Applying Critical Thinking to Academic Problems

As you grapple with academic problems and papers, you’ll be expected to use your critical thinking skills — analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating — as you read and write. You may simply dive in, using each skill as needed. However, the very wording of an assignment or examination question may alert you to a skill that your instructor expects you to use, as the first sample assignment in each set illustrates in the chart below.

Using Critical Thinking for College Assignments

Critical Thinking Skill Sample College Writing Assignments
Analysis: breaking into parts and elements based on a principle
  • Describe the immediate causes of the 1929 stock market crash. (Analyze by using the principle of immediate causes to identify and explain the reasons for the 1929 crash.)
  • Trace the stages through which a bill becomes federal law.
  • Explain and illustrate the three dominant styles of parenting.
  • Define romanticism, identifying and illustrating its major characteristics.
Synthesis: combining parts and elements to form new wholes
  • Discuss the following statement: High-minded opposition to slavery was only one cause, and not a very important one, of the animosity between North and South that in 1861 escalated into civil war. (Synthesize by combining the causes or elements of the North-South animosity, going beyond the opposition to slavery, to form a new whole: your conclusion that accounts for the escalation into civil war.)
  • Imagine that you are a trial lawyer in 1921, charged with defending Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder. Argue for their acquittal on whatever grounds you can justify.
Evaluation: judging according to standards or criteria
  • Present and evaluate the most widely accepted theories that account for the disappearance of the dinosaurs. (Evaluate, based on standards such as scientific merit, the credibility of each theory.)
  • Defend or challenge the idea that houses and public buildings should be constructed to last no longer than twenty years.
  • Contrast the models of the solar system advanced by Copernicus and by Kepler, showing how the latter improved on the former.