Teaching Critical Thinking: An Operational Framework

Critical thinking has attracted considerable focus in recent years in both high school and tertiary curricula (Ku 2009). While the concept has a long tradition and both philosophers and educators agree on its importance, there is a reported lack of agreement on what the concept involves (Cheung, Rudowicz, Kwan, and Yue 2002; Green, Hammer, and Star 2009; McMillan 1987). There is even less agreement on how to teach it (Noddings 1995). Described as a most difficult term in education (Moore and Parker 2011), it is not surprising that critical thinking has also taken on a narrower focus than when earlier conceived (Davies 2011). This chapter presents an operational framework for teaching critical thinking and illustrates its application in an educational setting. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.