Resources

Critical thinking is the Cheshire cat of educational curricula, appearing everywhere half formed but disappearing on close inspection. One way around this problem is to focus on the relationship between three key components: cognitive skills, virtues or affective dispositions, and the values of inquiry. Cognitive skills are the things we do with knowledge, such as infer, categorise, analyse, synthesis and so on. Virtues are those things that are typical of critical thinkers, such as willingness ... read more ...

Thinking critically requires a complex combination of skills and dispositions, including but not limited to the capacity to recognise argument structures, to objectively assess reasons, to draw valid inferences, to question assumptions, to and identify biases. Students who can master the logical structure of a deductive argument are better able to master mathematical proofs, textual analysis, and persuasive writing. Inductive or probabilistic reasoning is foundational to hypothesis formation and testing and thus a core aspect ... read more ...

There's a new update to UQ's Philosophy & Critical Thinking MOOC. Created by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (including some names you might be familiar with) on the edX platform launched by Harvard and MIT, it covers some of the big issues in philosophy and critical thinking and is intended as a resource for those keen to delve more deeply into all things philosophical and into the intricacies of critical thinking and argumentation. ... read more ...

A useful way to conceptualise critical thinking is as metacogntive evaluation - thinking about our thinking and evaluating its quality. It follows then that an essential activity in the teaching of critical thinking is to help students become metacognitive aware. But how does one actually do that? The Critical Thinking Matrix is a tool developed by Peter Ellerton at the University of Queensland that helps teachers do exactly that.  There's a ... read more ...