Teacher's Question of the Week
Q: One of the areas that teachers often ask about is that of critical thinking, including cognitive ability unfoldment and enhancement.
The next few teacher questions in this series will attempt to share some of the background unearthed from venturing into the field. The field of critical thinking is quite relevant to teaching students with learning disabilities because they often have strengths in reasoning and use their higher order thinking skills to devise executive strategies that compensate for perceptual processing difficulties, such as in short-term auditory memory or visual-motor processing speed. Many students can be approached through higher order thinking.
The first question, then, has to do with what are considered to be the cognitive skills and subskills which are part of critical thinking? (Below are listed only the skills without definitions due to copyright protection.)
A. The APA Delphi Report (1990) produced "Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction". The following are listed as foundational skills in critical thinking:
1. Interpretation
2. Analysis
3. Evaluation
4. Inference
5. Explanation
6. Self-Regulation
The list is expanded below by adding the subskills under each category.
1. Interpretation: Categorization, Decoding Significance, Clarifying Meaning
2. Analysis: Examining Ideas, Identifying Arguments, Analyzing Arguments
3. Evaluation: Assessing Claims, Assessing Arguments
4. Inference: Querying Evidence, Conjecturing Alternatives, Drawing Conclusions
5. Explanation: Stating Results, Justifying Procedures, Presenting Arguments
6. Self-Regulation: Self-Examination, Self-Correction
Author: Peter Facione of Santa Clara University. The above list with definitions used to be accessible as ED 315423 (which I can't seem to find anymore). The Institute for Critical Thinking, at Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043, offers copies for a minimal shipping fee. Peter Facione's work is also available through Insight Assessment, formerly California Academic Press: <http://www.insightassessment.com/home.html>.