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Build Your Critical Thinking Skills

As noted in the chapter on building a foundation for success, critical thinking is the ability to consider information in a thoughtful way, understand how to think logically and rationally, and apply those methods of thinking in your classes and your life.² You use critical thinking in all kinds of situations: For instance, when you’re making the tough decision of figuring out how many college loans you should apply for. You also use it to assess whether information — such as a candidate’s political position, an article you’ve read online, or claims made in a product advertisement — makes sense or is trustworthy.

Critical Thinking: The ability to consider information in a thoughtful way, understand how to think logically and rationally, and apply those methods of thinking in your classes and your life.

In this section we’ll look at key elements of critical thinking, including the skills involved and tips for mastering those skills.

Truth or Myth? When you think critically, you assess whether information is trustworthy: Does it make sense? Does it come from a credible, unbiased source? Critical thinking helps you avoid the mistake of blindly accepting whatever you see, hear, or read. So it saves you from reacting to information in a knee-jerk way — like driving for days to see a supposed UFO crash site.

AP Photo/Eric Draper

The Higher-Level Thinking Skills behind Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is made up of a collection of skills that help you assess information, answer questions, and make decisions. These skills are also known as higher-level thinking skills because they require you to think in sophisticated ways, such as evaluating and synthesizing information. Yet all higher-level thinking is based on lower-level thinking skills, such as remembering facts, dates, and definitions or describing an object or idea. One way to think of lower- and higher-level thinking is to consider the six questions journalists typically ask: Who?, What?, Where?, and When? are lower-level questions because they focus on basic facts and information, while How? and Why? are higher-level questions because they require you to connect and work with those basic facts.

ACTIVITY: In groups, ask students to discuss scenarios in their own lives when they used each of the skills listed in Table 2.1. How did they feel about the outcome of each scenario? What could they do in the future to focus more on these skills?

Table 2.1 shows a few examples of higher-level thinking skills. As you read through the rest of this chapter and the book, you’ll use these and other critical thinking skills to make smart decisions about your coursework, life, and career.

ACTIVITY: Ask students to select a recent article from a credible newspaper and use at least three of the five critical thinking skills listed in Table 2.1 to critique the article. Students may do this in a written response or present their critique in class.

Table 2.1: TABLE 2.1 Examples of Higher-Level Thinking Skills

Skill	Definition	Examples
Comparing and contrasting	Identifying similarities and differences between two or more concepts	To prepare for a sociology exam, you identify similarities and differences between Marxism and socialism. You want a new smartphone, so you compare and contrast data plans and other terms offered by several vendors to see which vendor offers the best deal.
Deducing	Arriving at a conclusion using reason and logic	You notice that all your friends who take time to study for exams get better grades than those who don’t study. You deduce that you can improve your grades if you study more. Someone you’ve dated several times has stopped responding to your texts and avoids looking at you in class. You conclude that this person has lost interest in spending time with you.
Synthesizing	Combining facts into a larger understanding of a concept	In your computer programming class, you learn that different techniques for finding and fixing software bugs all have limitations. You figure out a way to combine several techniques to compensate for their various limitations so that you can find and fix more bugs. As a marketing assistant, you review and synthesize comments from a focus group assembled to examine a new product. Participants’ comments suggest that the product name is intriguing but that it doesn’t communicate the product’s key benefits clearly.
Evaluating	Judging the authenticity or soundness of an argument	For a journalism class assignment, you read an article arguing against vaccinating children and adults against influenza (the flu) because the vaccine can have side effects and doesn’t guarantee immunity. You judge the argument weak because the author doesn’t address the fact that vaccination significantly lowers hospitalization rates for the flu.³ Your boss says you can’t have a raise because the company is having financial troubles. After evaluating the situation, you question this explanation because the company is hiring new employees.
Prioritizing	Determining the order of importance of tasks	To complete a term paper on the American Revolution, you list all the tasks involved (such as reading source materials, preparing an outline, and writing and revising the paper). You decide that the most important tasks are those that all the others depend on, such as reading sources, and those that will take the most time, such as preparing an outline. Your manager has just given you several new responsibilities. You prioritize those that directly support an important goal your manager has set for the team: increasing sales.

How to Use Your Higher-Level Thinking Skills

Now that you have a sense of the types of higher-level thinking skills involved in critical thinking, let’s explore how to use them. The next time you have a decision to make, a question to answer, or an argument to consider, follow these guidelines to reach careful conclusions.

ACTIVITY: Ask students to evaluate the credibility of popular Web sites such as Buzzfeed.com, HuffingtonPost.com, and Wikipedia.com. Then provide specific examples of where students may go to find more credible information (such as libraries and online research databases).

Gather and Evaluate Information. To think critically, you need information. The kind of information you need depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you want to choose a major, you’ll need information about your interests, values, strengths, and possible career goals. If you’re writing a term paper, you’ll need information found in books, your class notes, or readings on reserve in the library.

WRITING PROMPT: Have students reflect on what it means to be open-minded. How would they handle a situation similar to Christopher’s in their own lives? Ask them to write about a time when they benefited from being open-minded.

Having good information can steer you in the right direction and help you avoid mistakes. Imagine you’re a doctor treating a sick patient. If you diagnose the person’s medical problem using information that isn’t accurate, you could end up treating him for, say, an earache when he really has the flu. That’s why you have to evaluate how reliable your information is. If a source is questionable or hard to assess — maybe you overheard something from a friend’s cousin’s dog walker — you’ll need another source to back up the claims before you can trust the information. Remember Christopher? His sources — TV shows and Web sites — left out important facts and even distorted information, so they weren’t very reliable. Better sources lead to better choices.

WRITING PROMPT: As an alternative, have students reflect on a time when they were not open-minded. What made them resistant to considering alternative perspectives? How did this situation turn out? How might they encourage themselves to be more open-minded in future situations?

Keep an Open Mind. Critical thinking involves keeping an open mind. To do this, be open to new possibilities presented by information you gather. Think about old information in new ways, and consider information from different angles. For example, if Christopher approaches his career decision with an open mind, he might identify possibilities other than crime-scene investigation that interest him and provide the benefits he’s looking for.

Strange Idea? Or Strangely Brilliant? Critical thinkers see new possibilities in the information they gather. For instance, who’d ever get the strange idea that old shipping containers could serve as student housing? Architects in France did. They created this student-housing complex by stacking one hundred recycled containers, with each one serving as a different student’s room. Not so strange after all.

Apply What You’ve Learned. To be an expert critical thinker, you need to do something with the information you have — either disregard it because it didn’t pass your evaluation, or apply it in your life and work. For instance, use new knowledge about your strengths to set a goal for yourself, or use information you gained in a class to complete an assignment correctly.

Another way to apply information is to connect something you learned in the past to what you’re learning now. What do you already know about mathematics that you can use to learn college algebra? If you’ve worked on a construction crew, how can you apply knowledge gained from that experience in your architectural design class?

Review Your Outcomes. Reflection is part of critical thinking, so make time to review the outcomes of your decisions and actions. Ask yourself whether your decisions and actions are built on strong critical thinking — or whether you need to improve your thinking process. For example, if your instructors have been skeptical about arguments you’ve made in several writing assignments, consider whether you need to improve your ability to evaluate your sources’ reliability. View such experiences as opportunities for positive change, and get help if you need it to strengthen your critical thinking skills.

Critically Cool Creations. Critical thinking can spark critically cool inventions. Take Nao, the robot that can stand in for a sick child in the classroom during the child’s hospital stays. From the hospital the child uses a tablet computer to control the robot and follow along with the lessons. Here a boy tests this use of the Nao robot, drawing on his own critical thinking skills to evaluate the robot’s abilities.