Critical Thinking

Your students need to develop awareness of the elements of critical thinking, so that they can demonstrate them in their assignments. To begin with, students may be confused when asked to think more critically, or may be uncertain of the difference between descriptive and critical writing.

Critical thinking is often described (e.g. in Bloom's taxonomy) as having six stages, from lower-order to higher-order thinking:

1. Knowledge – the ability to recall what you have learned
2. Comprehension – understanding what you have learned
3. Application – putting to use the knowledge you have gained
4. Analysis – breaking down ideas into various parts
5. Synthesis – reconstructing the analysis in new ways
6. Evaluation – making judgements from what has been learned

Many students can demonstrate knowledge and comprehension, but are not clear on how to apply their knowledge, or how to analyse, synthesise or evaluate. Most university assignments require them to perform these higher-order tasks.

Biggs's SOLO taxonomy is useful for considering critical thinking. Table 1 (Braband & Dahl, 2009) lists some verbs that are associated with the various levels of the SOLO taxonomy.

Table 1: Examples of verbs within the SOLO taxonomy, levels 2 to 5

When you set assignments, be explicit about what you expect students to do. Identify the level of complexity students need to achieve in their approach. For example, point out that learning activities early in the session will require students to paraphrase texts or define concepts, to classify things according to newly learned systems or to apply a new method, whereas the later assignments will ask them to engage in more-complex activities.

Design activities to encourage critical thinking

When designing assignments, focus on the specific cognitive skills you would like them to develop. Are they to only memorise and recite information, or will you require more-complex skills, such as interpretation, analysis, inference and evaluation?

For example, you might construct your learning activities so that they require your students to:

• differentiate valid from invalid premises or models
• infer something accurately from incomplete evidence
• predict where a line of inquiry or a pattern is going
• locate the cause of an effect
• make a precise distinction
• select the right model
• argue the opposite viewpoint
• question received opinion
• see beyond the obvious
• review the literature
• identify weaknesses in the data
• represent statistical information graphically.

(Source: Georgia State University, Writing Across the Curriculum)

Figure 1: Example of an assignment that encourages critical thinking

Critical reviews

A common task that encourages higher-order thinking is the writing of a critical review or critique. The page Writing a Critical Review is a useful guide to the essential aspects of critical reviews, and includes a sample extract that highlights some of the typical language features.

Case studies

• This case study from the UNSW Business faculty will be of interest to you if you are looking for ways to incorporate the development of critical and analytical skills into your course.
• This UNSW case study investigates the role of an impromptu design task in the development of group-work and problem-solving skills in design for a large class of first-year Mechanical Engineering students.