada, Elizabeth Lisic, Kevin Harris, Katie Leming, Kyle Shanks, and Barry Stein, 2015, “Using the Critical Thinking Assessment Test (CAT) as a Model for Designing Within-Course Assessments: Changing How Faculty Assess Student Learning”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 30(3): 38–48. doi:10.5840/inquiryct201530316
Haynes, Ada and Barry Stein, 2021, “Observations from a Long-Term Effort to Assess and Improve Critical Thinking”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 231–254. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_014
Hiner, Amanda L. 2021. “Equipping Students for Success in College and Beyond: Placing Critical Thinking Instruction at the Heart of a General Education Program”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 188–208. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_012
Hitchcock, David, 2017, “Critical Thinking as an Educational Ideal”, in his On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking , Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 477–497. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-53562-3_30
–––, 2021, “Seven Philosophical Implications of Critical Thinking: Themes, Variations, Implications”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 9–30. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_002
hooks, bell, 1994, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom , New York and London: Routledge.
–––, 2010, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom , New York and London: Routledge.
Johnson, Ralph H., 1992, “The Problem of Defining Critical Thinking”, in Stephen P, Norris (ed.), The Generalizability of Critical Thinking , New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 38–53.
Kahane, Howard, 1971, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Kahneman, Daniel, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kahneman, Daniel, Olivier Sibony, & Cass R. Sunstein, 2021, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment , New York: Little, Brown Spark.
Kenyon, Tim, and Guillaume Beaulac, 2014, “Critical Thinking Education and Debasing”, Informal Logic , 34(4): 341–363. [ Kenyon & Beaulac 2014 available online ]
Krathwohl, David R., Benjamin S. Bloom, and Bertram B. Masia, 1964, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook II: Affective Domain , New York: David McKay.
Kuhn, Deanna, 1991, The Skills of Argument , New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511571350
–––, 2019, “Critical Thinking as Discourse”, Human Development, 62 (3): 146–164. doi:10.1159/000500171
Lipman, Matthew, 1987, “Critical Thinking–What Can It Be?”, Analytic Teaching , 8(1): 5–12. [ Lipman 1987 available online ]
–––, 2003, Thinking in Education , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition.
Loftus, Elizabeth F., 2017, “Eavesdropping on Memory”, Annual Review of Psychology , 68: 1–18. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044138
Makaiau, Amber Strong, 2021, “The Good Thinker’s Tool Kit: How to Engage Critical Thinking and Reasoning in Secondary Education”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 168–187. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_011
Martin, Jane Roland, 1992, “Critical Thinking for a Humane World”, in Stephen P. Norris (ed.), The Generalizability of Critical Thinking , New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 163–180.
Mayhew, Katherine Camp, and Anna Camp Edwards, 1936, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 , New York: Appleton-Century. [ Mayhew & Edwards 1936 available online ]
McPeck, John E., 1981, Critical Thinking and Education , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Moore, Brooke Noel and Richard Parker, 2020, Critical Thinking , New York: McGraw-Hill, 13th edition.
Nickerson, Raymond S., 1998, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises”, Review of General Psychology , 2(2): 175–220. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
Nieto, Ana Maria, and Jorge Valenzuela, 2012, “A Study of the Internal Structure of Critical Thinking Dispositions”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 27(1): 31–38. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20122713
Norris, Stephen P., 1985, “Controlling for Background Beliefs When Developing Multiple-choice Critical Thinking Tests”, Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice , 7(3): 5–11. doi:10.1111/j.1745-3992.1988.tb00437.x
Norris, Stephen P. and Robert H. Ennis, 1989, Evaluating Critical Thinking (The Practitioners’ Guide to Teaching Thinking Series), Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.
Norris, Stephen P. and Ruth Elizabeth King, 1983, Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
–––, 1984, The Design of a Critical Thinking Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland. ERIC Document ED260083.
–––, 1985, Test on Appraising Observations: Manual , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
–––, 1990a, Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2nd edition.
–––, 1990b, Test on Appraising Observations: Manual , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2nd edition.
OCR [Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations], 2011, AS/A Level GCE: Critical Thinking – H052, H452 , Cambridge: OCR. Past papers available at https://pastpapers.co/ocr/?dir=A-Level/Critical-Thinking-H052-H452; last accessed 2022 07 16.
Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013, The Ontario Curriculum Grades 9 to 12: Social Sciences and Humanities . Available at http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/ssciences9to122013.pdf ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
Passmore, John Arthur, 1980, The Philosophy of Teaching , London: Duckworth.
Paul, Richard W., 1981, “Teaching Critical Thinking in the ‘Strong’ Sense: A Focus on Self-Deception, World Views, and a Dialectical Mode of Analysis”, Informal Logic , 4(2): 2–7. [ Paul 1981 available online ]
–––, 1984, “Critical Thinking: Fundamental to Education for a Free Society”, Educational Leadership , 42(1): 4–14.
–––, 1985, “McPeck’s Mistakes”, Informal Logic , 7(1): 35–43. [ Paul 1985 available online ]
Paul, Richard W. and Linda Elder, 2006, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools , Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 4th edition.
Payette, Patricia, and Edna Ross, 2016, “Making a Campus-Wide Commitment to Critical Thinking: Insights and Promising Practices Utilizing the Paul-Elder Approach at the University of Louisville”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 31(1): 98–110. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20163118
Possin, Kevin, 2008, “A Field Guide to Critical-Thinking Assessment”, Teaching Philosophy , 31(3): 201–228. doi:10.5840/teachphil200831324
–––, 2013a, “Some Problems with the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA) Test”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 28(3): 4–12. doi:10.5840/inquiryct201328313
–––, 2013b, “A Serious Flaw in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Test”, Informal Logic , 33(3): 390–405. [ Possin 2013b available online ]
–––, 2013c, “A Fatal Flaw in the Collegiate Learning Assessment Test”, Assessment Update , 25 (1): 8–12.
–––, 2014, “Critique of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Test: The More You Know, the Lower Your Score”, Informal Logic , 34(4): 393–416. [ Possin 2014 available online ]
–––, 2020, “CAT Scan: A Critical Review of the Critical-Thinking Assessment Test”, Informal Logic , 40 (3): 489–508. [Available online at https://informallogic.ca/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/6243]
Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rear, David, 2019, “One Size Fits All? The Limitations of Standardised Assessment in Critical Thinking”, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education , 44(5): 664–675. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2018.1526255
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1762, Émile , Amsterdam: Jean Néaulme.
Scheffler, Israel, 1960, The Language of Education , Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Scriven, Michael, and Richard W. Paul, 1987, Defining Critical Thinking , Draft statement written for the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction. Available at http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
Sheffield, Clarence Burton Jr., 2018, “Promoting Critical Thinking in Higher Education: My Experiences as the Inaugural Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking at Rochester Institute of Technology”, Topoi , 37(1): 155–163. doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9392-1
Siegel, Harvey, 1985, “McPeck, Informal Logic and the Nature of Critical Thinking”, in David Nyberg (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1985: Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society , Normal, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, pp. 61–72.
–––, 1988, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
–––, 1999, “What (Good) Are Thinking Dispositions?”, Educational Theory , 49(2): 207–221. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00207.x
Simon, Herbert A., 1956, “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment”, Psychological Review , 63(2): 129–138. doi: 10.1037/h0042769
Simpson, Elizabeth, 1966–67, “The Classification of Educational Objectives: Psychomotor Domain”, Illinois Teacher of Home Economics , 10(4): 110–144, ERIC document ED0103613. [ Simpson 1966–67 available online ]
Skolverket, 2018, Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare , Stockholm: Skolverket, revised 2018. Available at https://www.skolverket.se/download/18.31c292d516e7445866a218f/1576654682907/pdf3984.pdf; last accessed 2022 07 15.
Smith, B. Othanel, 1953, “The Improvement of Critical Thinking”, Progressive Education , 30(5): 129–134.
Smith, Eugene Randolph, Ralph Winfred Tyler, and the Evaluation Staff, 1942, Appraising and Recording Student Progress , Volume III of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers.
Splitter, Laurance J., 1987, “Educational Reform through Philosophy for Children”, Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children , 7(2): 32–39. doi:10.5840/thinking1987729
Stanovich Keith E., and Paula J. Stanovich, 2010, “A Framework for Critical Thinking, Rational Thinking, and Intelligence”, in David D. Preiss and Robert J. Sternberg (eds), Innovations in Educational Psychology: Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Human Development , New York: Springer Publishing, pp 195–237.
Stanovich Keith E., Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak, 2011, “Intelligence and Rationality”, in Robert J. Sternberg and Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, pp. 784–826. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511977244.040
Tankersley, Karen, 2005, Literacy Strategies for Grades 4–12: Reinforcing the Threads of Reading , Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Thayer-Bacon, Barbara J., 1992, “Is Modern Critical Thinking Theory Sexist?”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 10(1): 3–7. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews199210123
–––, 1993, “Caring and Its Relationship to Critical Thinking”, Educational Theory , 43(3): 323–340. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1993.00323.x
–––, 1995a, “Constructive Thinking: Personal Voice”, Journal of Thought , 30(1): 55–70.
–––, 1995b, “Doubting and Believing: Both are Important for Critical Thinking”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 15(2): 59–66. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews199515226
–––, 2000, Transforming Critical Thinking: Thinking Constructively , New York: Teachers College Press.
Toulmin, Stephen Edelston, 1958, The Uses of Argument , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turri, John, Mark Alfano, and John Greco, 2017, “Virtue Epistemology”, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition). URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/epistemology-virtue/ >
Vincent-Lancrin, Stéphan, Carlos González-Sancho, Mathias Bouckaert, Federico de Luca, Meritxell Fernández-Barrerra, Gwénaël Jacotin, Joaquin Urgel, and Quentin Vidal, 2019, Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking: What It Means in School. Educational Research and Innovation , Paris: OECD Publishing.
Warren, Karen J. 1988. “Critical Thinking and Feminism”, Informal Logic , 10(1): 31–44. [ Warren 1988 available online ]
Watson, Goodwin, and Edward M. Glaser, 1980a, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form A , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
–––, 1980b, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal: Forms A and B; Manual , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation,
–––, 1994, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form B , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
Weinstein, Mark, 1990, “Towards a Research Agenda for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking”, Informal Logic , 12(3): 121–143. [ Weinstein 1990 available online ]
–––, 2013, Logic, Truth and Inquiry , London: College Publications.
Willingham, Daniel T., 2019, “How to Teach Critical Thinking”, Education: Future Frontiers , 1: 1–17. [Available online at https://prod65.education.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/main-education/teaching-and-learning/education-for-a-changing-world/media/documents/How-to-teach-critical-thinking-Willingham.pdf.]
Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 1996, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139174763

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT)
Critical Thinking Across the European Higher Education Curricula (CRITHINKEDU)
Critical Thinking Definition, Instruction, and Assessment: A Rigorous Approach
Critical Thinking Research (RAIL)
Foundation for Critical Thinking
Insight Assessment
Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21)
The Critical Thinking Consortium
The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities , by Robert H. Ennis

Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Get started with computers
Learn Microsoft Office
Apply for a job
Improve my work skills
Design nice-looking docs
Getting Started
Smartphones & Tablets
Typing Tutorial
Online Learning
Basic Internet Skills
Online Safety
Social Media
Zoom Basics
Google Docs
Google Sheets
Career Planning
Resume Writing
Cover Letters
Job Search and Networking
Business Communication
Entrepreneurship 101
Careers without College
Job Hunt for Today
3D Printing
Freelancing 101
Personal Finance
Sharing Economy
Decision-Making
Graphic Design
Photography
Image Editing
Learning WordPress
Language Learning
Critical Thinking
For Educators
Translations
Staff Picks
English expand_more expand_less

Critical Thinking and Decision-Making - What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking and decision-making -, what is critical thinking, critical thinking and decision-making what is critical thinking.

Critical Thinking and Decision-Making: What is Critical Thinking?

Lesson 1: what is critical thinking, what is critical thinking.

Critical thinking is a term that gets thrown around a lot. You've probably heard it used often throughout the years whether it was in school, at work, or in everyday conversation. But when you stop to think about it, what exactly is critical thinking and how do you do it ?

Watch the video below to learn more about critical thinking.

Simply put, critical thinking is the act of deliberately analyzing information so that you can make better judgements and decisions . It involves using things like logic, reasoning, and creativity, to draw conclusions and generally understand things better.

illustration of the terms logic, reasoning, and creativity

This may sound like a pretty broad definition, and that's because critical thinking is a broad skill that can be applied to so many different situations. You can use it to prepare for a job interview, manage your time better, make decisions about purchasing things, and so much more.

The process

illustration of "thoughts" inside a human brain, with several being connected and "analyzed"

As humans, we are constantly thinking . It's something we can't turn off. But not all of it is critical thinking. No one thinks critically 100% of the time... that would be pretty exhausting! Instead, it's an intentional process , something that we consciously use when we're presented with difficult problems or important decisions.

Improving your critical thinking

illustration of the questions "What do I currently know?" and "How do I know this?"

In order to become a better critical thinker, it's important to ask questions when you're presented with a problem or decision, before jumping to any conclusions. You can start with simple ones like What do I currently know? and How do I know this? These can help to give you a better idea of what you're working with and, in some cases, simplify more complex issues.

Real-world applications

illustration of a hand holding a smartphone displaying an article that reads, "Study: Cats are better than dogs"

Let's take a look at how we can use critical thinking to evaluate online information . Say a friend of yours posts a news article on social media and you're drawn to its headline. If you were to use your everyday automatic thinking, you might accept it as fact and move on. But if you were thinking critically, you would first analyze the available information and ask some questions :

What's the source of this article?
Is the headline potentially misleading?
What are my friend's general beliefs?
Do their beliefs inform why they might have shared this?

illustration of "Super Cat Blog" and "According to survery of cat owners" being highlighted from an article on a smartphone

After analyzing all of this information, you can draw a conclusion about whether or not you think the article is trustworthy.

Critical thinking has a wide range of real-world applications . It can help you to make better decisions, become more hireable, and generally better understand the world around you.

illustration of a lightbulb, a briefcase, and the world

/en/problem-solving-and-decision-making/why-is-it-so-hard-to-make-decisions/content/

Dialogic Teaching: A classroom guide for better thinking and talking

May 13, 2021

Dialogic Teaching: A classroom guide for better thinking and talking across your school.

Main, P (2021, May 13). Dialogic Teaching: A classroom guide for better thinking and talking. Retrieved from https://www.structural-learning.com/post/how-to-use-dialogic-pedagogy-the-key-to-powerful-teaching

What is dialogic teaching?

Dialogic teaching emphasizes the importance of dialogue and conversation as vital components of the learning process. By fostering meaningful interactions between teachers and students, as well as among students themselves, this method enriches classroom practice and enhances learning outcomes in primary schools.

The work of Neil Mercer and Robin Alexander sheds light on the quality of classroom talk, providing valuable insights into the different kinds of classroom talk and their impact on students' learning.

Research conducted by the Education Endowment Foundation reveals that children in control schools, where dialogic teaching is implemented, demonstrate significant gains in both their understanding and instrumental learning when compared to their peers in traditional classrooms.

Embracing dialogic teaching requires a shift in classroom dynamics, where the teacher assumes the role of a facilitator, creating an environment that fosters effective classroom dialogue and offers abundant learning opportunities.

By incorporating this approach into their practice, educators can empower students to become active participants in their learning journey, cultivating critical thinking , communication, and problem-solving skills that are essential for success in the 21st century.

What are the origins of dialogic teaching?

The term was first developed by Robin Alexander throughout the early 2000s, however the concept of dialogic talk can be traced back to Socrates . Socrates suggested that education practice should be centered on notions of dialogue and that question should elicit new thinking and not probe for set answers. A teacher and student participated in a question that neither of them knew the answer to, suggesting that the process is more important than the outcome.

Before Alexander began his research, Vygotsky was driven by a concern for language. He suggests that development has a social process because children learn through social interaction by communicating and interacting with more knowledgeable and more able people. They gain a better understanding of prior knowledge. This is better known as cognitive scaffolding . Vygotsky linked better language with better thinking or a stronger ability to express what they mean. Children need rich learning environments. In these settings, there needs to be opportunities for children to engage in meaningful conversations about topics which interest them.

These discussions help build relationships between peers and adults. In addition to building relationships, conversation allows children to share information and opinions. Through discussion, children become aware of themselves and each other. As well as developing friendships, children begin to understand the world around them. Conversation provides a safe environment where children feel comfortable sharing personal thoughts and feelings .

To exchange and experiment with meanings, Alexander explored Vygotsky’s theory further finding that this form of learning is vital in the development of communicative skills . Dialogic talk is a theory that has become increasingly popular in recent years as the discussion continues to grow. The theory discusses the value of talk in the classroom and how it helps develop learner autonomy . It is a teaching method where the teacher encourages and facilitates discussion in order to develop understanding .

Developing the theory derived from Socratic methods , it was thought that lecturing alone was not sufficient in encouraging the development of learners and that questioning should be used to extend thinking rather than assess it. Dialogic talk is seen as a vehicle for increasing people’s engagement at a deep level. However, it is an aspect of teaching that must be thoroughly planned for otherwise the discussion can lose focus.

The Power of Conversation: Fostering Critical Thinking through Dialogic Teaching

Dialogic teaching, much like a vibrant tapestry, weaves together a rich array of ideas, perspectives, and questions, creating a stimulating environment that nurtures critical thinking and intellectual growth. Inspired by Robin Alexander's research on the subject, this dynamic classroom strategy has been shown to foster deeper thinking and promote a positive impact on academic outcomes.

There are numerous benefits to incorporating dialogic teaching methods into classroom practice, including:

Encouraging active student participation, which fosters a sense of ownership and engagement in their learning journey.
Developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills , as students are challenged to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information.
Facilitating the development of strong communication skills , as students learn to articulate their thoughts and ideas effectively.
Creating a positive attitude towards learning, as students experience the joy of discovery and intellectual curiosity.
Building a sense of community and collaboration in the classroom, as students learn from and support one another in their pursuit of knowledge.

The work of Robin Alexander and Barnes and Todd (1995) highlights the transformative potential of dialogic teaching in fostering critical thinking and enhancing academic outcomes. By embracing the power of conversation as a tool for learning, educators can create a dynamic and inclusive learning environment that empowers students to reach their full potential.

Dialogic Teaching Strategies: Encouraging Student Voice and Participation

Dialogic teaching strategies, as fertile soil nourishing the seeds of knowledge, provide a fertile ground for students to cultivate their voice and participate actively in the learning process .

These methods, rooted in educational theories such as Sociocultural theory and Child development theories, emphasize the transformative impact of dialogic education on students' intellectual and social growth. To foster a vibrant and engaging classroom environment, educators can implement the following actionable ideas:

Encourage open-ended questioning , promoting deeper levels of thinking and stimulating rich, meaningful discussions.
Utilize think-pair-share activities , allowing students to explore and exchange ideas with their peers before sharing with the whole class.
Implement Socratic seminars , fostering critical thinking and collaborative inquiry through structured group discussions.
Incorporate role-playing activities, enabling students to explore various perspectives and develop empathy.
Create safe spaces for reflection and self-expression, empowering students to share their thoughts and ideas without fear of judgment.

The work of Lyle (2008) and Resnick et al. (2015) emphasizes the significant correlation between oracy and student outcomes, underlining the potential social impact of dialogic teaching strategies. By offering ample opportunities for children to engage in meaningful dialogue, educators can inspire students in school to become confident communicators, critical thinkers, and compassionate members of society.

What are the five key principles of dialogic talk?

Dialogic teaching strategies create a rich and engaging learning experience that promotes student voice and participation. At the core of this approach is the use of dialogue during classroom teaching, which fosters an environment that nurtures the development of critical thinking and collaboration . Drawing upon evidence from classroom practice, we can distill five key principles of dialogic talk:

Collective: Engaging students in a shared learning experience, where knowledge is co-constructed through dialogue and collaboration.
Reciprocal: Encouraging the free exchange of ideas, where students listen to one another, question, and respond thoughtfully.
Supportive: Creating a safe and inclusive environment, enabling students to express their thoughts and opinions without fear of judgment.
Cumulative: Building on prior knowledge and understanding, allowing students to develop a deeper comprehension of the subject matter.
Purposeful: Ensuring that classroom discussions are focused and meaningful, with clear learning objectives in mind.

The research conducted by Alexander (2006) and Mercer and Dawes (2014) highlights the significant impact of dialogic teaching strategies on oracy and student outcomes. By fostering learning practices that emphasize the value of dialogue and interaction, educators can create environments in which children thrive, developing the skills and confidence needed for success in today's interconnected world.

develop clear dialogic learning guidelines

By adhering to these key principles in the classroom , students will not only increase understanding of their prior knowledge but also cultivate a sense of curiosity and ownership over their learning journey.

Jerome Bruner, a prominent theorist in the realm of dialogic talk, posits that culture, rather than biology, shapes human life and the human mind. Bruner builds on Vygotsky's notion that most learning in most settings is a communal activity, emphasizing the importance of social interactions in shaping our understanding of the world.

Bruner's research underscores the vital role of positive classroom cultures in fostering effective learning experiences ( Bruner, 1996 ). He suggests that educators have often underestimated children's innate predispositions for particular kinds of interactions, and by understanding the types of interactions that resonate with children, teachers can create more engaging and meaningful learning environments.

Furthermore, Noddings (2005) highlights the importance of fostering a caring and supportive classroom culture, where students feel valued and understood.

To captivate students' interests and facilitate deeper learning, educators must provide context and purpose for the learning material, employing stories, images , metaphors, and analogies to make abstract concepts more accessible.

In addition, it is crucial to create opportunities for students to practice using language appropriately, as this fosters the development of effective communication skills and promotes a greater understanding of the subject matter. By integrating these principles into their teaching practices, educators can nurture a positive classroom culture that empowers students to thrive academically and socially .

Children talking about their ideas - dialogic teaching

What are the benefits of dialogic teaching?

The benefits of dialogic pedagogy can be seen in its other uses. In business, it enhances employee and customer communication, and in politics it builds constituency. As the science behind dialogic pedagogy has come to light, many schools and organisations have adopted it. We recommend that schools use it to further develop their students. Tata Power Group developed a school in Mumbai where dialogic pedagogy has been integrated into the curriculum.

They observe a daily 20 minute break and allow students to discuss in a group. What impact does dialogic pedagogy have on attainment?

The education endowment foundatio n (EEF),conducted a trial researching into the impact the cognitively challenging classroom talk can lead to gains for pupils. For English, Maths and Science, they found a positive impact in English for all children in year 5. It concluded the dialogic teaching made two additional months progress in English and science.

In another study conducted by EEF, they looked at how much time was spent talking about topics such as history, geography, maths and science. They compared three groups: one which had no formal instruction; one who received traditional teacher-led lessons; and one who received an interactive lesson plan . They found that those who were taught via the interactive method achieved higher levels than both the control group and the traditional group.

How should I implement Dialogic Teaching?

There are several ways you could introduce dialogic pedagogy into your class room. The best way would be to start with small steps. You may wish to try out some of the activities suggested below and use them as the basis of starting your own dialogic teaching project.

1) Start off by asking questions. Ask open ended questions. These help build up conversation. When you ask a question, wait for someone else to answer before moving onto the next topic.

2) Use visual aids . Visual aids can include pictures or diagrams.

3) Provide multiple choice options.

4) Allow students to take turns speaking.

5) Have students write down key points from each person’s contribution.

6) Encourage students to share opinions and experiences.

7) Give feedback after every turn.

8) Make sure there is enough silence between speakers.

9) Don't interrupt when people speak.

10) Be prepared to listen carefully.

11) Let everyone finish speaking.

Embracing a dialogic learning environment

There are numerous guidelines relating to this pedagogical approach but they shouldn't be seen as straitjackets. Provide teaching staff with the principles and some underlying resources such as a dialogic teaching framework . Afford teachers the opportunity to take educational theory and use it in their own classroom practice. If the concept becomes a tick box exercise implemented by a well-meaning management team then the classroom teacher can easily become demotivated.

Maintaining professional integrity in the teaching profession requires us to trust the classroom practitioner to make decisions about their own scaffolding approach. They may facilitate collaborative learning differently from you or me. As long as the concept has been embraced and the learning process has been enhanced particularly for low-achieving students, we should trust classroom teachers to make their own decisions. Dialogic discourse comes in all sorts of form, if it is announcing student interaction and critical thinking then it's probably working.

We have been trying to systematically increase levels of thinking by increasing the complexity of student thinking. Using the Universal Thinking Framework , we can carefully guide dialogic discourse along with the critical thinking that accompanies it. By carefully taking a student through a certain cognitive route we can positively effect their discourse about the content. The collaborative learning that entails has a positive impact on both the classroom talk and the cognitive development of the student.

This dialogic learning gets to the very essence of what Vygotsky theorised. Scaffolding approaches like this means that we can support the learning process for all of our students.

Creating dialogic teaching guidelines

The following principles outline what makes up an effective dialogue between teachers and students. They have been developed from research into successful schools where there was a high degree of student participation in learning activities. The principles also reflect the views of many practitioners working with young people today.

1) Students' voices matter - they must be heard by everyone involved in the lesson. This means not only listening to them but actively engaging with their ideas and opinions. Teachers need to make it clear that they value this input. The levels of engagement need to be strong even among self-declared introverts.

2) Everyone's voice counts - if we want our learners to feel valued then we must ensure that everyone gets a chance to contribute. We cannot assume that just because somebody speaks first that they will get more airtime. If we do so, we risk creating hierarchies within classrooms based upon power rather than ability.

3) All contributions count equally - even though some might seem less important than others, all contributions still add something valuable to the discussion. This type of democratic engagement builds the foundations of a truly dialogic classroom.

4) Every idea has its place - don't let anyone dominate the debate. There needs to be space for different perspectives on any given issue. Classroom interactions can harvest some new and interesting perspectives.

5) No one knows everything - nobody has all the answers. Instead, we should encourage pupils to think critically about issues and challenge assumptions. This will help raise the quality of classroom talk and raise the levels of thinking.

Coming to a conclusion about dialogic pedagogy

Before we move on to criticisms of dialogic talk, let's briefly touch on how you can assess a structured classroom discussion as it may be difficult to grasp exactly what the students understand from the questions. The first way to assess understanding is through active participation. If a student is participating more than others, you can assume they have a better understanding although this is not always the case. Let's move on to the criticisms of dialogic talk.

Another problem with the theory is that the teachers voice is the guiding source in the lesson however, many teachers lack the tools necessary for planning effective whole class dialogues. Dialogic talk must be structured and implemented effectively to have an impact.

It requires time and effort which are often lacking in teacher education programs . In addition, it takes practice and experience to become proficient at using these techniques. Finally, it is very easy to fall back onto old habits when teaching. As such, I would suggest that teachers who wish to use dialogic methods should start small and work towards implementing larger scale lessons.

To conclude, when students are given the opportunity to form their own opinions and share their thoughts about a topic, they will have a better understanding of the subject. The power of classroom talk also extends to the development of good language skills as they engage in spoken and written discussion. By developing vocabulary and engaging in effective conversations , students will become more able to use their minds to comprehend and recall information.

A new classroom tool for classroom talk

At structural learning , we have developed a new collaborative pedagogy that helps children talk and think about their learning. Using specially designed building blocks , children can construct sentences, timelines along with all types of curriculum content. The key to the pedagogy is children articulating their ideas to one another. As groups of learners build with the blocks, they nearly always justify and reason verbally. This natural way of problem-solving promotes deeper thinking and better conversations. You can find out more about this pedagogy on our block building page .

Enhance Learner Outcomes Across Your School

Download an Overview of our Support and Resources

We'll send it over now.

Please fill in the details so we can send over the resources.

What type of school are you?

We'll get you the right resource

Is your school involved in any staff development projects?

Are your colleagues running any research projects or courses?

Do you have any immediate school priorities?

Please check the ones that apply.

Download your resource

Thanks for taking the time to complete this form, submit the form to get the tool.

Classroom Practice

0 Your cart is currently empty.

The importance of critical thinking

Monday 13 January 2020

For years theorists have studied the importance of developing critical thinking skills in pupils to create confident and independent citizens of the world— people who can hypothesise about, analyse, create and evaluate the world they live in. However, while many teachers agree on the importance of developing these skills, time restraints and a push to teach content often impacts the time spent developing critical thinkers.

Critical thinking involves the ability to gather information, process it, evaluate it using evidence and apply the information to new situations. Developing these skills is a time- consuming and progressive journey which is enhanced through immersion in opportunities to practise and discussions.

Both Linda Elder and Richard Paul from the Center for Critical Thinking explain that critical thinking is a stage theory in which pupils progress from the unreflective thinker to the accomplished thinker in a series of six stages. During each stage, pupils must demonstrate they can transfer their critical thinking skills into all aspects of their lives. For this reason, progression through stages is time-consuming and requires a multitude of practise opportunities.

Other stage theories, including Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain (Bloom et al. 1956) highlight the importance of progressing through hierarchical stages to develop higher- order thinking skills. Bloom et al. (1956) believe that simply recalling facts is the lowest level of thinking, progressing into comprehending, applying and analysing as the levels of thinking become more complex. Higher-order thinking occurs when pupils can evaluate the quality of information presented and use their knowledge to create and/or improve an item or a situation.

While adaptations have been made to Bloom's Taxonomy, the hierarchical nature of thinking still remains consistent. It is also imperative to note that pupils will progress through the stages at different rates, as with all skill development.

'Education is not the learning of facts but training the mind to think.' – Albert Einstein

So how can teachers promote critical thinking in the classroom?

Oral language plays an important role in developing critical thinkers. Encouraging discussions where pupils question phenomena or points of view, justify their personal opinions using evidence, and use prior knowledge to find solutions or alternative methods, are vital. Providing pupils with opportunities to communicate with other pupils, teachers and school staff allows them to examine alternative points of view and ways of thinking about a topic.
While critical thinking can be developed throughout all learning areas, some—such as science and design and technology—provide greater opportunities to develop these skills through hands-on investigations.

Science naturally lends itself to developing critical thinkers as it requires pupils to hypothesise about a topic, analyse or test the information, provide evidence to prove or disprove the theory/idea and evaluate the evidence. It requires pupils to constantly question the world around them and seek alternative solutions to local, national or global issues. Conducting experiments and open-ended tasks creates engaging lessons where pupils can develop their higher-order thinking skills.

Likewise, design and technology provides opportunities for pupils to use their prior knowledge to plan, create and evaluate a designed solution (a product or a service). Hands-on projects should be centred around an identified local, national or global issue/ need, such as planning and building a bird feeder for the local ranger. Pupils must use their lower-order thinking skills to plan the project and higher-order thinking skills to create and evaluate the effectiveness of their designed product.

Lastly, encouraging cooperative learning provides additional opportunities for pupils to justify their point of view, explore other pupils' points of view and reason with their peers to find the most effective solution/answer.

In summary, it is clear that developing pupils' critical thinking skills through oral discussions, hands-on investigations and cooperative learning activities is imperative and should be a priority in all schools to create critical thinkers of the future.

Looking for resources to encourage your pupils’ thinking skills, then take a look at our new release Higher-order thinking skills here.

Have you any other great ideas on teaching critical thinking in the classroom?

We would love to hear about them in the comments below.

References:

L Elder & R Paul, Critical thinking development: A stage theory, The critical thinking community, viewed 8 December 2015, http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/critical-thinking-development-a-stage-theory/483
B Bloom, M Englehart, E Furst, W Hill & D Krathwohl, Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals, Handbook I: Cognitive domain, Longmans, Green, New York, Toronto, 1956, viewed 8 December 2015, http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/bloom.html
Higher-order Thinking Skills

Share this post:

One reason we love picture books at ERG is they not only look inviting and feel wonderful in our hands, but also have layers to dig into! The themes that often emerge from picture books provide our students with ideas to explore, opinions to express, and rich conversations to be had. One magical quality of picture books is the ability to address sensitive topics in an approachable way. This is often created with word choice and illustrations.

If you are wondering how to challenge some of your highest-level readers, this lens is often useful. Exploring theme is not easy – it requires making inferences while staying grounded in text evidence. Noticing an author’s word choice in combination with the illustrations is another way to explore tone, which can stretch the thinking of your students around texts.

You may now be wondering how to support your most needy readers. One way is to read the text aloud to students, but still have them explore the rich questions that will exercise their higher-level thinking skills. It is important to allow our less successful readers to participate in discussions around rich texts. The more they do this, the more the more successful they will become.

If you have a wide range of readers, consider using the picture book as a read aloud, in a literacy station, or in small group work (if you have multiple copies). The reading, writing, and talking is often much easier to generate with picture books FIRST before you head into texts with more complex structures.

However, make no mistake about it – the critical thinking is still critical thinking. Higher level discussions come from really good questions, so don’t forget to plan ahead!

There are many titles that will lend themselves to exploring theme and tone, but here is one of ERG’s favorites .

Name of Book : The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson

Level of text:.

Guided Reading Level M, Lexile Level 300

Remember, the thinking can go well beyond the “levels”!

Brief Summary:

There is a fence that segregates Clover’s side of town from Anna’s. The two girls figure out how to become friends despite the rules of the grown-ups. This book is told from the view of the child, which creates hope while exploring issues of racial divisions.

Higher Level Thinking Questions:

What are some clues that help us infer the time period of this story?
What could the fence represent?
What words did the author use to help use our senses as we read?
What is the significance of the ending?
How did the author handle delicate subject matter?
How does the author represent “hopeful voices”?

These can be discussed in collaborative groups or used as a way to increase comprehension through writing!

Supporting Organizer:

What Does it Say, Mean, Matter?

This graphic organizer helps make student thinking visible, and serves as a bridge from concrete thinking to abstract thinking. It can be used with a variety of texts, especially those with deeper themes. It also lends itself to multiple reads.

If you like this, then you might like others by this author:

Jacqueline Woodson: The Day You Begin , Each Kindness

Save your spot at our Living Your Leadership Legacy Conference today! Visit our events page for more info. Dismiss

Critical Thinking and Book Talk Using Picturebooks

Mary Roche 1. Introducing Critical Thinking and Book Talk

Home » Funded Projects » Using picture books to develop primary school children’s critical thinking and critical literacy

Using picture books to develop primary school children’s critical thinking and critical literacy

In this collaborative action research project, we (a literacy researcher and a primary school deputy head) design and implement a series of interactive reading circles with children in a year 1 and 2 class.

Inspired by the work of Mary Roche, we use picture books to introduce the children to careful and close readings of stories, taking account of both text and images and how these work together. In small groups (no more than 8 participants) children sit together around a picture book, spending time looking at each page and discussing its meaning and content.

Our aim is to offer an approach to meaning making and engaging with fictional texts that is child centred and can serve as an antidote to the often narrow conceptions of ‘reading comprehension’ that are part of the national curriculum in England. In terms of research, our main question is how such discussions can best be facilitated and what questions and prompts teachers can use to ignite children’s ‘deep’ thinking about stories and their multiple meanings. For example, we video-record and analyse some of the circles to examine how teachers can use ‘I wonder why’ statements and open questions to facilitate children’s deep and critical thinking about author intentions and how convincing a story or idea is.

As part of the reading circles, we are also trying to find out how we can introduce the children to thinking about the meanings of visuals and modes such as colour or size.

Current UKLA Funded Projects

Books, bags and boxes: a study of the role and impact of the leeds school library service, discovering doctoral literacies: the emergence of new literacy events and relational doctoral practice, teacher’s perceptions and experiences of using narrative video games to teach literacy, reading for cultural meaning: creating a literacy toolkit for english teachers to use when selecting prose texts for diverse students. melissa jogie.

The multimodal school play: integrating performative digital animation into narrative and set design

‘To start talking phonics is crazy’: how parents understand ‘literacy’ in the lives of children with learning disabilities

Past ukla funded projects, grammar policy, pedagogy and the primary-secondary transition: students’ perceptions and reflections: ian cushing & marie helks, “you’ll never be as good as the white kids in their language”: using young adult fiction to explore language discrimination in schools. dr ian cushing & mr anthony carter, what literature texts are being taught in years 7 to 9 judith kneen, cardiff metropolitan university, developing effective oral feedback exchanges: supporting children’s writing at key stage two., rivers of multilingual reading – torrent or trickle sabine little, university of sheffield, agentic writing across the primary curriculum: using dramatic enquiry in a community of writers.

Subscribe to our Newsletter

NONFICTION BOOKS
BEST NONFICTION 2023
BEST NONFICTION 2024
Historical Biographies
The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
Philosophical Biographies
World War 2
World History
American History
British History
Chinese History
Russian History
Ancient History (up to 500)
Medieval History (500-1400)
Military History
Art History
Travel Books
Ancient Philosophy
Contemporary Philosophy
Ethics & Moral Philosophy
Great Philosophers
Social & Political Philosophy
Classical Studies
New Science Books
Maths & Statistics
Popular Science
Physics Books
Climate Change Books
How to Write
English Grammar & Usage
Books for Learning Languages
Linguistics
Political Ideologies
Foreign Policy & International Relations
American Politics
British Politics
Religious History Books
Mental Health
Neuroscience
Child Psychology
Film & Cinema
Opera & Classical Music
Behavioural Economics
Development Economics
Economic History
Financial Crisis
World Economies
Investing Books
Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
Data Science Books
Sex & Sexuality
Death & Dying
Food & Cooking
Sports, Games & Hobbies
FICTION BOOKS
BEST NOVELS 2024
BEST FICTION 2023
New Literary Fiction
World Literature
Literary Criticism
Literary Figures
Classic English Literature
American Literature
Comics & Graphic Novels
Fairy Tales & Mythology
Historical Fiction
Crime Novels
Science Fiction
Short Stories
South Africa
United States
Arctic & Antarctica
Afghanistan
Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
Netherlands
Kids Recommend Books for Kids
High School Teachers Recommendations
Prizewinning Kids' Books
Popular Series Books for Kids
BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
Ages Baby-2
Books for Teens and Young Adults
THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2023
BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2023
Best Audiobooks for Kids
Environment
Best Books for Teens of 2023
Best Kids' Books of 2023
Political Novels
New History Books
New Historical Fiction
New Biography
New Memoirs
New World Literature
New Economics Books
New Climate Books
New Math Books
New Philosophy Books
New Psychology Books
New Physics Books
THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
Actors Read Great Books
Books Narrated by Their Authors
Best Audiobook Thrillers
Best History Audiobooks
Nobel Literature Prize
Booker Prize (fiction)
Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
Financial Times (nonfiction)
Wolfson Prize (history)
Royal Society (science)
Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Make Your Own List

Philosophy Books

The best books on critical thinking, recommended by nigel warburton.

Thinking from A to Z by Nigel Warburton

Do you know your straw man arguments from your weasel words? Nigel Warburton , Five Books philosophy editor and author of Thinking from A to Z, selects some of the best books on critical thinking—and explains how they will help us make better-informed decisions and construct more valid arguments.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed

The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

The best books on Critical Thinking - Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study by Tom Chatfield

Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study by Tom Chatfield

The best books on Critical Thinking - Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

1 Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

2 thinking, fast and slow by daniel kahneman, 3 factfulness: ten reasons we're wrong about the world — and why things are better than you think by hans rosling, 4 black box thinking: the surprising truth about success by matthew syed, 5 the art of thinking clearly by rolf dobelli, 6 critical thinking: your guide to effective argument, successful analysis and independent study by tom chatfield.

I t’s been just over two years since you explained to us what critical thinking is all about. Could you update us on any books that have come out since we first spoke?

Calling Bullshit by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West started life as a course at the University of Washington. It is a book—a handbook really—written with the conviction that bullshit, particularly the kind that is circulated on the Internet, is damaging democracy , and that misinformation and disinformation can have very serious consequences. Bullshitters don’t care about truth. But truth is important, and this book shows why. It is focussed on examples from science and medicine, but ranges more widely too. It’s a lively read. It covers not just verbal bullshit, bullshit with statistics (particularly in relation to big data) and about causation, but also has a chapter on bullshit data visualisations that distract from the content they are about, or present that data in misleading ways. Like all good books on critical thinking this one includes some discussion of the psychology of being taken in by misleading contributions to public debate.

In How To Make the World Add Up , Tim Harford gives us ten rules for thinking better about numbers, together with a Golden Rule (‘Be curious’). Anyone who has listened to his long-running radio series More or Less will know how brilliant Tim is at explaining number-based claims – as I read it, I hallucinated Tim’s reassuring, sceptical, reasonable, amused, and patient voice. He draws on a rich and fascinating range of examples to teach us (gently) how not to be taken in by statistics and poorly supported claims. There is some overlap with Calling Bullshit , but they complement each other. Together they provide an excellent training in how not to be bamboozled by data-based claims.

[end of update. The original interview appears below]

___________________________

We’re here to talk about critical thinking. Before we discuss your book recommendations, I wonder if you would first explain: What exactly is critical thinking, and when should we be using it?

There’s a whole cluster of things that go under the label ‘critical thinking’. There’s what you might call formal logic , the most extreme case of abstractions. For example take the syllogism: if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, you can deduce from that structure of arguments that Socrates is mortal. You could put anything in the slots of ‘men,’ ‘Socrates,’ ‘mortal’, and whatever you put in, the argument structure remains valid. If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. That kind of logic, which can be represented using letters and signs rather than words, has its place. Formal logic is a quasi-mathematical (some would say mathematical) subject.

But that’s just one element of critical thinking. Critical thinking is broader, though it encompasses that. In recent years, it’s been very common to include discussion of cognitive biases—the psychological mistakes we make in reasoning and the tendencies we have to think in certain patterns which don’t give us reliably good results. That’s another aspect: focussing on the cognitive biases is a part of what’s sometimes called ‘informal logic’, the sorts of reasoning errors that people make, which can be described as fallacious. They’re not, strictly speaking, logical fallacies, always. Some of them are simply psychological tendencies that give us unreliable results.

The gambler’s fallacy is a famous one: somebody throwing a die that isn’t loaded has thrown it three times without getting a six, and then imagines that, by some kind of law of averages, the fourth time they’re more likely to get a six, because they haven’t yet got one yet. That’s just a bad kind of reasoning, because each time that you roll the dice, the odds are the same: there’s a one in six chance of throwing a six. There’s no cumulative effect and a dice doesn’t have a memory. But we have this tendency, or certainly gamblers often do, to think that somehow the world will even things out and give you a win if you’ve had a series of losses. That’s a kind of informal reasoning error that many of us make, and there are lots of examples like that.

I wrote a little book called Thinking from A to Z which was meant to name and explain a whole series of moves and mistakes in thinking. I included logic, some cognitive biases, some rhetorical moves, and also (for instance) the topic of pseudo-profundity, whereby people make seemingly deep statements that are in fact shallow. The classical example is to give a seeming paradox—to say, for example ‘knowledge is just a kind of ignorance,’ or ‘virtue is only achieved through vice.’ Actually, that’s just a rhetorical trick, and once you see it, you can generate any number of such ‘profundities’. I suppose that would fall under rhetoric, the art of persuasion: persuading people that you are a deeper thinker than you are. Good reasoning isn’t necessarily the best way to persuade somebody of something, and there are many devious tricks that people use within discussion to persuade people of a particular position. The critical thinker is someone who recognises the moves, can anatomise the arguments, and call them to attention.

So, in answer to your question: critical thinking is not just pure logic . It’s a cluster of things. But its aim is to be clear about what is being argued, what follows from the given evidence and arguments, and to detect any cognitive biases or rhetorical moves that may lead us astray.

Many of the terms you define and illustrate in Thinking from A to Z— things like ‘straw man’ arguments and ‘weasel words’—have been creeping into general usage. I see them thrown around on Twitter. Do you think that our increased familiarity with debate, thanks to platforms like Twitter, has improved people’s critical thinking or made it worse?

I think that improving your critical thinking can be quite difficult. But one of the ways of doing it is to have memorable labels, which can describe the kind of move that somebody’s making, or the kind of reasoning error, or the kind of persuasive technique they’re using.

For example, you can step back from a particular case and see that somebody’s using a ‘weak analogy’. Once you’re familiar with the notion of a weak analogy, it’s a term that you can use to draw attention to a comparison between two things which aren’t actually alike in the respects that somebody is implying they are. Then the next move of a critical thinker would be to point out the respects in which this analogy doesn’t hold, and so demonstrate how poor it is at supporting the conclusion provided. Or, to use the example of weasel words—once you know that concept, it’s easier to spot them and to speak about them.

Social media, particularly Twitter, is quite combative. People are often looking for critical angles on things that people have said, and you’re limited in words. I suspect that labels are probably in use there as a form of shorthand. As long as they’re used in a precise way, this can be a good thing. But remember that responding to someone’s argument with ‘that’s a fallacy’, without actually spelling out what sort of fallacy it is supposed to be, is a form of dismissive rhetoric itself.

There are also a huge number of resources online now which allow people to discover definitions of critical thinking terms. When I first wrote Thinking from A to Z , there weren’t the same number of resources available. I wrote it in ‘A to Z’ form, partly just as a fun device that allows for lots of cross references, but partly because I wanted to draw attention to the names of things. Naming the moves is important.

“People seem to get a kick out of the idea of sharing irrelevant features—it might be a birthday or it might be a hometown—with somebody famous. But so what?”

The process of writing the book improved my critical thinking quite a lot, because I had to think more precisely about what particular terms meant and find examples of them that were unambiguous. That was the hardest thing, to find clear-cut examples of the various moves, to illustrate them. I coined some of the names myself: there’s one in there which is called the ‘Van Gogh fallacy,’ which is the pattern of thought when people say: ‘Well, Van Gogh had red hair, was a bit crazy, was left-handed, was born on the 30th of March, and, what do you know, I share all those things’—which I do happen to do—‘and therefore I must be a great genius too.’

I love that. Well, another title that deals with psychological biases is the first critical thinking book that you want to discuss, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow . Why did you choose this one?

This is an international bestseller by the Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist—although he’s principally a psychologist—Daniel Kahneman. He developed research with Amos Tversky, who unfortunately died young. I think it would have been a co-written book otherwise. It’s a brilliant book that summarizes their psychological research on cognitive biases (or its patterns of thinking) which all of us are prone to, which aren’t reliable.

There is a huge amount of detail in the book. It summarizes a lifetime of research—two lifetimes, really. But Kahneman is very clear about the way he describes patterns of thought: as using either ‘System One’ or ‘System Two.’ System One is the fast, intuitive, emotional response to situations where we jump to a conclusion very quickly. You know: 2 + 2 is 4. You don’t think about it.

System Two is more analytical, conscious, slower, methodical, deliberative. A more logical process, which is much more energy consuming. We stop and think. How would you answer 27 × 17? You’d have to think really hard, and do a calculation using the System Two kind of thinking. The problem is that we rely on this System One—this almost instinctive response to situations—and often come out with bad answers as a result. That’s a framework within which a lot of his analysis is set.

I chose this book because it’s a good read, and it’s a book you can keep coming back to—but also because it’s written by a very important researcher in the area. So it’s got the authority of the person who did the actual psychological research. But it’s got some great descriptions of the phenomena he researches, I think. Anchoring, for instance. Do you know about anchoring?

I think so. Is that when you provide an initial example that shapes future responses? Perhaps you’d better explain it.

That’s more or less it. If you present somebody with an arbitrary number, psychologically, most people seem prone when you ask them a question to move in the direction of that number. For instance, there’s an experiment with judges. They were being asked off the cuff: What would be a good sentence for a particular crime, say shoplifting? Maybe they’d say it would be a six-month sentence for a persistent shoplifter.

But if you prime a judge by giving an anchoring number—if you ask, ‘Should the sentence for shoplifting be more than nine months?’ They’re more like to say on average that the sentence should be eight months than they would have been otherwise. And if you say, ‘Should it be punished by a sentence of longer than three months?’ they’re more likely to come down in the area of five , than they would otherwise.

So the way you phrase a question, by introducing these numbers, you give an anchoring effect. It sways people’s thinking towards that number. If you ask people if Gandhi was older than 114 years old when he died, people give a higher answer than if you just asked them: ‘How old was Gandhi when he died?’

I’ve heard this discussed in the context of charity donations. Asking if people will donate, say, £20 a month returns a higher average pledge than asking for £1 a month.

People use this anchoring technique often with selling wine on a list too. If there’s a higher-priced wine for £75, then somehow people are more drawn to one that costs £40 than they would otherwise have been. If that was the most expensive one on the menu, they wouldn’t have been drawn to the £40 bottle, but just having seen the higher price, they seem to be drawn to a higher number. This phenomenon occurs in many areas.

And there are so many things that Kahneman covers. There’s the sunk cost fallacy, this tendency that we have when we give our energy, or money, or time to a project—we’re very reluctant to stop, even when it’s irrational to carry on. You see this a lot in descriptions of withdrawal from war situations. We say: ‘We’ve given all those people’s lives, all that money, surely we’re not going to stop this campaign now.’ But it might be the rational thing to do. All that money being thrown there, doesn’t mean that throwing more in that direction will get a good result. It seems that we have a fear of future regret that outweighs everything else. This dominates our thinking.

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .

What Kahneman emphasizes is that System One thinking produces overconfidence based on what’s often an erroneous assessment of a situation. All of us are subject to these cognitive biases, and that they’re extremely difficult to remove. Kahneman’s a deeply pessimistic thinker in some respects; he recognizes that even after years of studying these phenomena he can’t eliminate them from his own thinking. I interviewed him for a podcast once , and said to him: ‘Surely, if you teach people critical thinking, they can get better at eliminating some of these biases.’ He was not optimistic about that. I’m much more optimistic than him. I don’t know whether he had empirical evidence to back that up, about whether studying critical thinking can increase your thinking abilities. But I was surprised how pessimistic he was.

Interesting.

Unlike some of the other authors that we’re going to discuss . . .

Staying on Kahneman for a moment, you mentioned that he’d won a Nobel Prize, not for his research in psychology per se but for his influence on the field of economics . His and Tversky’s ground-breaking work on the irrationality of human behaviour and thinking forms the spine of a new field.

Let’s look at Hans Rosling’s book next, this is Factfulness . What does it tell us about critical thinking?

Rosling was a Swedish statistician and physician, who, amongst other things, gave some very popular TED talks . His book Factfulness , which was published posthumously—his son and daughter-in-law completed the book—is very optimistic, so completely different in tone from Kahneman’s. But he focuses in a similar way on the ways that people make mistakes.

We make mistakes, classically, in being overly pessimistic about things that are changing in the world. In one of Rosling’s examples he asks what percentage of the world population is living on less than $2 a day. People almost always overestimate that number, and also the direction in which things are moving, and the speed in which they’re moving. Actually, in 1966, half of the world’s population was in extreme poverty by that measure, but by 2017 it was only 9%, so there’s been a dramatic reduction in global poverty. But most people don’t realise this because they don’t focus on the facts, and are possibly influenced by what they may have known about the situation in the 1960s.

If people are asked what percentage of children are vaccinated against common diseases, they almost always underestimate it. The correct answer is a very high proportion, something like 80%. Ask people what the life expectancy for every child born today is, the global average, and again they get it wrong. It’s over 70 now, another surprisingly high figure. What Rosling’s done as a statistician is he’s looked carefully at the way the world is.

“Pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better”

People assume that the present is like the past, so when they’ve learnt something about the state of world poverty or they’ve learnt about health, they often neglect to take a second reading and see the direction in which things are moving, and the speed with which things are changing. That’s the message of this book.

It’s an interesting book; it’s very challenging. It may be over-optimistic. But it does have this startling effect on the readers of challenging widely held assumptions, much as Steven Pinker ‘s The Better Angels of Our Nature has done. It’s a plea to look at the empirical data, and not just assume that you know how things are now. But pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better. In many ways, though clearly not in relation to global warming and climate catastrophe, the statistics are actually very good for humanity.

That’s reassuring.

So this is critical thinking of a numerical, statistical kind. It’s a bit different from the more verbally-based critical thinking that I’ve been involved with. I’m really interested to have my my assumptions challenged, and Factfulness is a very readable book. It’s lively and thought-provoking.

Coming back to what you said about formal logic earlier, statistics is another dense subject which needs specialist training. But it’s one that has a lot in common with critical thinking and a lot of people find very difficult—by which I mean, it’s often counter-intuitive.

One of the big problems for an ordinary reader looking at this kind of book is that we are not equipped to judge the reliability of his sources, and so the reliability of the conclusions that he draws. I think we have to take it on trust and authority and hope that, given the division of intellectual labour, there are other statisticians looking at his work and seeing whether he was actually justified in drawing the conclusions that he drew. He made these sorts of public pronouncements for a long time and responded to critics.

But you’re right that there is a problem here. I believe that most people can equip themselves with tools for critical thinking that work in everyday life. They can learn something about cognitive biases; they can learn about reasoning and rhetoric, and I believe that we can put ourselves as members of a democracy in a position where we think critically about the evidence and arguments that are being presented to us, politically and in the press. That should be open to all intelligent people, I think. It is not a particularly onerous task to equip yourself with a basic tools of thinking clearly.

Absolutely. Next you wanted to talk about Five Books alumnus Matthew Syed ‘s Black Box Thinking .

Yes, quite a different book. Matthew Syed is famous as a former international table tennis player, but—most people probably don’t know this—he has a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford as well.

This book is really interesting. It’s an invitation to think differently about failure. The title, Black Box Thinking, comes from the black boxes which are standardly included in every passenger aircraft, so that if an accident occurs there’s a recording of the flight data and a recording of the audio communications as the plane goes down. When there’s a crash, rescuers always aim to recover these two black boxes. The data is then analysed, the causes of the crash, dissected and scrutinized, and the information shared across the aeronautic industry and beyond.

Obviously, everybody wants to avoid aviation disasters because they’re so costly in terms of loss of human life. They undermine trust in the whole industry. There’s almost always some kind of technical or human error that can be identified, and everybody can learn from particular crashes. This is a model of an industry where, when there is a failure, it’s treated as a very significant learning experience, with the result that airline travel has become a very safe form of transport.

This contrasts with some other areas of human endeavour, such as, sadly, much of healthcare, where the information about failures often isn’t widely shared. This can be for a number of reasons: there may be a fear of litigation—so if a surgeon does something unorthodox, or makes a mistake, and somebody as a result doesn’t survive an operation, the details of exactly what happened on the operating table will not be widely shared, typically, because there is this great fear of legal comeback.

The hierarchical aspects of the medical profession may have a part to play here, too. People higher up in the profession are able to keep a closed book, and not share their mistakes with others, because it might be damaging to their careers for people to know about their errors. There has been, historically anyway, a tendency for medical negligence and medical error, to be kept very quiet, kept hidden, hard to investigate.

“You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it”

What Matthew Syed is arguing is that we need to take a different attitude to failure and see it as the aviation industry does. He’s particularly interested in this being done within the healthcare field, but more broadly too. It’s an idea that’s come partly from his reading of the philosopher Karl Popper, who described how science progresses not by proving theories true, but by trying to disprove them. You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it. So, in a sense, the failure of the hypothesis is the way by which science progresses: conjecture followed by refutation, not hypothesis followed by confirmation.

As Syed argues, we progress in all kinds of areas is by making mistakes. He was a superb table-tennis player, and he knows that every mistake that he made was a learning experience, at least potentially, a chance to improve. I think you’d find the same attitude among musicians, or in areas where practitioners are very attentive to the mistakes that they make, and how those failures can teach them in a way that allows them to make a leap forward. The book has a whole range of examples, many from industry, about how different ways of thinking about failure can improve the process and the output of particular practices.

When we think of bringing up kids to succeed, and put emphasis on avoiding failure, we may not be helping them develop. Syed’s argument is that we should make failure a more positive experience, rather than treat it as something that’s terrifying, and always to be shied away from. If you’re trying to achieve success, and you think, ‘I have to achieve that by accumulating other successes,’ perhaps that’s the wrong mindset to achieve success at the higher levels. Perhaps you need to think, ‘Okay, I’m going to make some mistakes, how can I learn from this, how can I share these mistakes, and how can other people learn from them too?’

That’s interesting. In fact, just yesterday I was discussing a book by Atul Gawande, the surgeon and New Yorker writer, called The Checklist Manifesto . In that, Gawande also argues that we should draw from the success of aviation, in that case, the checklists that they run through before take-off and so on, and apply it to other fields like medicine. A system like this is aiming to get rid of human error, and I suppose that’s what critical thinking tries to do, too: rid us of the gremlins in machine.

Well, it’s also acknowledging that when you make an error, it can have disastrous consequence. But you don’t eliminate errors just by pretending they didn’t occur. With the Chernobyl disaster , for instance, there was an initial unwillingness to accept the evidence in front of people’s eyes that a disaster had occurred, combined with a fear of being seen to have messed up. There’s that tendency to think that everything’s going well, a kind of cognitive bias towards optimism and a fear of being responsible for error, but it’s also this unwillingness to see that in certain areas, admission of failure and sharing of the knowledge that mistakes have occurred is the best way to minimize failure in the future.

Very Beckettian . “Fail again. Fail better.”

Absolutely. Well, shall we move onto to Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 book, The Art of Thinking Clearly ?

Yes. This is quite a light book in comparison with the others. It’s really a summary of 99 moves in thinking, some of them psychological, some of them logical, some of them social. What I like about it is that he uses lots of examples. Each of the 99 entries is pretty short, and it’s the kind of book you can dip into. I would think it would be very indigestible to read it from cover to cover, but it’s a book to keep going back to.

I included it because it suggests you can you improve your critical thinking by having labels for things, recognising the moves, but also by having examples which are memorable, through which you can learn. This is an unpretentious book. Dobelli doesn’t claim to be an original thinker himself; he’s a summariser of other people’s thoughts. What he’s done is brought lots of different things together in one place.

Just to give a flavour of the book: he’s got a chapter on the paradox of choice that’s three pages long called ‘Less is More,’ and it’s the very simple idea that if you present somebody with too many choices, rather than freeing them and improving their life and making them happier, it wastes a lot of their time, even destroys the quality of their life.

“If you present somebody with too many choices, it wastes a lot of their time”

I saw an example of this the other day in the supermarket. I bumped into a friend who was standing in front of about 20 different types of coffee. The type that he usually buys wasn’t available, and he was just frozen in this inability to make a decision between all the other brands that were in front of him. If there’d only been one or two, he’d have just gone for one of those quickly.

Dobelli here is summarising the work of psychologist Barry Schwartz who concluded that generally, a broader selection leads people to make poorer decisions for themselves. We think going into the world that what we need is more choice, because that’ll allow us to do the thing we want to do, acquire just the right consumable, or whatever. But perhaps just raising that possibility, the increased number of choices will lead us to make poorer choices than if we had fewer to choose between.

Now, that’s the descriptive bit, but at the end of this short summary, he asks ‘So what can you do about this practically?’ His answer is that you should think carefully about what you want before you look at what’s on offer. Write down the things you think you want and stick to them. Don’t let yourself be swayed by further choices. And don’t get caught up in a kind of irrational perfectionism. This is not profound advice, but it’s stimulating. And that’s typical of the book.

You can flip through these entries and you can take them or leave them. It’s a kind of self-help manual.

Oh, I love that. A critical thinking self-help book .

It really is in that self-help genre, and it’s nicely done. He gets in and out in a couple of pages for each of these. I wouldn’t expect this to be on a philosophy reading list or anything like that, but it’s been an international bestseller. It’s a clever book, and I think it’s definitely worth dipping into and coming back to. The author is not claiming that it is the greatest or most original book in the world; rather, it’s just a book that’s going to help you think clearly. That’s the point.

Absolutely. Let’s move to the final title, Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study . We had Tom on Five Books many moons ago to discuss books about computer games . This is rather different. What makes it so good?

Well, this is a different kind of book. I was trying to think about somebody reading this interview who wants to improve their thinking. Of the books I’ve discussed, the ones that are most obviously aimed at that are Black Box Thinking , the Dobelli book, and Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking . The others are more descriptive or academic. But this book is quite a contrast with the Dobelli’s. The Art of Thinking Clearly is a very short and punchy book, while Tom’s is longer, and more of a textbook. It includes exercises, with summaries in the margins, it’s printed in textbook format. But that shouldn’t put a general reader off, because I think it’s the kind of thing you can work through yourself and dip into.

It’s clearly written and accessible, but it is designed to be used on courses as well. Chatfield teaches a point, then asks you to test yourself to see whether you’ve learnt the moves that he’s described. It’s very wide-ranging: it includes material on cognitive biases as well as more logical moves and arguments. His aim is not simply to help you think better, and to structure arguments better, but also to write better. It’s the kind of book that you might expect a good university to present to the whole first year intake, across a whole array of courses. But I’m including it here more as a recommendation for the autodidact. If you want to learn to think better: here is a course in the form of a book. You can work through this on your own.

It’s a contrast with the other books as well, so that’s part of my reason for putting it in there, so there’s a range of books on this list.

Definitely. I think Five Books readers, almost by definition, tend towards autodidacticism, so this is a perfect book recommendation. And, finally, to close: do you think that critical thinking is something that more people should make an effort to learn? I suppose the lack of it might help to explain the rise of post-truth politics.

It’s actually quite difficult to teach critical thinking in isolation. In the Open University’s philosophy department, when I worked there writing and designing course materials, we decided in the end to teach critical thinking as it arose in teaching other content: by stepping back from time to time to look at the critical thinking moves being made by philosophers, and the critical thinking moves a good student might make in response to them. Pedagogically, that often works much better than attempting to teach critical thinking as a separate subject in isolation.

This approach can work in scientific areas too. A friend of mine has run a successful university course for zoologists on critical thinking, looking at correlation and cause, particular types of rhetoric that are used in write ups and experiments, and so on, but all the time driven by real examples from zoology. If you’ve got some subject matter, and you’ve got examples of people reasoning, and you can step back from it, I think this approach can work very well.

But in answer to your question, I think that having some basic critical thinking skills is a prerequisite of being a good citizen in a democracy . If you are too easily swayed by rhetoric, weak at analysing arguments and the ways that people use evidence, and prone to all kinds of biases that you are unaware of, how can you engage politically? So yes, all of us can improve our critical thinking skills, and I do believe that that is an aspect of living the examined life that Socrates was so keen we all should do.

December 4, 2020

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Nigel Warburton

Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, writer and host of the podcast Philosophy Bites . Featuring short interviews with the world's best philosophers on bite-size topics, the podcast has been downloaded more than 40 million times. He is also our philosophy editor here at Five Books , where he has been interviewing other philosophers about the best books on a range of philosophy topics since 2013 (you can read all the interviews he's done here: not all are about philosophy). In addition, he's recommended books for us on the best introductions to philosophy , the best critical thinking books, as well as some of the key texts to read in the Western canon . His annual recommendations of the best philosophy books of the year are among our most popular interviews on Five Books . As an author, he is best known for his introductory philosophy books, listed below:

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

IMAGES

The benefits of critical thinking for students and how to develop it
8 elemental steps to critical thinking:
How to Improve Critical Thinking
12 Benefits of Critical Thinking: Discover the Importance of Using this
PPT
6 Main Types of Critical Thinking Skills (With Examples)

VIDEO

The failure of finishing your To-Do lists
Critical Thinking 1 Units 1-4 Review Questions
Why We Should Read Books
High Up Academy For English and Leadership: Mind Talk : The importance of critical thinking
Unlocking the Secrets of Success: Why Reading Matters More Than You Think
Listening Comprehension and Booktalk: What Does the Research Tell Us?

COMMENTS

An approach to developing critical thinking abilities in early years
That's where, I believe, an approach called 'Critical Thinking and Book Talk' (CT&BT, Roche, 2010) can play a role. It is premised on the idea of developing young children's ability to make meaning from the texts and images of picture books as they discuss them together. Developing the Critical Thinking and Book Talk approach
Critical Thinking: A Key Foundation for Language and Literacy ...
Critical thinking happens when children draw on their existing knowledge and experience, as well as on their problem-solving skills, to do things like: Compare and contrast. Explain why things happen. Evaluate ideas and form opinions. Understand the perspectives of others. Predict what will happen in the future. Think of creative solutions.
Book Talk: Creating Excitement About Reading
A book talk is an activity used in many classrooms of all ages to generate excitement and discussion around books. It involves students giving a short (2-3 minute) presentation to the class about a book they have enjoyed. A book talk is not designed to be a formal book report but is a more relaxed presentation.
Conversations with Children! Asking Questions That Stretch ...
Asking Questions That Stretch Children's Thinking. When we ask children questions—especially big, open-ended questions—we support their language development and critical thinking. We can encourage them to tell us about themselves and talk about the materials they are using, their ideas, and their reflections. This is the fifth and final ...
PDF Additional resources for Critical thinking and book talk
Roche's Critical Thinking and Book Talk approach is listed first in this set of support materials for the Irish Primary Language Curriculum. Mary Roche's Padlet includes a wide range of literature about picture books. education.nsw.gov.au. Mary Roche's article in Books for Keeps. Mary Roche's post on the Scéalta- the Early Childhood ...
'Critical Thinking and Book Talk'
The Critical Thinking and Book Talk (CT&BT) approach, using carefully chosen picturebooks as stimuli for thinking, engagement and discussion, can constitute an accessible, multimodal resource for adding to these skills, while at the same time developing a far wider range of literary understanding than focusing solely on skills permits.
What Are Critical Thinking Skills and Why Are They Important?
According to the University of the People in California, having critical thinking skills is important because they are [ 1 ]: Universal. Crucial for the economy. Essential for improving language and presentation skills. Very helpful in promoting creativity. Important for self-reflection.
Developing Children's Critical Thinking through Picturebooks
1. Critical Thinking and Book Talk' - The 'why' factor 2. Comprehension, making meaning, literacy, critical thinking and critical literacy 3. Interactive, or dialogic, reading aloud 4. A focus on oral language development 5. Some picturebook theory 6. Critical Thinking and Book Talk in the Classroom 7. Practical advice 8. Conclusion
PDF Introduction
Critical literacy, book talk and dialogic teaching In critical literacy, teachers are facilitators of dialogue (Freire, 1972). In this role, the teacher is not the only person holding valid knowledge. In Roche's picturebook talks, the teacher uses 'open-ended comments and questions' (2015 :112) to stimulate the children's thinking
PDF Fostering Creativity, Imagination and Critical Thinking in Gmgy ...
Picture books are often thought of as belonging only in infant classrooms, but they are perfect for introducing children of all ages to big ideas, critical engagement, and the notion of making meaning together through thinking and discussion (Leland, et al., 2013). Critical thinking and Book talk encourage children to become critical
Developing Children's Critical Thinking through Picturebooks
ABSTRACT. This accessible text will show students and class teachers how they can enable their pupils to become critical thinkers through the medium of picturebooks. By introducing children to the notion of making-meaning together through thinking and discussion, Roche focuses on carefully chosen picturebooks as a stimulus for discussion, and ...
Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking. Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms ...
Using Picture Books To Teach Critical Thinking
For a 'Critical Thinking and Book Talk' session in a classroom. read a picturebook aloud with participants seated in a semicircle initially. ensuring that all can see the images clearly. Visual literacy — decoding images — is as important as decoding text. The reading. writing. and talking is often much easier to generate with picture ...
PDF Fostering Creativity Imagination and Critical Thinking in GMGY
Fostering Creativity Imagination and Critical Thinking in GMGY
6 Benefits of Critical Thinking and Why They Matter
Critical thinking capacity does all that and more. 4. It's a multi-faceted practice. Critical thinking is known for encompassing a wide array of disciplines, and cultivating a broad range of cognitive talents. One could indeed say that it's a cross-curricular activity for the mind, and the mind must be exercised just like a muscle to stay ...
Critical Thinking and Decision-Making
Simply put, critical thinking is the act of deliberately analyzing information so that you can make better judgements and decisions. It involves using things like logic, reasoning, and creativity, to draw conclusions and generally understand things better. This may sound like a pretty broad definition, and that's because critical thinking is a ...
Dialogic Teaching: A classroom guide for better thinking and talking
Dialogic teaching strategies create a rich and engaging learning experience that promotes student voice and participation. At the core of this approach is the use of dialogue during classroom teaching, which fosters an environment that nurtures the development of critical thinking and collaboration.
PDF Critical Thinking Book Talk
We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.
The importance of critical thinking
The importance of critical thinking. Monday 13 January 2020. For years theorists have studied the importance of developing critical thinking skills in pupils to create confident and independent citizens of the world— people who can hypothesise about, analyse, create and evaluate the world they live in. However, while many teachers agree on ...
Picturebooks and Critical Inquiry: Tools to (Re)Imagine a More
Energizing the importance of social responsibility, building critical communities of care and compassion, and advancing self-reflection and critical thinking in our youngest learners can have positive and lasting effects in our school communities and beyond. Utilizing picturebooks as tools for reimagining a more inclusive world can often be the ...
Using Picture Books to Increase Critical Thinking
The themes that often emerge from picture books provide our students with ideas to explore, opinions to express, and rich conversations to be had. One magical quality of picture books is the ability to address sensitive topics in an approachable way. This is often created with word choice and illustrations. If you are wondering how to challenge ...
Critical Thinking and Book Talk Using Picturebooks
Getting started with critical thinking and book talk; Mary Roche 4. Assessing children's critical thinking and book talk; Mary Roche 3. Philosophical underpinnings of CT and BT; Mary Roche 1. Introducing Critical Thinking and Book Talk 8 years ago.
Using picture books to develop primary school children's critical
Inspired by the work of Mary Roche, we use picture books to introduce the children to careful and close readings of stories, taking account of both text and images and how these work together. In small groups (no more than 8 participants) children sit together around a picture book, spending time looking at each page and discussing its meaning ...
The best books on Critical Thinking
Thinking from A to Z. by Nigel Warburton. Read. 1 Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West. 2 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. 3 Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. 4 Black Box Thinking: The Surprising ...
Mary Roche 1. Introducing Critical Thinking and Book Talk
8 years ago More. NCCA. Download. Share. Upload, livestream, and create your own videos, all in HD. This is "Mary Roche 1. Introducing Critical Thinking and Book Talk" by NCCA on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.