Title: Overview of Critical Thinking Skills
Headings: Overview of Critical Thinking Skills
Overview of Critical Thinking Skills
What is Critical Thinking?
Instructional Strategies and Critical Thinking
Case #1-Differing Views on Patient Treatment
Emotions and Critical Thinking
Teaching students to use CTS during instruction
Making Critical Thinking Explicit
Stages of Critical Thinking
Case #2-Why Are Mrs. Connor's Teeth Yellow?
Case #3-Female with Erythroplakia

Content: Overview of Critical Thinking Skills
Overview of Critical Thinking Skills
What is Critical Thinking? Many researchers, including Facione, Simpson and Courtneay, Banning, Brookfield, Ornstein and Hunkins, Sternberg, Ennis, and Lipman, have defined critical thinking (CT). Researchers debate whether critical thinking can be learned or if it's a developmental process regulated by motivations, dispositions, and personality traits. Despite differences of opinion, many researchers agree that critical thinking is "Purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological or contextual considerations upon which judgment is based. 11
Critical thinking is also regarded as intellectually engaged, skillful, and responsible thinking that facilitates good judgment because it requires the application of assumptions, knowledge, competence, and the ability to challenge one's own thinking. Critical thinking requires the use of self-correction and monitoring to judge the rationality of thinking as well as reflexivity. When using critical thinking, individuals step back and reflect on the quality of that thinking. Simpson and Courtneay point out that critical thinking processes require active argumentation, initiative, reasoning, envisioning and analyzing complex alternatives, and making contingency-related value judgment. 12
According to Banning, critical thinking involves scrutinizing, differentiating, and appraising information as well as reflecting on information to make judgments that will inform clinical decisions. 13 Brookfield asserts that identifying and challenging assumptions and analyzing assumptions for validity are essential to critical thinking skills.