OUMH1603

LEARNING SKILLS FOR 21ST

CENTURY

Chapter 6: Critical Thinking and

Reasoning Skills

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 Learning Outcomes

 Define critical thinking;

 Explain how critical thinking skills can be improved;
 Elaborate the skills of critical thinking;
 Distinguish between deductive and inductive
reasoning; and
 Classify the ways to assess critical thinking skills.

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 Contents

 Critical Thinking and Reasoning Skills

 The Need for Critical Thinking
 Empirical Evidence that Critical Thinking can Be
Improved
 Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning
 Assessment of Critical Thinking

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 1. The Need for Critical Thinking

 The Twin Pillars of Knowing and Thinking

 There are a few differences between knowing and thinking
 (a) Thinking is a mental activity, or mind in motion, which
usually includes event, or situations in the past or the future.
 (b) Thoughts do not have anything to do with the truth of the
present moment; it is just what a person is thinking and not
necessarily related to facts and truth.
 (c) Knowing, on the other hand, does not actually entail
thought. For instance, when someone asks your name, you
instantly know your name and you do not require thinking for
that.
 (d) Thoughts are the origin of doubts while knowledge can
only be either true or false.
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 1. The Need for Critical Thinking

 A Working Definition of Critical Thinking

 List of some generic skills of a critical thinker (Halpern, 2014):
 Seek out contradictory evidence;
 Make risk: benefit assessment;
 Recall relevant information when needed;
 Give reasons for choices as well as varying the style and amount of
detail in explanations depending on who is receiving the information;
 Understand basic research principles;
 Present a coherent and persuasive argument on a controversial,
contemporary topic;
 Determine credibility and use this information in formulating and
communicating decisions

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 1. The Need for Critical Thinking

 Changing How People Think: Should It Be Done?

 Examples of the need for critical thinking; some are as
follows:
 Bullying cases among teenagers.
 Citizens who believes in political campaigns.
 Employees who are being exploited by employers.
 People who are being rude.

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2. Empirical Evidence that Critical Thinking
Can Be Improved

 In Malaysia, the government has imposed several ideas in developing and

enhancing critical thinking ability among students in various forms such as
 The Malaysia Education Blueprint
 Adds reasoning skill in the curriculum besides the traditional reading, writing and
arithmetic skills.
 Malaysia Smart School
 Set to bring a completely new paradigm into the national education system.
 Two of its five strategies are focused on thinking.
 Innovative Human Capital Development (IHCD) Plan
 Aims at fostering Malaysia towards an innovative society with the recommendation
to review, revamp and restructure the curriculum of tertiary institutions
 School Based Assessment (SBA) System
 Teachers are given more freedom and opportunities to empower their students.

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2. Empirical Evidence that Critical Thinking
Can Be Improved

 Two Types of Thinking – Fast and Slow

 System 1 Thinking
 Intuitions are like visual illusions in some ways. They can
sometimes assist us to understand the world, however they
are often misleading and it is a challenge not to pay attention
to intuitions.
 System 2 Thinking
 Critical thinking is System 2 thinking; which is deliberate, slow
and effortful.
 System 2 involves considering evidence, evaluating risks,
calculating probabilities, and judging credibility.

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3. Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning

 Thinking is a skill that can be improved by training,

practice and through learning how to do better.
 Thinking is just like any other skills and we can
enhance and get better at that skill.
 Highly intelligence people need to improve their
thinking in order to make full use of that high
intelligence.

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3. Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning

 CAF: Consider All Factors

 CAF is an attention-directing tool that is designed to increase
the breadth of perception since we need to be looking at and
consider all factors before making a decision.
 Teaching CAF is a matter of adding more and more factors to
be considered in the list. Ask ourselves these questions:
 What has been left out?
 Can we add another factor to the list?
 What else must be considered?

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3. Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning

 APC: Alternatives, Possibilities, Choices

 According to de Bono (1994), this is another attention-directing
tool, which moves our thinking to look at parallel possibilities.
 There are many sorts of alternatives:
 Perception: The same thing can be looked at in many different ways.
 Action: Alternative courses of action that can be taken in a situation.
 Solution: Alternative solutions to a problem.
 Approaches: Different ways of tackling the problem in order to find a
solution.
 Explanation: Alternative explanations of how something happened.
Alternative hypotheses in science.
 Design: Alternative designs, each of which fulfils the purpose of the
design (machines, buildings, posters, etc.).

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3. Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning

 Focus and Purpose

 There are three main characteristics in this skill of thinking (de
Bono, 1994):
 Key questions
 Focus and purpose thinking skill, we have to ask ourselves
 Setting the focus
 We should set our focus and purpose and not only be aware of
them.
 Types of thinking
 Five broad types of thinking that we should be aware of and the
focus of each will lead us to be purposive in our thinking
(Exploring, Seeking, Choosing, Organising, Checking)

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3. Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning

 AGO: Aims, Goals and Objectives

 AGO is related to the thinking habit of wanting to know
the focus and purpose of thinking at every moment,
 But the focus is more of the overall purpose or objective
and not moment-to-moment focus.
 Two aspects that we can consider when we acquire this
skill:
 Alternative Definitions of the Objective
 Sub-objectives

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3. Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning

 Deductive Reasoning
 Deductive reasoning is a basic form of valid reasoning where
it moves from general to specific.
 In deductive reasoning, or deduction, we start out with a
general statement, or hypothesis, and then we examine the
possibilities to reach a specific, logical conclusion.
 Sometimes deductive reasoning is informally called a “top-
down” approach.
 Deductive logic is concerned with the validity of arguments:
an argument is deductively valid if and only if its conclusion
follows a logically necessary consequence of its premises.

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3. Skills of Critical Thinking and Reasoning

 Inductive Reasoning
 Moving from some specific observations about the world to
broader generalisations and theories
 Key types of inductive reasoning (Parrish, 2018):
 Generalised - Draws a conclusion from a generalisation.
 Statistical - Draws a conclusion based on statistics
 Sample - Draws a conclusion about one group based on a different
sample group.
 Analogous - Draws a conclusion based on shared properties of two
groups.
 Predictive - Draws a conclusion based on a prediction made using a
past sample.
 Causal inference - Draws a conclusion based on a causal connection.

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 4. Assessment of Critical Thinking

 Among some of the methods of assessing critical

thinking
 Through inquiry
 Through writing
 Group collaboration

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 5. Summary

 People need to have critical thinking skills to be better at

multitasking and to be more efficient in decision-making and
problem solving.
 Critical thinking involves judgment, reasoning, reflection,
questioning, metacognition and mental process.
 The government has introduced various programs and school
syllabus to improve critical thinking skills among students.
 A number of skills can be learned to improve critical thinking
skills such as CAF, APC, Logic and Perception, Focus and
Purpose, AGO, deductive and inductive reasoning.
 Through inquiry, writing and group collaborations, we can assess
critical thinking skills. 17