Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum

A Brief Edition of Thought & Knowledge

Diane F. Halpern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317778363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Consider that many of the people who are alive today will be working at jobs that do not currently exist and that the explosion of information means that today's knowledge will quickly become outdated. As a result, two goals for education clearly emerge -- learning how to learn and how to think critically about information that changes at a rapid rate. We face a multitude of new challenges to our natural environment, difficult dilemmas concerning the use of weapons of mass destruction, political agendas for the distribution of scarce commodities and wealth, psychological problems of loneliness and depression, escalating violence, and an expanding elderly population. International in scope and in magnitude, these new problems strain resources and threaten the continuance of life on earth. To creatively and effectively attack these imminent problems, a well educated, thinking populace is essential.

An abridged edition of Halpern's best-selling text, Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum is designed to help students enhance their thinking skills in every class. The skills discussed are needed in every academic area and setting -- both in and out of class. They are:

• determining cause;
• assessing likelihood and uncertainty;
• comprehending complex text;
• solving novel problems;
• making good decisions;
• evaluating claims and evidence; and
• thinking creatively.

In this adaptation of her best-selling text, Diane Halpern applies the theories and research of cognitive psychology to the development of critical thinking and learning skills needed in the increasingly complex world in which we work and live. The book is distinguished by its clear writing style, humorous tone, many practical examples and anecdotes, and rigorous academic grounding. Everyday examples and exercises promote the transfer of critical thinking skills and dispositions to real-world settings and problems. The goal is to help readers recognize when and how to apply the thinking skills needed to analyze arguments, reason clearly, identify and solve problems, and make sound decisions. Also of importance, a general thinking skills framework ties the chapters together, but each is written so that it can "stand alone." This organization allows for maximum flexibility in the selection of topics and the order in which they are covered. This book is intended for use in any course emphasizing critical thinking as an approach to excellence in thinking and learning.

1

Thinking: An Introduction

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Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

—Bertrand Russell (quoted in Macmillan Publishers, 1989)

“Think about it!” How many times have you heard this phrase or said it yourself? Look around you. Watch a student solving a calculus problem, or a programmer “debugging” a computer program, or a politician arguing that the Strategic Defense Initiative will not work. Watch a child absorbed in a fairy tale, or an architect designing a skyscraper, or a senior citizen planning to live on a fixed income. What are they doing that makes their faces appear so serious, so quizzical—so much like the original interpretation of Rodin's famous statue, “The Thinker,” which appears on the cover of this book? They are all “lost in thought,” yet lost seems like a strange word to describe the process of thinking—maybe “finding knowledge in thought” would be a more appropriate phrase.

THE NEED FOR CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

Although the ability to think critically has always been important, it is imperative for the citizens of the 21st century. For the first time in the history of the human race, we have the ability to destroy all life on earth. The decisions that we make as individuals and as a society regarding the economy, conservation of natural resources, and the development of nuclear weapons will affect future generations of all people around the world. We are also called upon to make decisions on a wide range of important local and personal topics. For example, in a recent election, voters had to decide if they favored or opposed an increase in property taxes, the construction of a canal that would divert water from one part of the state to another, mandatory AIDS testing for criminals, and a rent control ordinance, in addition to deciding which candidate they preferred for diverse political offices including governor, state treasurer, county commissioner, and trustee of the local library system. Consumers need to decide if the nitrates in their hot dogs are carcinogens, if the public school system is providing an adequate education, and whether health plans that allow you to choose your physician are preferable to plans that do not allow this flexibility. Because every citizen is required to make countless important decisions, it may seem obvious that, as a society, we should be concerned with the way these decisions are made. Surprisingly, it is only within the last 10 to 15 years that educators, politicians, and the general public have begun to address this topic in a serious manner.

The (U.S.) National Education Goals Panel recognized the need to ensure that college graduates have the knowledge and skills to enhance and sustain a strong global economy and to participate in the democratic process so that we can all enjoy a world of peace with adequate resources. One of the goals that they set for college graduates in the year 2000 is: “The proportion of college graduates who demonstrate an advanced ability to think critically, communicate effectively, and solve problems will increase substantially” (National Education Goals Panel, 1991, p. 237).

Numerous national reports have shown that instruction designed to improve the thinking process is desperately needed. The United States has been described as a “nation at risk” because we are failing to provide students with the most essential component of education—instruction that fosters the development of the ability to think (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). Steen (1987) summarized the results of an international study on mathematical reasoning with this ominous warning, “Indeed, as the ‘back-to-basics’ movement has flourished in the last 15 years, the ability of U.S. students to think (rather than to memorize) has declined accordingly” (p. 251). The Education Commission of the States reached a similar sobering conclusion in its 1982 report: “The pattern is clear: the percentage of students achieving higher order skills is declining” (cited in Baron & Sternberg, 1987, p. x).

International studies repeatedly paint a gloomy picture of the current status of critical thinking. Izawa and Hayden (1993) summarized the results from an international comparison in which the best students from the United States scored lower than the worst Japanese students in mathematical problem solving; abysmal results were also obtained for reading skills and knowledge of history. Neubert and Binko (1992), using data from a different study, concluded that only 39% of 17-year-olds can find, summarize, and explain information. And, in what may be the most horrifying tale ever told by the prolific science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, he reported (1989) on the true state of scientific understanding and knowledge by Americans. In a telephone survey conducted by the Public Opinion Laboratory at Northern Illinois University, he noted, the researchers found that 20% of the more than 200 adults surveyed believe that the sun revolves around the earth. Why, asked Asimov, over 400 years since the scientific community agreed on the fundamental scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun, are the vast majority of adults still unaware of a basic fact that is “taught” in grammar school science?

The depressingly long list of findings and reports by prestigious panels that conclude that many adults do not have adequate thinking and learning skills shows that it is time to stop issuing reports and time to start acting in ways that promote these skills.

If the conclusions of national and international study groups don't convince you of the need for critical thinking instruction, consider this: Most people will finish their formal education between the ages of 18 and 22. Today's young adults are expected to have the longest average life span in the history of the world, with most living into their 70s and many living into their 80s and 90s. We can only guess what life will be like in the years 2050 or 2060 or beyond, years that many of you who are reading this book will live through. One likely guess is that many of today's young adults will be working at jobs that currently don't exist and dealing with technologies that dwarf the imagination of present-day science fiction writers. What do they need to learn during their first two decades of life that will prepare them for their remaining 50+ years?

A forward-looking education must be built on the twin foundations of knowing how to learn and knowing how to think clearly about the rapidly proliferating information with which we will all have to contend. I have an inexpensive modem attached to my home computer that I can use to access virtually all of the research articles in a major university library, the contents of dozens of daily newspapers, airline flight schedules, several encyclopedia services, the Dow Jones Index, a pharmaceutical reference guide, college catalogues for thousands of colleges, government publications, movie reviews, and much more. All of this information is available in the comfort of my own home with only a few minutes of “search time” on the computer. The problem has become knowing what to do with the deluge of data. The information has to be selected, interpreted, digested, learned, and applied, or it is of no more use on my desk than it is on a library shelf. If we cannot think intelligently about the myriad issues that confront us, then we are in danger of having all of the answers, but still not knowing what they mean.

Thought and Knowledge

This is a book about thought and knowledge and the relationship between these two constructs. It's about thinking in ways that allow us to use previous knowledge to create new knowledge. Everything we know, and everything everyone else knows—that is, all existing knowledge—was created by someone. When we learn Euclidean geometry, we are learning about knowledge created by the great mathematician, Euclid. Similarly, other eminent inventions and insights such as the wheel, shoes, video games, toilet paper, E = mc¹, and the “discovery” of America, all represent knowledge created by people. Knowledge is not something static that gets transferred from one person to another like pouring water from one vessel to another. It is dynamic. Of course, it's silly to think that we should all start from “scratch” and begin by re-creating the wheel. We build on the knowledge created by others to create new knowledge.

We also create knowledge every time we learn a new concept. The newly acquired information is used to construct our own internal knowledge structures. (Knowledge structures is a somewhat technical term used by cognitive psychologists to stand for all of the interrelated concepts that each of us has about different subjects.) Knowledge is a “state of understanding” that exists only in the mind of the individual knower (King, 1994, p. 16). We use our existing knowledge when we receive new information in order to make sense of the new information; thus the acquisition of knowledge is an active mental process. Each individual builds “extensive knowledge structures” that connect new ideas to what is known so that knowledge is always personal and somewhat idiosyncratic. These knowledge structures or schemata are our personal internal representations about the nature of the world. When we recombine them in new ways with other schemata, we are creating new knowledge. This idea was expressed more eloquently by Resnick (1985) when she said: “Knowledge is no longer viewed as a reflection of what has been given from the outside; it is a personal construction in which the individual imposes meaning by relating bits of knowledge and experience to some organizing schemata” (p. 130).

A Working Definition of Critical Thinking

Although many psychologists and others have proposed several definitions for the term critical thinking, these definitions tend to be similar in content. Here is a simple definition that captures the main concepts: critical thinking is the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed—the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions when the thinker is using skills that are thoughtful and effective for the particular context and type of thinking task. Other definitions include the notions that critical thinking is the formation of logical inferences (Simon & Kaplan, 1989), the development of cohesive and logical reasoning patterns (Stahl & Stahl, 1991), and careful and deliberate determination of whether to accept, reject, or suspend judgment (Moore & Parker, 1994). All of these definitions capture the idea of a mental activity that will be useful for a particular cognitive task.

The “critical” part of critical thinking denotes an evaluation component. Sometimes the word critical is used to convey something negative, as when we say, “She was critical of the movie.” But, evaluation can and should be a constructive reflection of positive and negative attributes. When we think critically, we are evaluating the outcomes of our thought processes—how good a decision is or how well a problem has been solved. Critical thinking also involves evaluating the thinking process—the reasoning that went into the conclusion we've arrived at or the kinds of factors considered in making a decision. Critical thinking is sometimes called directed thinking because it focuses on obtaining a desired outcome. Daydreams, night dreams, and other sorts of thinking that are not engaged in for a specific purpose are not subsumed under the critical thinking category. Neither is the type of thinking that underlies our daily routinized habits, which, although goal directed, involve very little conscious evaluation, such as getting up in the morning, brushing our teeth, or taking our usual route to school and work. These are examples of nondirected or automatic thinking.

The focus of this book is on the development and improvement of those skills that characterize clear, precise, purposeful thinking. It is a practical book, based primarily on applications of cognitive psychology to memory, reasoning, problem solving, creativity, language, and decision making. Despite the fact that some critics have claimed that critical thinking is just a fad that will surely go out of style, it has a very long history in psychology and education. John Dewey, the pioneering American educator identified “learning to think” as the primary purpose of education in 1933. Besides, it is difficult for me to consider that the need to think well is a “passing fancy” that will soon be out of style, much like Rubik's cube, “big hair,” and bell-bottom trousers.

Although psychology has been concerned with the way people think for much of its 100+ years of existence as an academic discipline, cognitive psychology, the branch of psychology that is concerned with thought and knowledge, has virtually dominated scientific psychology for the past 20 years. Cognitive psychologists have been concerned with learning about the skills and strategies used in problem solving, reasoning, and decision making and the way these abilities relate to intelligence. All of this interest in human thinking processes has given birth to a new area of psychology that has come to be known as cognitive process instruction. Its goal is to utilize the knowledge we have accumulated about human thinking processes and mechanisms in ways that can help people improve how they think. For example, by examining correct and incorrect responses in a variety of situations, psychologists have found that most people's spontaneous and intuitive approaches to problems are frequently wrong. Furthermore, they can often predict when an incorrect response will be made either because of the nature of the problem or because of biases that a problem solver may bring to the problem. This knowledge is already being put to use to solve a host of applied problems that range from providing military personnel with map-reading skills to designing “user-friendly” (easy to use) computer programs.

One of my favorite definitions of critical thinking was published over 35 years ago (1960) and comes very close to this contemporary notion of intelligence as learnable skills: “Critical thinking then is the process of evaluation or categorization in terms of some previously accepted standards … this seems to involve attitude plus knowledge of facts plus some thinking skills” (Russell, cited in d'Angelo, 1971, p. 6). In short, Russell's equation is:

Attitude + Knowledge + Thinking Skills = Intelligent Thinking

Changing How People Think: Should It Be Done?

We know that the avera...