How to develop critical thinking ability in students
Yesterday had visited an engineering college for a seminar on ‘How to develop critical thinking ability in Students’. The Principal of the engineering college felt that one of the reason why Industry felt that his student lac ability to understand and explain their subject was because beyond the superficial level of course completion and exam students seldom engaged themselves in getting deeper into their subjects. Hence he felt ‘Critical thinking skill’ was a useful and important life skill which can enables his student form opinion and engage with material beyond course completion and exam clearing and help them to look into, read, learn and evaluate on a subject and take decisions. We participated in the round table and panel discussion and following is the summary of points put forth by me:
“If I have to share with you a more detailed definition of Critical thinking then it can be put up as something like this:
“Critical thinking is intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, synthesizing and/or evaluating information gathered from or generated by observations, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief and action”
A simpler way to put critical thinking is:
‘You must be able to know how to connect between ideas and evaluate information’.
Today’s global knowledge economy which is driven by information and technology. This places great demands on flexible intellectual skills, and the ability to analyse information and integrate diverse sources of knowledge to solve problems. Thinking clearly and systematically can improve the way we express our ideas.
So
It is: Exploring and probing, Challenging with reasoning, Uncovering biases
It is not: Memorizing; Blind acceptance of what is fed to you
How to actually practice it
Teaching students to do critical thinking must start with making them understand what need to be done. We will be teaching them to be in a position to evaluate information and analyse different point of view of the subject at hand.
Teaching students “How to think critically” may begin by alerting them to the kind of questions and problems that interest scholars or professional in your field. There are certain purposeful, frequent, intentional method which can be adopted in the classroom which will make them think such as:
A. Activities in the field of topic that will call them to look at different angles related to the theory covered. For eg in Maths, Engineering course encourage students to participate in study groups to share ideas to solve problems and provide reasons
Or
With students prepare steps to systematically gather data according to methodologies in your area or discipline of chapter being thought, ask them to assess relevance of data, its source and relevance to the topic covered in class
B. Make them read topics which has been taught and enter into a dialogue with the source they read, encourage them to ask questions, give write ups on any counter view.
C. Prepare groups to do tasks on topics like say comparing two different streams of thoughts on a topic and presenting analysis of it .
Get some real world problems from the chapters taught. Let them do reading for understanding, examine arguments on the topic and then explain their understanding to class.
Critical Thinking is a “domain-general” thinking skill, not one that is specific to a particular subject area. In order to live a meaningful life and to structure our lives accordingly, we need to justify and reflect on our values and decisions. critical thinking provides the tools for this process of self-evaluation.
