What is Critical Thinking?

And how to improve your critical thinking

Critical thinking is a term that gets thrown around by educators but is never really explained. Yet, understanding critical thinking is the first step to improving it. Here are its details.

The term critical thinking to describe an educational goal was commonly associated with John Dewey (1910). Simply said, critical thinking is about thinking critically about every piece of information put forth. It’s taking a dubious/skeptical mindset to things you are told, knowing that words carry a speaker’s underlying motives and wants to lead you to certain conclusions. A critical thinker will analyze these motives and conclusions to see if believing them is beneficial or detrimental to him or herself.

Google: “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.”

Let’s break this down. Critical thinking involves an issue, objective analysis, objective evaluation, and a conclusion. Objective = not influenced by personal opinion, unbiased or factual. Analysis = detailed examination of the components that make up something (the issue in this case). Evaluation = assessment, making a judgment about the amount, number, or value of something.

Based on this broad definition alone, we know that critical thinking involves many different steps.

The dispute in this definition lies in how different people define careful thinking and the types of goals. Careful thinking takes into account scope, criteria for thinking carefully, and the thinking components a person focuses on.

Understand that critical thinking involves many steps and components, such as observation, research, analysis, inference, evaluation, and decision making. Then, make sure to apply each of these components when considering the answer to an issue. Practice these components to improve your abilities in those components individually, and to also increase your critical thinking skills.

Second, understand the mindset shift that will make you more critical. This involves paying attention to observations in your life, questioning why those observations are what they are, being open-minded/curious enough to investigate and not jump to immediate biases, getting into the habit of inquiry, and having the self-confidence to trust in your own reasoning and analysis.

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