Demystifying Critical Thinking

Critical-thinking scholarship is in a mystified state. No single definition of critical thinking is widely accepted, but stakeholders in higher education often enter conversation about critical thinking with the premise that their individual definitions are uniformly shared. With an increasing emphasis on academic accountability, we need to work toward a better understanding of the varying ways the term critical thinking is used and explore the implications of the variation for effective pedagogy. In this article, I describe the confusion about critical thinking in psychology and offer suggestions for demystifying the concept. I provide a framework for organizing critical-thinking scholarship into meaningful dimensions. Finally, I describe a psychology curriculum using performance-based assessment practices as one context in which critical thinking in psychology can be made clearer for students and faculty.