What is Critical Thinking?

There has been much talk about equipping our young with critical thinking. Enrichment courses have been developed to teach these skills and exam questions have been designed to sieve out students who can and cannot think critically.

But what is critical thinking?

To put it simply, critical thinking is a set of thinking methodology that allows a person to evaluate a piece of information or opinion and judge for him to what extent the information or opinion is true.

For example, if you come across a sign that says:
“Storewide discounts up to 50%”

If you think about it, the statement could mean different things to different people - Does ‘storewide’ means all items sold in the store? By any chance do they have undiscounted items still sold at that time? Are the discounts all 50% or a range of discounts with a maximum of 50%?

Another example is when someone makes an opinion such as:
“Male students do better at Maths than girls.”

A critical thinker would be asking himself, “Would everyone agree to this statement?”, “Are there any survey or research data that supports this opinion?”

Critical thinkers don’t accept information blindly. They question them. Usually these questions will have more than one possible answer. Critical thinking involves judging a piece of information using relevant criteria such as its accuracy, relevance, reliability, consistency and bias. Computers, no matter how intelligent, cannot think critically because unlike the human brain, are programmed to accept one correct answer for each situation.

While the example given above may be a little high level for your child, it doesn’t mean that you cannot start introducing elements of critical thinking to your child at the primary school manner. In fact, Science is a discipline rooted in critical thinking. The Scientific Method is a step-by-step critical thinking process. A scientist or anyone who is exploring ideas and concepts will always start with a question. And in his exploration, he will need to ask himself more questions that will lead him to the discovery of an answer or a concept.

When taught with a discovery approach, Science students will have a good basic training in critical thinking. Taking a simplified example, a child wants to find out if a pebble floats or sink in water. He sees a pebble at the bottom of stream. Should he conclude that pebbles sinks when dropped into water? If he is using critical thinking he will be asking himself, “Is the pebble at the bottom of the stream because it is denser than water or because it is stuck to the bottom?” He will then have to do some testing to find out which statement is true. This might lead him to more questions. In Science, one must search for answers to his questions and then search again and again until he finds a valid explanation to his original question, hence the word ‘re-search’.

Attitudes for effective critical thinking.
In his book Thinking Skills, Dr John Langrehr suggests four attitudes that one must have to develop his critical thinking skills that he abbreviated to C.O.O.L. Encourage your child to adopt these attitudes towards information they read, hear and see around them

C is for clarify.
When judging a piece of information, encourage your child to clarify so that he understands as much background information to appreciate the context of the information or opinion.

O for open minded.
Don’t always assume your opinion is the only right opinion. To be fair-minded encourage your child to listen to other people’s point of view and understand their reasons for its. This will also help your child be more emphatic towards others and build better relationship with his peers.

O is objective.
Being objective means to consider all the supporting information such as evidence, facts, and statistics before making a judgment. This is a mark of a good leader. People who are not very skilled in critical thinking may make judgments and decisions based on emotions or hunches with no supporting evidence.

L is for Loose.
What Dr Langrehr really means by loose is being flexible. By being objective, you might be presented with evidence that your original point of view has been wrong all along. You need to have intellectual courage to admit that your initial view or judgment is wrong and be prepared to change it.

In Conclusion.

Using critical thinking when learning, especially in Science, can actually help your child achieve a deeper level of understanding of concepts because he is constantly seeking to understand concepts more.