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Pam Dusenberry, Shoreline Community College
What IS critical thinking, anyway? A great deal has been written on the subject. From a review of the literature, it seems that four components of critical thinking emerge:
the use of higher order thinking skills as in Bloom's taxonomy,
the use of metacognition, or the awareness and monitoring of one's thinking,
thinking about an issue for the purpose of deciding what to believe or to do, and
the attitude of openness or willingness to change one's point of view.
While good definitions abound, a good one that integrates the first three aspects and implies the fourth is from the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking:
"Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action" (National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, 1996).
A caveat about these elements is that critical thinking theorists appear to agree that thinking is different in the different disciplines. The basis for this idea comes from the novice-to-expert research in cognitive psychology.
Research from Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychologists studied how people learn to become experts, or how experts behave as they take in new information. They found that experts bring to bear a great deal of knowledge along with a complex set of strategies for finding, taking in and using new information. Experts are different from novices in that they "chunk" bits of knowledge together, and they know which processing strategies to use in different situations. These processes are such things as seeing relationships, problem solving, and understanding implications and how new information changes their knowledge and beliefs. When they read in their fields, they may not learn much that is new because they already know most of it--but they do tend to learn all the new bits of information.
Novices, on the other hand, see knowledge as unrelated bits of information--they do not see the relationships among the bits. When they read in the new field, they do not learn as much as experts because they also do not yet have the necessary thinking strategies or structure of concepts.
When experts were given material to learn outside the area of their expertise, they behaved much more like novices. They did not bring to bear all the strategies they used in their field. One important conclusion from this research is that people develop learning strategies as they gain more knowledge about a particular subject. In other words, learning/thinking strategies do not directly transfer across subjects.
(Continued on page 10)
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