Can Critical Thinking Be Taught?

This was previously posted and is currently enjoying a traffic surge. I'm a skeptic of teaching critical thinking as a skill independent of any discipline.

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James Hanley vents his frustration over the difficulty cultivating critical-thinking skills in his students:

A recent study found that 45% of college students don’t learn critical thinking skills during their time in college. I admit it. I don’t think I managed to teach any of these students how to think critically. It’s impossible to do so if they skip class regularly and don’t bother with the assigned readings. I’ve even shown students the percentage of “F”s I’ve given in the same class over the prior two years, and it has no effect on student performance. I’m going to spend the next couple of months doing a major revamp of some of my classes. Not just adjusting the syllabus, but radically restructuring how I’m teaching them. What I’m doing isn’t working. Maybe it never has as well as I thought, and I’m just now learning how to really recognize it.

As Professor Hanley suggests, part of the problem is with students who don't come to class or complete assigned readings, but in a paper on teaching critical thinking skills, Daniel Willingham argues that it's impossible to improve general, transferable, critical-thinking skills because of the way problem-solving is structured. Critical thinking can only be improved within specific domains of knowledge as knowledge deepens and familiarity with certain repeated methods of analysis are encountered.

While I believe Hanley was referring to frustration with students in all of his political science classes, I would imagine that students in his Government class fare the worst because all, or almost all, are encountering new methods of analysis for the first time. If Willingham is right, students in an introductory political science class would tend to focus on the surface structure rather than the deeper structure of problems.

For an opposing view on teaching critical thinking, Diane Halperin says that general critical-thinking skills can be taught by applying methods derived from an understanding of cognitive psychology. Specifically, people can be taught transferable retrieval cues for deeper structural aspects of problems. But an important point she also makes is that individual differences in disposition must be considered. There is an ethic to think critically and some have it more than others and that difference still needs to be addressed. This is similar to Dr. Hanley's comment on students who aren't motivated to attend classes, but Halperin more specifically locates a cognitive dispositional problem that would likely continue in many students, even if they attended classes and did the assigned reading. That's because it isn't just about motivation to take certain observable actions; it's also about inclination, or the lack of inclination, to switch cognitive gears.

Comments

[NMissC]

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Critical thinking can only be improved within specific domains of knowledge as knowledge deepens and familiarity with certain repeated methods of analysis are encountered.
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That's consistent with my experience-- that the ability to do critical thinking emerges out of the work done to master a discipline.

I wonder if there's some sort of connection to the idea that Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote about-- the idea that one necessary predicate to genius was 10,000 hours of practice (he used the Beatles as an example). There's a certain amount of repeat to any kind of study to reach mastery. With disciplines like history or law (that I think I've mastered), it involves repeating views of the material from higher level down to greater detail to "get" how a subject works, and that's an essential predicate to critical thinking on the subject.

It shouldn't even require contemplation to conclude that students who don't do readings and don't attend class won't master anything. They might be able to read something off an outline sufficient to survive an exam, but that's about it.

[Dr X]

NMissC:

I do think they could be related. Years of practice develops vast, quick-processing networks of associative knowledge. This greatly enriches the underpinnings for critical thinking about one's particular area of expertise.

[Ruth]

Really interesting discussion. I think, though without anything to back it up, that you either learn this as a child or you never will. That ways of thinking, whether taught or just observed, have to happen early in development. Yes? No?

[Wayzata psychiatrist]

"It's also about inclination, or the lack of inclination, to switch cognitive gears." I have also read Gladwell's book "Talent is Overrated" urging us all to understand the influence of practice. Similarly others like Paul Arden say it's all about your drive - how good do you want to be? Halperin seems to think some people simply don't want to be good. Laziness, in other words? I would tend to agree that anyone can learn critical thinking in the context of a discipline, but not everyone wants to or will.