basic vs complex critical thinking

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

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Facilitating Complex Thinking

Complex Thinking

As we will indicate in this chapter repeatedly, forms of thinking require choices among instructional strategies. To support this idea, we begin the chapter by discussing three kinds of complex thinking in turn: critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. We consider how each can be facilitated by appropriate teaching strategies. Then we discuss several broad strategies for encouraging complex thinking, including some that are teacher-directed and others that rely more heavily on students’ initiative.

Although instructional strategies differ in their details, they each encourage particular forms of learning and thinking. The forms have distinctive educational purposes, even though they sometimes overlap, in the sense that one form may contribute to success with another form. Consider three somewhat complex forms of thinking that are commonly pursued in classroom learning: (1) critical thinking, (2) creative thinking, and (3) problem-solving

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• Educational Psychology. Authored by : Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton. Provided by : The Saylor Foundation. Retrieved from : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/educationalpsychology. License : CC BY: Attribution

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What Is Critical Thinking? | Definition & Examples

Published on May 30, 2022 by Eoghan Ryan . Revised on May 31, 2023.

Critical thinking is the ability to effectively analyze information and form a judgment .

To think critically, you must be aware of your own biases and assumptions when encountering information, and apply consistent standards when evaluating sources .

Critical thinking skills help you to:

• Identify credible sources
• Evaluate and respond to arguments
• Assess alternative viewpoints
• Test hypotheses against relevant criteria

Table of contents

Why is critical thinking important, critical thinking examples, how to think critically, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about critical thinking.

Critical thinking is important for making judgments about sources of information and forming your own arguments. It emphasizes a rational, objective, and self-aware approach that can help you to identify credible sources and strengthen your conclusions.

Critical thinking is important in all disciplines and throughout all stages of the research process . The types of evidence used in the sciences and in the humanities may differ, but critical thinking skills are relevant to both.

In academic writing , critical thinking can help you to determine whether a source:

• Is free from research bias
• Provides evidence to support its research findings
• Considers alternative viewpoints

Outside of academia, critical thinking goes hand in hand with information literacy to help you form opinions rationally and engage independently and critically with popular media.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Critical thinking can help you to identify reliable sources of information that you can cite in your research paper . It can also guide your own research methods and inform your own arguments.

Outside of academia, critical thinking can help you to be aware of both your own and others’ biases and assumptions.

Academic examples

However, when you compare the findings of the study with other current research, you determine that the results seem improbable. You analyze the paper again, consulting the sources it cites.

You notice that the research was funded by the pharmaceutical company that created the treatment. Because of this, you view its results skeptically and determine that more independent research is necessary to confirm or refute them. Example: Poor critical thinking in an academic context You’re researching a paper on the impact wireless technology has had on developing countries that previously did not have large-scale communications infrastructure. You read an article that seems to confirm your hypothesis: the impact is mainly positive. Rather than evaluating the research methodology, you accept the findings uncritically.

Nonacademic examples

However, you decide to compare this review article with consumer reviews on a different site. You find that these reviews are not as positive. Some customers have had problems installing the alarm, and some have noted that it activates for no apparent reason.

You revisit the original review article. You notice that the words “sponsored content” appear in small print under the article title. Based on this, you conclude that the review is advertising and is therefore not an unbiased source. Example: Poor critical thinking in a nonacademic context You support a candidate in an upcoming election. You visit an online news site affiliated with their political party and read an article that criticizes their opponent. The article claims that the opponent is inexperienced in politics. You accept this without evidence, because it fits your preconceptions about the opponent.

There is no single way to think critically. How you engage with information will depend on the type of source you’re using and the information you need.

However, you can engage with sources in a systematic and critical way by asking certain questions when you encounter information. Like the CRAAP test , these questions focus on the currency , relevance , authority , accuracy , and purpose of a source of information.

When encountering information, ask:

• Who is the author? Are they an expert in their field?
• What do they say? Is their argument clear? Can you summarize it?
• When did they say this? Is the source current?
• Where is the information published? Is it an academic article? Is it peer-reviewed ?
• Why did the author publish it? What is their motivation?
• How do they make their argument? Is it backed up by evidence? Does it rely on opinion, speculation, or appeals to emotion ? Do they address alternative arguments?

Critical thinking also involves being aware of your own biases, not only those of others. When you make an argument or draw your own conclusions, you can ask similar questions about your own writing:

• Am I only considering evidence that supports my preconceptions?
• Is my argument expressed clearly and backed up with credible sources?
• Would I be convinced by this argument coming from someone else?

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• ChatGPT vs human editor
• ChatGPT citations
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Using ChatGPT for your studies
• What is ChatGPT?
• Chicago style
• Paraphrasing

 Plagiarism

• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Consequences of plagiarism
• Common knowledge

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Critical thinking refers to the ability to evaluate information and to be aware of biases or assumptions, including your own.

Like information literacy , it involves evaluating arguments, identifying and solving problems in an objective and systematic way, and clearly communicating your ideas.

Critical thinking skills include the ability to:

You can assess information and arguments critically by asking certain questions about the source. You can use the CRAAP test , focusing on the currency , relevance , authority , accuracy , and purpose of a source of information.

Ask questions such as:

• Who is the author? Are they an expert?
• How do they make their argument? Is it backed up by evidence?

A credible source should pass the CRAAP test  and follow these guidelines:

• The information should be up to date and current.
• The author and publication should be a trusted authority on the subject you are researching.
• The sources the author cited should be easy to find, clear, and unbiased.
• For a web source, the URL and layout should signify that it is trustworthy.

Information literacy refers to a broad range of skills, including the ability to find, evaluate, and use sources of information effectively.

Being information literate means that you:

• Know how to find credible sources
• Use relevant sources to inform your research
• Understand what constitutes plagiarism
• Know how to cite your sources correctly

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search, interpret, and recall information in a way that aligns with our pre-existing values, opinions, or beliefs. It refers to the ability to recollect information best when it amplifies what we already believe. Relatedly, we tend to forget information that contradicts our opinions.

Although selective recall is a component of confirmation bias, it should not be confused with recall bias.

On the other hand, recall bias refers to the differences in the ability between study participants to recall past events when self-reporting is used. This difference in accuracy or completeness of recollection is not related to beliefs or opinions. Rather, recall bias relates to other factors, such as the length of the recall period, age, and the characteristics of the disease under investigation.

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Complex Thinking: Creativity, Critical Thought, and Logic

People with strengths in complex thinking may be good at deeply understanding ideas and concepts, seeing connections among information from different sources, demonstrating imagination, constructing and defending arguments based on facts or evidence, taking risks with new ideas, and/or drawing inferences from limited information. Conversely, people with challenges in this area may struggle to understand new ideas and concepts without considerable support, have trouble “reading between the lines” or making inferences, approach problems in a haphazard way, or tend to rely on existing ideas rather than coming up with original ones. As with other areas of learning, complex thinking is not something you’re simply either good at or not good at. Different people are good at thinking about different kinds of ideas. The subject matter—and your level of interest in it—can affect how well you understand and think about concepts. And everyone has a certain degree of imagination and creativity. Strategies for managing challenges with complex thinking

• Talk through an approach to solving a difficult problem with someone else before beginning. (Click here for a structured process for examining a complex problem.)
• Make an effort to ask good questions when learning about a new idea. This can help increase your comprehension.
• Take an improvisation class. This can help you practice “thinking on your feet” and coming up with unscripted ideas in response to a line or scenario you’re given.
• Play games that develop reasoning and logic skills. Research suggests even simple, inexpensive games can have a big impact.  
• Turn off the television. To find out how this and other strategies can encourage creativity and innovation, check out this article .     

Learn more This excellent Newsweek article from July 2010 focuses on America’s declining creativity and what can be done to reverse it. Back to The Science of Learning So what? Why understanding your learning strengths and challenges matters

Defining Critical Thinking

• A Brief History of the Idea of Critical Thinking
• Critical Thinking: Basic Questions & Answers
• Our Conception of Critical Thinking
• Sumner’s Definition of Critical Thinking
• Research in Critical Thinking
• Critical Societies: Thoughts from the Past

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Understanding the Complex Relationship between Critical Thinking and Science Reasoning among Undergraduate Thesis Writers

• Jason E. Dowd
• Robert J. Thompson
• Leslie A. Schiff
• Julie A. Reynolds

*Address correspondence to: Jason E. Dowd ( E-mail Address: [email protected] ).

Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708

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Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708

Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Developing critical-thinking and scientific reasoning skills are core learning objectives of science education, but little empirical evidence exists regarding the interrelationships between these constructs. Writing effectively fosters students’ development of these constructs, and it offers a unique window into studying how they relate. In this study of undergraduate thesis writing in biology at two universities, we examine how scientific reasoning exhibited in writing (assessed using the Biology Thesis Assessment Protocol) relates to general and specific critical-thinking skills (assessed using the California Critical Thinking Skills Test), and we consider implications for instruction. We find that scientific reasoning in writing is strongly related to inference , while other aspects of science reasoning that emerge in writing (epistemological considerations, writing conventions, etc.) are not significantly related to critical-thinking skills. Science reasoning in writing is not merely a proxy for critical thinking. In linking features of students’ writing to their critical-thinking skills, this study 1) provides a bridge to prior work suggesting that engagement in science writing enhances critical thinking and 2) serves as a foundational step for subsequently determining whether instruction focused explicitly on developing critical-thinking skills (particularly inference ) can actually improve students’ scientific reasoning in their writing.

INTRODUCTION

Critical-thinking and scientific reasoning skills are core learning objectives of science education for all students, regardless of whether or not they intend to pursue a career in science or engineering. Consistent with the view of learning as construction of understanding and meaning ( National Research Council, 2000 ), the pedagogical practice of writing has been found to be effective not only in fostering the development of students’ conceptual and procedural knowledge ( Gerdeman et al. , 2007 ) and communication skills ( Clase et al. , 2010 ), but also scientific reasoning ( Reynolds et al. , 2012 ) and critical-thinking skills ( Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 ).

Critical thinking and scientific reasoning are similar but different constructs that include various types of higher-order cognitive processes, metacognitive strategies, and dispositions involved in making meaning of information. Critical thinking is generally understood as the broader construct ( Holyoak and Morrison, 2005 ), comprising an array of cognitive processes and dispostions that are drawn upon differentially in everyday life and across domains of inquiry such as the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Scientific reasoning, then, may be interpreted as the subset of critical-thinking skills (cognitive and metacognitive processes and dispositions) that 1) are involved in making meaning of information in scientific domains and 2) support the epistemological commitment to scientific methodology and paradigm(s).

Although there has been an enduring focus in higher education on promoting critical thinking and reasoning as general or “transferable” skills, research evidence provides increasing support for the view that reasoning and critical thinking are also situational or domain specific ( Beyer et al. , 2013 ). Some researchers, such as Lawson (2010) , present frameworks in which science reasoning is characterized explicitly in terms of critical-thinking skills. There are, however, limited coherent frameworks and empirical evidence regarding either the general or domain-specific interrelationships of scientific reasoning, as it is most broadly defined, and critical-thinking skills.

The Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education Initiative provides a framework for thinking about these constructs and their interrelationship in the context of the core competencies and disciplinary practice they describe ( American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2011 ). These learning objectives aim for undergraduates to “understand the process of science, the interdisciplinary nature of the new biology and how science is closely integrated within society; be competent in communication and collaboration; have quantitative competency and a basic ability to interpret data; and have some experience with modeling, simulation and computational and systems level approaches as well as with using large databases” ( Woodin et al. , 2010 , pp. 71–72). This framework makes clear that science reasoning and critical-thinking skills play key roles in major learning outcomes; for example, “understanding the process of science” requires students to engage in (and be metacognitive about) scientific reasoning, and having the “ability to interpret data” requires critical-thinking skills. To help students better achieve these core competencies, we must better understand the interrelationships of their composite parts. Thus, the next step is to determine which specific critical-thinking skills are drawn upon when students engage in science reasoning in general and with regard to the particular scientific domain being studied. Such a determination could be applied to improve science education for both majors and nonmajors through pedagogical approaches that foster critical-thinking skills that are most relevant to science reasoning.

Writing affords one of the most effective means for making thinking visible ( Reynolds et al. , 2012 ) and learning how to “think like” and “write like” disciplinary experts ( Meizlish et al. , 2013 ). As a result, student writing affords the opportunities to both foster and examine the interrelationship of scientific reasoning and critical-thinking skills within and across disciplinary contexts. The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between students’ critical-thinking skills and scientific reasoning skills as reflected in the genre of undergraduate thesis writing in biology departments at two research universities, the University of Minnesota and Duke University.

In the following subsections, we discuss in greater detail the constructs of scientific reasoning and critical thinking, as well as the assessment of scientific reasoning in students’ thesis writing. In subsequent sections, we discuss our study design, findings, and the implications for enhancing educational practices.

Critical Thinking

The advances in cognitive science in the 21st century have increased our understanding of the mental processes involved in thinking and reasoning, as well as memory, learning, and problem solving. Critical thinking is understood to include both a cognitive dimension and a disposition dimension (e.g., reflective thinking) and is defined as “purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considera­tions upon which that judgment is based” ( Facione, 1990, p. 3 ). Although various other definitions of critical thinking have been proposed, researchers have generally coalesced on this consensus: expert view ( Blattner and Frazier, 2002 ; Condon and Kelly-Riley, 2004 ; Bissell and Lemons, 2006 ; Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 ) and the corresponding measures of critical-­thinking skills ( August, 2016 ; Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight, 2016 ).

Both the cognitive skills and dispositional components of critical thinking have been recognized as important to science education ( Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 ). Empirical research demonstrates that specific pedagogical practices in science courses are effective in fostering students’ critical-thinking skills. Quitadamo and Kurtz (2007) found that students who engaged in a laboratory writing component in the context of a general education biology course significantly improved their overall critical-thinking skills (and their analytical and inference skills, in particular), whereas students engaged in a traditional quiz-based laboratory did not improve their critical-thinking skills. In related work, Quitadamo et al. (2008) found that a community-based inquiry experience, involving inquiry, writing, research, and analysis, was associated with improved critical thinking in a biology course for nonmajors, compared with traditionally taught sections. In both studies, students who exhibited stronger presemester critical-thinking skills exhibited stronger gains, suggesting that “students who have not been explicitly taught how to think critically may not reach the same potential as peers who have been taught these skills” ( Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 , p. 151).

Recently, Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight (2016) found that first-year general chemistry students who engaged in a science writing heuristic laboratory, which is an inquiry-based, writing-to-learn approach to instruction ( Hand and Keys, 1999 ), had significantly greater gains in total critical-thinking scores than students who received traditional laboratory instruction. Each of the four components—inquiry, writing, collaboration, and reflection—have been linked to critical thinking ( Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight, 2016 ). Like the other studies, this work highlights the value of targeting critical-thinking skills and the effectiveness of an inquiry-based, writing-to-learn approach to enhance critical thinking. Across studies, authors advocate adopting critical thinking as the course framework ( Pukkila, 2004 ) and developing explicit examples of how critical thinking relates to the scientific method ( Miri et al. , 2007 ).

In these examples, the important connection between writing and critical thinking is highlighted by the fact that each intervention involves the incorporation of writing into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education (either alone or in combination with other pedagogical practices). However, critical-thinking skills are not always the primary learning outcome; in some contexts, scientific reasoning is the primary outcome that is assessed.

Scientific Reasoning

Scientific reasoning is a complex process that is broadly defined as “the skills involved in inquiry, experimentation, evidence evaluation, and inference that are done in the service of conceptual change or scientific understanding” ( Zimmerman, 2007 , p. 172). Scientific reasoning is understood to include both conceptual knowledge and the cognitive processes involved with generation of hypotheses (i.e., inductive processes involved in the generation of hypotheses and the deductive processes used in the testing of hypotheses), experimentation strategies, and evidence evaluation strategies. These dimensions are interrelated, in that “experimentation and inference strategies are selected based on prior conceptual knowledge of the domain” ( Zimmerman, 2000 , p. 139). Furthermore, conceptual and procedural knowledge and cognitive process dimensions can be general and domain specific (or discipline specific).

With regard to conceptual knowledge, attention has been focused on the acquisition of core methodological concepts fundamental to scientists’ causal reasoning and metacognitive distancing (or decontextualized thinking), which is the ability to reason independently of prior knowledge or beliefs ( Greenhoot et al. , 2004 ). The latter involves what Kuhn and Dean (2004) refer to as the coordination of theory and evidence, which requires that one question existing theories (i.e., prior knowledge and beliefs), seek contradictory evidence, eliminate alternative explanations, and revise one’s prior beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence. Kuhn and colleagues (2008) further elaborate that scientific thinking requires “a mature understanding of the epistemological foundations of science, recognizing scientific knowledge as constructed by humans rather than simply discovered in the world,” and “the ability to engage in skilled argumentation in the scientific domain, with an appreciation of argumentation as entailing the coordination of theory and evidence” ( Kuhn et al. , 2008 , p. 435). “This approach to scientific reasoning not only highlights the skills of generating and evaluating evidence-based inferences, but also encompasses epistemological appreciation of the functions of evidence and theory” ( Ding et al. , 2016 , p. 616). Evaluating evidence-based inferences involves epistemic cognition, which Moshman (2015) defines as the subset of metacognition that is concerned with justification, truth, and associated forms of reasoning. Epistemic cognition is both general and domain specific (or discipline specific; Moshman, 2015 ).

There is empirical support for the contributions of both prior knowledge and an understanding of the epistemological foundations of science to scientific reasoning. In a study of undergraduate science students, advanced scientific reasoning was most often accompanied by accurate prior knowledge as well as sophisticated epistemological commitments; additionally, for students who had comparable levels of prior knowledge, skillful reasoning was associated with a strong epistemological commitment to the consistency of theory with evidence ( Zeineddin and Abd-El-Khalick, 2010 ). These findings highlight the importance of the need for instructional activities that intentionally help learners develop sophisticated epistemological commitments focused on the nature of knowledge and the role of evidence in supporting knowledge claims ( Zeineddin and Abd-El-Khalick, 2010 ).

Scientific Reasoning in Students’ Thesis Writing

Pedagogical approaches that incorporate writing have also focused on enhancing scientific reasoning. Many rubrics have been developed to assess aspects of scientific reasoning in written artifacts. For example, Timmerman and colleagues (2011) , in the course of describing their own rubric for assessing scientific reasoning, highlight several examples of scientific reasoning assessment criteria ( Haaga, 1993 ; Tariq et al. , 1998 ; Topping et al. , 2000 ; Kelly and Takao, 2002 ; Halonen et al. , 2003 ; Willison and O’Regan, 2007 ).

At both the University of Minnesota and Duke University, we have focused on the genre of the undergraduate honors thesis as the rhetorical context in which to study and improve students’ scientific reasoning and writing. We view the process of writing an undergraduate honors thesis as a form of professional development in the sciences (i.e., a way of engaging students in the practices of a community of discourse). We have found that structured courses designed to scaffold the thesis-­writing process and promote metacognition can improve writing and reasoning skills in biology, chemistry, and economics ( Reynolds and Thompson, 2011 ; Dowd et al. , 2015a , b ). In the context of this prior work, we have defined scientific reasoning in writing as the emergent, underlying construct measured across distinct aspects of students’ written discussion of independent research in their undergraduate theses.

The Biology Thesis Assessment Protocol (BioTAP) was developed at Duke University as a tool for systematically guiding students and faculty through a “draft–feedback–revision” writing process, modeled after professional scientific peer-review processes ( Reynolds et al. , 2009 ). BioTAP includes activities and worksheets that allow students to engage in critical peer review and provides detailed descriptions, presented as rubrics, of the questions (i.e., dimensions, shown in Table 1 ) upon which such review should focus. Nine rubric dimensions focus on communication to the broader scientific community, and four rubric dimensions focus on the accuracy and appropriateness of the research. These rubric dimensions provide criteria by which the thesis is assessed, and therefore allow BioTAP to be used as an assessment tool as well as a teaching resource ( Reynolds et al. , 2009 ). Full details are available at www.science-writing.org/biotap.html .

In previous work, we have used BioTAP to quantitatively assess students’ undergraduate honors theses and explore the relationship between thesis-writing courses (or specific interventions within the courses) and the strength of students’ science reasoning in writing across different science disciplines: biology ( Reynolds and Thompson, 2011 ); chemistry ( Dowd et al. , 2015b ); and economics ( Dowd et al. , 2015a ). We have focused exclusively on the nine dimensions related to reasoning and writing (questions 1–9), as the other four dimensions (questions 10–13) require topic-specific expertise and are intended to be used by the student’s thesis supervisor.

Beyond considering individual dimensions, we have investigated whether meaningful constructs underlie students’ thesis scores. We conducted exploratory factor analysis of students’ theses in biology, economics, and chemistry and found one dominant underlying factor in each discipline; we termed the factor “scientific reasoning in writing” ( Dowd et al. , 2015a , b , 2016 ). That is, each of the nine dimensions could be understood as reflecting, in different ways and to different degrees, the construct of scientific reasoning in writing. The findings indicated evidence of both general and discipline-specific components to scientific reasoning in writing that relate to epistemic beliefs and paradigms, in keeping with broader ideas about science reasoning discussed earlier. Specifically, scientific reasoning in writing is more strongly associated with formulating a compelling argument for the significance of the research in the context of current literature in biology, making meaning regarding the implications of the findings in chemistry, and providing an organizational framework for interpreting the thesis in economics. We suggested that instruction, whether occurring in writing studios or in writing courses to facilitate thesis preparation, should attend to both components.

Research Question and Study Design

The genre of thesis writing combines the pedagogies of writing and inquiry found to foster scientific reasoning ( Reynolds et al. , 2012 ) and critical thinking ( Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 ; Quitadamo et al. , 2008 ; Stephenson and Sadler-­McKnight, 2016 ). However, there is no empirical evidence regarding the general or domain-specific interrelationships of scientific reasoning and critical-thinking skills, particularly in the rhetorical context of the undergraduate thesis. The BioTAP studies discussed earlier indicate that the rubric-based assessment produces evidence of scientific reasoning in the undergraduate thesis, but it was not designed to foster or measure critical thinking. The current study was undertaken to address the research question: How are students’ critical-thinking skills related to scientific reasoning as reflected in the genre of undergraduate thesis writing in biology? Determining these interrelationships could guide efforts to enhance students’ scientific reasoning and writing skills through focusing instruction on specific critical-thinking skills as well as disciplinary conventions.

To address this research question, we focused on undergraduate thesis writers in biology courses at two institutions, Duke University and the University of Minnesota, and examined the extent to which students’ scientific reasoning in writing, assessed in the undergraduate thesis using BioTAP, corresponds to students’ critical-thinking skills, assessed using the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST; August, 2016 ).

Study Sample

The study sample was composed of students enrolled in courses designed to scaffold the thesis-writing process in the Department of Biology at Duke University and the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota. Both courses complement students’ individual work with research advisors. The course is required for thesis writers at the University of Minnesota and optional for writers at Duke University. Not all students are required to complete a thesis, though it is required for students to graduate with honors; at the University of Minnesota, such students are enrolled in an honors program within the college. In total, 28 students were enrolled in the course at Duke University and 44 students were enrolled in the course at the University of Minnesota. Of those students, two students did not consent to participate in the study; additionally, five students did not validly complete the CCTST (i.e., attempted fewer than 60% of items or completed the test in less than 15 minutes). Thus, our overall rate of valid participation is 90%, with 27 students from Duke University and 38 students from the University of Minnesota. We found no statistically significant differences in thesis assessment between students with valid CCTST scores and invalid CCTST scores. Therefore, we focus on the 65 students who consented to participate and for whom we have complete and valid data in most of this study. Additionally, in asking students for their consent to participate, we allowed them to choose whether to provide or decline access to academic and demographic background data. Of the 65 students who consented to participate, 52 students granted access to such data. Therefore, for additional analyses involving academic and background data, we focus on the 52 students who consented. We note that the 13 students who participated but declined to share additional data performed slightly lower on the CCTST than the 52 others (perhaps suggesting that they differ by other measures, but we cannot determine this with certainty). Among the 52 students, 60% identified as female and 10% identified as being from underrepresented ethnicities.

In both courses, students completed the CCTST online, either in class or on their own, late in the Spring 2016 semester. This is the same assessment that was used in prior studies of critical thinking ( Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 ; Quitadamo et al. , 2008 ; Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight, 2016 ). It is “an objective measure of the core reasoning skills needed for reflective decision making concerning what to believe or what to do” ( Insight Assessment, 2016a ). In the test, students are asked to read and consider information as they answer multiple-choice questions. The questions are intended to be appropriate for all users, so there is no expectation of prior disciplinary knowledge in biology (or any other subject). Although actual test items are protected, sample items are available on the Insight Assessment website ( Insight Assessment, 2016b ). We have included one sample item in the Supplemental Material.

The CCTST is based on a consensus definition of critical thinking, measures cognitive and metacognitive skills associated with critical thinking, and has been evaluated for validity and reliability at the college level ( August, 2016 ; Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight, 2016 ). In addition to providing overall critical-thinking score, the CCTST assesses seven dimensions of critical thinking: analysis, interpretation, inference, evaluation, explanation, induction, and deduction. Scores on each dimension are calculated based on students’ performance on items related to that dimension. Analysis focuses on identifying assumptions, reasons, and claims and examining how they interact to form arguments. Interpretation, related to analysis, focuses on determining the precise meaning and significance of information. Inference focuses on drawing conclusions from reasons and evidence. Evaluation focuses on assessing the credibility of sources of information and claims they make. Explanation, related to evaluation, focuses on describing the evidence, assumptions, or rationale for beliefs and conclusions. Induction focuses on drawing inferences about what is probably true based on evidence. Deduction focuses on drawing conclusions about what must be true when the context completely determines the outcome. These are not independent dimensions; the fact that they are related supports their collective interpretation as critical thinking. Together, the CCTST dimensions provide a basis for evaluating students’ overall strength in using reasoning to form reflective judgments about what to believe or what to do ( August, 2016 ). Each of the seven dimensions and the overall CCTST score are measured on a scale of 0–100, where higher scores indicate superior performance. Scores correspond to superior (86–100), strong (79–85), moderate (70–78), weak (63–69), or not manifested (62 and below) skills.

Scientific Reasoning in Writing

At the end of the semester, students’ final, submitted undergraduate theses were assessed using BioTAP, which consists of nine rubric dimensions that focus on communication to the broader scientific community and four additional dimensions that focus on the exhibition of topic-specific expertise ( Reynolds et al. , 2009 ). These dimensions, framed as questions, are displayed in Table 1 .

Student theses were assessed on questions 1–9 of BioTAP using the same procedures described in previous studies ( Reynolds and Thompson, 2011 ; Dowd et al. , 2015a , b ). In this study, six raters were trained in the valid, reliable use of BioTAP rubrics. Each dimension was rated on a five-point scale: 1 indicates the dimension is missing, incomplete, or below acceptable standards; 3 indicates that the dimension is adequate but not exhibiting mastery; and 5 indicates that the dimension is excellent and exhibits mastery (intermediate ratings of 2 and 4 are appropriate when different parts of the thesis make a single category challenging). After training, two raters independently assessed each thesis and then discussed their independent ratings with one another to form a consensus rating. The consensus score is not an average score, but rather an agreed-upon, discussion-based score. On a five-point scale, raters independently assessed dimensions to be within 1 point of each other 82.4% of the time before discussion and formed consensus ratings 100% of the time after discussion.

In this study, we consider both categorical (mastery/nonmastery, where a score of 5 corresponds to mastery) and numerical treatments of individual BioTAP scores to better relate the manifestation of critical thinking in BioTAP assessment to all of the prior studies. For comprehensive/cumulative measures of BioTAP, we focus on the partial sum of questions 1–5, as these questions relate to higher-order scientific reasoning (whereas questions 6–9 relate to mid- and lower-order writing mechanics [ Reynolds et al. , 2009 ]), and the factor scores (i.e., numerical representations of the extent to which each student exhibits the underlying factor), which are calculated from the factor loadings published by Dowd et al. (2016) . We do not focus on questions 6–9 individually in statistical analyses, because we do not expect critical-thinking skills to relate to mid- and lower-order writing skills.

The final, submitted thesis reflects the student’s writing, the student’s scientific reasoning, the quality of feedback provided to the student by peers and mentors, and the student’s ability to incorporate that feedback into his or her work. Therefore, our assessment is not the same as an assessment of unpolished, unrevised samples of students’ written work. While one might imagine that such an unpolished sample may be more strongly correlated with critical-thinking skills measured by the CCTST, we argue that the complete, submitted thesis, assessed using BioTAP, is ultimately a more appropriate reflection of how students exhibit science reasoning in the scientific community.

Statistical Analyses

We took several steps to analyze the collected data. First, to provide context for subsequent interpretations, we generated descriptive statistics for the CCTST scores of the participants based on the norms for undergraduate CCTST test takers. To determine the strength of relationships among CCTST dimensions (including overall score) and the BioTAP dimensions, partial-sum score (questions 1–5), and factor score, we calculated Pearson’s correlations for each pair of measures. To examine whether falling on one side of the nonmastery/mastery threshold (as opposed to a linear scale of performance) was related to critical thinking, we grouped BioTAP dimensions into categories (mastery/nonmastery) and conducted Student’s t tests to compare the means scores of the two groups on each of the seven dimensions and overall score of the CCTST. Finally, for the strongest relationship that emerged, we included additional academic and background variables as covariates in multiple linear-regression analysis to explore questions about how much observed relationships between critical-thinking skills and science reasoning in writing might be explained by variation in these other factors.

Although BioTAP scores represent discreet, ordinal bins, the five-point scale is intended to capture an underlying continuous construct (from inadequate to exhibiting mastery). It has been argued that five categories is an appropriate cutoff for treating ordinal variables as pseudo-continuous ( Rhemtulla et al. , 2012 )—and therefore using continuous-variable statistical methods (e.g., Pearson’s correlations)—as long as the underlying assumption that ordinal scores are linearly distributed is valid. Although we have no way to statistically test this assumption, we interpret adequate scores to be approximately halfway between inadequate and mastery scores, resulting in a linear scale. In part because this assumption is subject to disagreement, we also consider and interpret a categorical (mastery/nonmastery) treatment of BioTAP variables.

We corrected for multiple comparisons using the Holm-Bonferroni method ( Holm, 1979 ). At the most general level, where we consider the single, comprehensive measures for BioTAP (partial-sum and factor score) and the CCTST (overall score), there is no need to correct for multiple comparisons, because the multiple, individual dimensions are collapsed into single dimensions. When we considered individual CCTST dimensions in relation to comprehensive measures for BioTAP, we accounted for seven comparisons; similarly, when we considered individual dimensions of BioTAP in relation to overall CCTST score, we accounted for five comparisons. When all seven CCTST and five BioTAP dimensions were examined individually and without prior knowledge, we accounted for 35 comparisons; such a rigorous threshold is likely to reject weak and moderate relationships, but it is appropriate if there are no specific pre-existing hypotheses. All p values are presented in tables for complete transparency, and we carefully consider the implications of our interpretation of these data in the Discussion section.

CCTST scores for students in this sample ranged from the 39th to 99th percentile of the general population of undergraduate CCTST test takers (mean percentile = 84.3, median = 85th percentile; Table 2 ); these percentiles reflect overall scores that range from moderate to superior. Scores on individual dimensions and overall scores were sufficiently normal and far enough from the ceiling of the scale to justify subsequent statistical analyses.

a Scores correspond to superior (86–100), strong (79–85), moderate (70–78), weak (63–69), or not manifested (62 and lower) skills.

The Pearson’s correlations between students’ cumulative scores on BioTAP (the factor score based on loadings published by Dowd et al. , 2016 , and the partial sum of scores on questions 1–5) and students’ overall scores on the CCTST are presented in Table 3 . We found that the partial-sum measure of BioTAP was significantly related to the overall measure of critical thinking ( r = 0.27, p = 0.03), while the BioTAP factor score was marginally related to overall CCTST ( r = 0.24, p = 0.05). When we looked at relationships between comprehensive BioTAP measures and scores for individual dimensions of the CCTST ( Table 3 ), we found significant positive correlations between the both BioTAP partial-sum and factor scores and CCTST inference ( r = 0.45, p < 0.001, and r = 0.41, p < 0.001, respectively). Although some other relationships have p values below 0.05 (e.g., the correlations between BioTAP partial-sum scores and CCTST induction and interpretation scores), they are not significant when we correct for multiple comparisons.

a In each cell, the top number is the correlation, and the bottom, italicized number is the associated p value. Correlations that are statistically significant after correcting for multiple comparisons are shown in bold.

b This is the partial sum of BioTAP scores on questions 1–5.

c This is the factor score calculated from factor loadings published by Dowd et al. (2016) .

When we expanded comparisons to include all 35 potential correlations among individual BioTAP and CCTST dimensions—and, accordingly, corrected for 35 comparisons—we did not find any additional statistically significant relationships. The Pearson’s correlations between students’ scores on each dimension of BioTAP and students’ scores on each dimension of the CCTST range from −0.11 to 0.35 ( Table 3 ); although the relationship between discussion of implications (BioTAP question 5) and inference appears to be relatively large ( r = 0.35), it is not significant ( p = 0.005; the Holm-Bonferroni cutoff is 0.00143). We found no statistically significant relationships between BioTAP questions 6–9 and CCTST dimensions (unpublished data), regardless of whether we correct for multiple comparisons.

The results of Student’s t tests comparing scores on each dimension of the CCTST of students who exhibit mastery with those of students who do not exhibit mastery on each dimension of BioTAP are presented in Table 4 . Focusing first on the overall CCTST scores, we found that the difference between those who exhibit mastery and those who do not in discussing implications of results (BioTAP question 5) is statistically significant ( t = 2.73, p = 0.008, d = 0.71). When we expanded t tests to include all 35 comparisons—and, like above, corrected for 35 comparisons—we found a significant difference in inference scores between students who exhibit mastery on question 5 and students who do not ( t = 3.41, p = 0.0012, d = 0.88), as well as a marginally significant difference in these students’ induction scores ( t = 3.26, p = 0.0018, d = 0.84; the Holm-Bonferroni cutoff is p = 0.00147). Cohen’s d effect sizes, which reveal the strength of the differences for statistically significant relationships, range from 0.71 to 0.88.

a In each cell, the top number is the t statistic for each comparison, and the middle, italicized number is the associated p value. The bottom number is the effect size. Correlations that are statistically significant after correcting for multiple comparisons are shown in bold.

Finally, we more closely examined the strongest relationship that we observed, which was between the CCTST dimension of inference and the BioTAP partial-sum composite score (shown in Table 3 ), using multiple regression analysis ( Table 5 ). Focusing on the 52 students for whom we have background information, we looked at the simple relationship between BioTAP and inference (model 1), a robust background model including multiple covariates that one might expect to explain some part of the variation in BioTAP (model 2), and a combined model including all variables (model 3). As model 3 shows, the covariates explain very little variation in BioTAP scores, and the relationship between inference and BioTAP persists even in the presence of all of the covariates.

** p < 0.01.

*** p < 0.001.

The aim of this study was to examine the extent to which the various components of scientific reasoning—manifested in writing in the genre of undergraduate thesis and assessed using BioTAP—draw on general and specific critical-thinking skills (assessed using CCTST) and to consider the implications for educational practices. Although science reasoning involves critical-thinking skills, it also relates to conceptual knowledge and the epistemological foundations of science disciplines ( Kuhn et al. , 2008 ). Moreover, science reasoning in writing , captured in students’ undergraduate theses, reflects habits, conventions, and the incorporation of feedback that may alter evidence of individuals’ critical-thinking skills. Our findings, however, provide empirical evidence that cumulative measures of science reasoning in writing are nonetheless related to students’ overall critical-thinking skills ( Table 3 ). The particularly significant roles of inference skills ( Table 3 ) and the discussion of implications of results (BioTAP question 5; Table 4 ) provide a basis for more specific ideas about how these constructs relate to one another and what educational interventions may have the most success in fostering these skills.

Our results build on previous findings. The genre of thesis writing combines pedagogies of writing and inquiry found to foster scientific reasoning ( Reynolds et al. , 2012 ) and critical thinking ( Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 ; Quitadamo et al. , 2008 ; Stephenson and Sadler-McKnight, 2016 ). Quitadamo and Kurtz (2007) reported that students who engaged in a laboratory writing component in a general education biology course significantly improved their inference and analysis skills, and Quitadamo and colleagues (2008) found that participation in a community-based inquiry biology course (that included a writing component) was associated with significant gains in students’ inference and evaluation skills. The shared focus on inference is noteworthy, because these prior studies actually differ from the current study; the former considered critical-­thinking skills as the primary learning outcome of writing-­focused interventions, whereas the latter focused on emergent links between two learning outcomes (science reasoning in writing and critical thinking). In other words, inference skills are impacted by writing as well as manifested in writing.

Inference focuses on drawing conclusions from argument and evidence. According to the consensus definition of critical thinking, the specific skill of inference includes several processes: querying evidence, conjecturing alternatives, and drawing conclusions. All of these activities are central to the independent research at the core of writing an undergraduate thesis. Indeed, a critical part of what we call “science reasoning in writing” might be characterized as a measure of students’ ability to infer and make meaning of information and findings. Because the cumulative BioTAP measures distill underlying similarities and, to an extent, suppress unique aspects of individual dimensions, we argue that it is appropriate to relate inference to scientific reasoning in writing . Even when we control for other potentially relevant background characteristics, the relationship is strong ( Table 5 ).

In taking the complementary view and focusing on BioTAP, when we compared students who exhibit mastery with those who do not, we found that the specific dimension of “discussing the implications of results” (question 5) differentiates students’ performance on several critical-thinking skills. To achieve mastery on this dimension, students must make connections between their results and other published studies and discuss the future directions of the research; in short, they must demonstrate an understanding of the bigger picture. The specific relationship between question 5 and inference is the strongest observed among all individual comparisons. Altogether, perhaps more than any other BioTAP dimension, this aspect of students’ writing provides a clear view of the role of students’ critical-thinking skills (particularly inference and, marginally, induction) in science reasoning.

While inference and discussion of implications emerge as particularly strongly related dimensions in this work, we note that the strongest contribution to “science reasoning in writing in biology,” as determined through exploratory factor analysis, is “argument for the significance of research” (BioTAP question 2, not question 5; Dowd et al. , 2016 ). Question 2 is not clearly related to critical-thinking skills. These findings are not contradictory, but rather suggest that the epistemological and disciplinary-specific aspects of science reasoning that emerge in writing through BioTAP are not completely aligned with aspects related to critical thinking. In other words, science reasoning in writing is not simply a proxy for those critical-thinking skills that play a role in science reasoning.

In a similar vein, the content-related, epistemological aspects of science reasoning, as well as the conventions associated with writing the undergraduate thesis (including feedback from peers and revision), may explain the lack of significant relationships between some science reasoning dimensions and some critical-thinking skills that might otherwise seem counterintuitive (e.g., BioTAP question 2, which relates to making an argument, and the critical-thinking skill of argument). It is possible that an individual’s critical-thinking skills may explain some variation in a particular BioTAP dimension, but other aspects of science reasoning and practice exert much stronger influence. Although these relationships do not emerge in our analyses, the lack of significant correlation does not mean that there is definitively no correlation. Correcting for multiple comparisons suppresses type 1 error at the expense of exacerbating type 2 error, which, combined with the limited sample size, constrains statistical power and makes weak relationships more difficult to detect. Ultimately, though, the relationships that do emerge highlight places where individuals’ distinct critical-thinking skills emerge most coherently in thesis assessment, which is why we are particularly interested in unpacking those relationships.

We recognize that, because only honors students submit theses at these institutions, this study sample is composed of a selective subset of the larger population of biology majors. Although this is an inherent limitation of focusing on thesis writing, links between our findings and results of other studies (with different populations) suggest that observed relationships may occur more broadly. The goal of improved science reasoning and critical thinking is shared among all biology majors, particularly those engaged in capstone research experiences. So while the implications of this work most directly apply to honors thesis writers, we provisionally suggest that all students could benefit from further study of them.

There are several important implications of this study for science education practices. Students’ inference skills relate to the understanding and effective application of scientific content. The fact that we find no statistically significant relationships between BioTAP questions 6–9 and CCTST dimensions suggests that such mid- to lower-order elements of BioTAP ( Reynolds et al. , 2009 ), which tend to be more structural in nature, do not focus on aspects of the finished thesis that draw strongly on critical thinking. In keeping with prior analyses ( Reynolds and Thompson, 2011 ; Dowd et al. , 2016 ), these findings further reinforce the notion that disciplinary instructors, who are most capable of teaching and assessing scientific reasoning and perhaps least interested in the more mechanical aspects of writing, may nonetheless be best suited to effectively model and assess students’ writing.

The goal of the thesis writing course at both Duke University and the University of Minnesota is not merely to improve thesis scores but to move students’ writing into the category of mastery across BioTAP dimensions. Recognizing that students with differing critical-thinking skills (particularly inference) are more or less likely to achieve mastery in the undergraduate thesis (particularly in discussing implications [question 5]) is important for developing and testing targeted pedagogical interventions to improve learning outcomes for all students.

The competencies characterized by the Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education Initiative provide a general framework for recognizing that science reasoning and critical-thinking skills play key roles in major learning outcomes of science education. Our findings highlight places where science reasoning–related competencies (like “understanding the process of science”) connect to critical-thinking skills and places where critical thinking–related competencies might be manifested in scientific products (such as the ability to discuss implications in scientific writing). We encourage broader efforts to build empirical connections between competencies and pedagogical practices to further improve science education.

One specific implication of this work for science education is to focus on providing opportunities for students to develop their critical-thinking skills (particularly inference). Of course, as this correlational study is not designed to test causality, we do not claim that enhancing students’ inference skills will improve science reasoning in writing. However, as prior work shows that science writing activities influence students’ inference skills ( Quitadamo and Kurtz, 2007 ; Quitadamo et al. , 2008 ), there is reason to test such a hypothesis. Nevertheless, the focus must extend beyond inference as an isolated skill; rather, it is important to relate inference to the foundations of the scientific method ( Miri et al. , 2007 ) in terms of the epistemological appreciation of the functions and coordination of evidence ( Kuhn and Dean, 2004 ; Zeineddin and Abd-El-Khalick, 2010 ; Ding et al. , 2016 ) and disciplinary paradigms of truth and justification ( Moshman, 2015 ).

Although this study is limited to the domain of biology at two institutions with a relatively small number of students, the findings represent a foundational step in the direction of achieving success with more integrated learning outcomes. Hopefully, it will spur greater interest in empirically grounding discussions of the constructs of scientific reasoning and critical-thinking skills.

This study contributes to the efforts to improve science education, for both majors and nonmajors, through an empirically driven analysis of the relationships between scientific reasoning reflected in the genre of thesis writing and critical-thinking skills. This work is rooted in the usefulness of BioTAP as a method 1) to facilitate communication and learning and 2) to assess disciplinary-specific and general dimensions of science reasoning. The findings support the important role of the critical-thinking skill of inference in scientific reasoning in writing, while also highlighting ways in which other aspects of science reasoning (epistemological considerations, writing conventions, etc.) are not significantly related to critical thinking. Future research into the impact of interventions focused on specific critical-thinking skills (i.e., inference) for improved science reasoning in writing will build on this work and its implications for science education.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge the contributions of Kelaine Haas and Alexander Motten to the implementation and collection of data. We also thank Mine Çetinkaya-­Rundel for her insights regarding our statistical analyses. This research was funded by National Science Foundation award DUE-1525602.

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• Jason E. Dowd ,
• Robert J. Thompson ,
• Leslie Schiff ,
• Kelaine Haas ,
• Christine Hohmann ,
• Chris Roy ,
• Warren Meck ,
• John Bruno , and
• Rebecca Price, Monitoring Editor
• Kari L. Nelson ,
• Claudia M. Rauter , and
• Christine E. Cutucache
• Elisabeth Schussler, Monitoring Editor

Submitted: 17 March 2017 Revised: 19 October 2017 Accepted: 20 October 2017

© 2018 J. E. Dowd et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2018 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking

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Matthew Van Cleave, Lansing Community College

Copyright Year: 2016

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Reviewed by "yusef" Alexander Hayes, Professor, North Shore Community College on 6/9/21

Formal and informal reasoning, argument structure, and fallacies are covered comprehensively, meeting the author's goal of both depth and succinctness. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

Formal and informal reasoning, argument structure, and fallacies are covered comprehensively, meeting the author's goal of both depth and succinctness.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The book is accurate.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

While many modern examples are used, and they are helpful, they are not necessarily needed. The usefulness of logical principles and skills have proved themselves, and this text presents them clearly with many examples.

Clarity rating: 5

It is obvious that the author cares about their subject, audience, and students. The text is comprehensible and interesting.

Consistency rating: 5

The format is easy to understand and is consistent in framing.

Modularity rating: 5

This text would be easy to adapt.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The organization is excellent, my one suggestion would be a concluding chapter.

Interface rating: 5

I accessed the PDF version and it would be easy to work with.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The writing is excellent.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

This is not an offensive text.

Reviewed by Susan Rottmann, Part-time Lecturer, University of Southern Maine on 3/2/21

I reviewed this book for a course titled "Creative and Critical Inquiry into Modern Life." It won't meet all my needs for that course, but I haven't yet found a book that would. I wanted to review this one because it states in the preface that it... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

I reviewed this book for a course titled "Creative and Critical Inquiry into Modern Life." It won't meet all my needs for that course, but I haven't yet found a book that would. I wanted to review this one because it states in the preface that it fits better for a general critical thinking course than for a true logic course. I'm not sure that I'd agree. I have been using Browne and Keeley's "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking," and I think that book is a better introduction to critical thinking for non-philosophy majors. However, the latter is not open source so I will figure out how to get by without it in the future. Overall, the book seems comprehensive if the subject is logic. The index is on the short-side, but fine. However, one issue for me is that there are no page numbers on the table of contents, which is pretty annoying if you want to locate particular sections.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

I didn't find any errors. In general the book uses great examples. However, they are very much based in the American context, not for an international student audience. Some effort to broaden the chosen examples would make the book more widely applicable.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

I think the book will remain relevant because of the nature of the material that it addresses, however there will be a need to modify the examples in future editions and as the social and political context changes.

Clarity rating: 3

The text is lucid, but I think it would be difficult for introductory-level students who are not philosophy majors. For example, in Browne and Keeley's "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking," the sub-headings are very accessible, such as "Experts cannot rescue us, despite what they say" or "wishful thinking: perhaps the biggest single speed bump on the road to critical thinking." By contrast, Van Cleave's "Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking" has more subheadings like this: "Using your own paraphrases of premises and conclusions to reconstruct arguments in standard form" or "Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives." If students are prepared very well for the subject, it would work fine, but for students who are newly being introduced to critical thinking, it is rather technical.

It seems to be very consistent in terms of its terminology and framework.

Modularity rating: 4

The book is divided into 4 chapters, each having many sub-chapters. In that sense, it is readily divisible and modular. However, as noted above, there are no page numbers on the table of contents, which would make assigning certain parts rather frustrating. Also, I'm not sure why the book is only four chapter and has so many subheadings (for instance 17 in Chapter 2) and a length of 242 pages. Wouldn't it make more sense to break up the book into shorter chapters? I think this would make it easier to read and to assign in specific blocks to students.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The organization of the book is fine overall, although I think adding page numbers to the table of contents and breaking it up into more separate chapters would help it to be more easily navigable.

Interface rating: 4

The book is very simply presented. In my opinion it is actually too simple. There are few boxes or diagrams that highlight and explain important points.

The text seems fine grammatically. I didn't notice any errors.

The book is written with an American audience in mind, but I did not notice culturally insensitive or offensive parts.

Overall, this book is not for my course, but I think it could work well in a philosophy course.

Reviewed by Daniel Lee, Assistant Professor of Economics and Leadership, Sweet Briar College on 11/11/19

This textbook is not particularly comprehensive (4 chapters long), but I view that as a benefit. In fact, I recommend it for use outside of traditional logic classes, but rather interdisciplinary classes that evaluate argument read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

This textbook is not particularly comprehensive (4 chapters long), but I view that as a benefit. In fact, I recommend it for use outside of traditional logic classes, but rather interdisciplinary classes that evaluate argument

To the best of my ability, I regard this content as accurate, error-free, and unbiased

The book is broadly relevant and up-to-date, with a few stray temporal references (sydney olympics, particular presidencies). I don't view these time-dated examples as problematic as the logical underpinnings are still there and easily assessed

Clarity rating: 4

My only pushback on clarity is I didn't find the distinction between argument and explanation particularly helpful/useful/easy to follow. However, this experience may have been unique to my class.

To the best of my ability, I regard this content as internally consistent

I found this text quite modular, and was easily able to integrate other texts into my lessons and disregard certain chapters or sub-sections

The book had a logical and consistent structure, but to the extent that there are only 4 chapters, there isn't much scope for alternative approaches here

No problems with the book's interface

The text is grammatically sound

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

Perhaps the text could have been more universal in its approach. While I didn't find the book insensitive per-se, logic can be tricky here because the point is to evaluate meaningful (non-trivial) arguments, but any argument with that sense of gravity can also be traumatic to students (abortion, death penalty, etc)

No additional comments

Reviewed by Lisa N. Thomas-Smith, Graduate Part-time Instructor, CU Boulder on 7/1/19

The text covers all the relevant technical aspects of introductory logic and critical thinking, and covers them well. A separate glossary would be quite helpful to students. However, the terms are clearly and thoroughly explained within the text,... read more

The text covers all the relevant technical aspects of introductory logic and critical thinking, and covers them well. A separate glossary would be quite helpful to students. However, the terms are clearly and thoroughly explained within the text, and the index is very thorough.

The content is excellent. The text is thorough and accurate with no errors that I could discern. The terminology and exercises cover the material nicely and without bias.

The text should easily stand the test of time. The exercises are excellent and would be very helpful for students to internalize correct critical thinking practices. Because of the logical arrangement of the text and the many sub-sections, additional material should be very easy to add.

The text is extremely clearly and simply written. I anticipate that a diligent student could learn all of the material in the text with little additional instruction. The examples are relevant and easy to follow.

The text did not confuse terms or use inconsistent terminology, which is very important in a logic text. The discipline often uses multiple terms for the same concept, but this text avoids that trap nicely.

The text is fairly easily divisible. Since there are only four chapters, those chapters include large blocks of information. However, the chapters themselves are very well delineated and could be easily broken up so that parts could be left out or covered in a different order from the text.

The flow of the text is excellent. All of the information is handled solidly in an order that allows the student to build on the information previously covered.

The PDF Table of Contents does not include links or page numbers which would be very helpful for navigation. Other than that, the text was very easy to navigate. All the images, charts, and graphs were very clear

I found no grammatical errors in the text.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

The text including examples and exercises did not seem to be offensive or insensitive in any specific way. However, the examples included references to black and white people, but few others. Also, the text is very American specific with many examples from and for an American audience. More diversity, especially in the examples, would be appropriate and appreciated.

Reviewed by Leslie Aarons, Associate Professor of Philosophy, CUNY LaGuardia Community College on 5/16/19

This is an excellent introductory (first-year) Logic and Critical Thinking textbook. The book covers the important elementary information, clearly discussing such things as the purpose and basic structure of an argument; the difference between an... read more

This is an excellent introductory (first-year) Logic and Critical Thinking textbook. The book covers the important elementary information, clearly discussing such things as the purpose and basic structure of an argument; the difference between an argument and an explanation; validity; soundness; and the distinctions between an inductive and a deductive argument in accessible terms in the first chapter. It also does a good job introducing and discussing informal fallacies (Chapter 4). The incorporation of opportunities to evaluate real-world arguments is also very effective. Chapter 2 also covers a number of formal methods of evaluating arguments, such as Venn Diagrams and Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives, but to my mind, it is much more thorough in its treatment of Informal Logic and Critical Thinking skills, than it is of formal logic. I also appreciated that Van Cleave’s book includes exercises with answers and an index, but there is no glossary; which I personally do not find detracts from the book's comprehensiveness.

Overall, Van Cleave's book is error-free and unbiased. The language used is accessible and engaging. There were no glaring inaccuracies that I was able to detect.

Van Cleave's Textbook uses relevant, contemporary content that will stand the test of time, at least for the next few years. Although some examples use certain subjects like former President Obama, it does so in a useful manner that inspires the use of critical thinking skills. There are an abundance of examples that inspire students to look at issues from many different political viewpoints, challenging students to practice evaluating arguments, and identifying fallacies. Many of these exercises encourage students to critique issues, and recognize their own inherent reader-biases and challenge their own beliefs--hallmarks of critical thinking.

As mentioned previously, the author has an accessible style that makes the content relatively easy to read and engaging. He also does a suitable job explaining jargon/technical language that is introduced in the textbook.

Van Cleave uses terminology consistently and the chapters flow well. The textbook orients the reader by offering effective introductions to new material, step-by-step explanations of the material, as well as offering clear summaries of each lesson.

This textbook's modularity is really quite good. Its language and structure are not overly convoluted or too-lengthy, making it convenient for individual instructors to adapt the materials to suit their methodological preferences.

The topics in the textbook are presented in a logical and clear fashion. The structure of the chapters are such that it is not necessary to have to follow the chapters in their sequential order, and coverage of material can be adapted to individual instructor's preferences.

The textbook is free of any problematic interface issues. Topics, sections and specific content are accessible and easy to navigate. Overall it is user-friendly.

I did not find any significant grammatical issues with the textbook.

The textbook is not culturally insensitive, making use of a diversity of inclusive examples. Materials are especially effective for first-year critical thinking/logic students.

I intend to adopt Van Cleave's textbook for a Critical Thinking class I am teaching at the Community College level. I believe that it will help me facilitate student-learning, and will be a good resource to build additional classroom activities from the materials it provides.

Reviewed by Jennie Harrop, Chair, Department of Professional Studies, George Fox University on 3/27/18

While the book is admirably comprehensive, its extensive details within a few short chapters may feel overwhelming to students. The author tackles an impressive breadth of concepts in Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, which leads to 50-plus-page chapters... read more

While the book is admirably comprehensive, its extensive details within a few short chapters may feel overwhelming to students. The author tackles an impressive breadth of concepts in Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, which leads to 50-plus-page chapters that are dense with statistical analyses and critical vocabulary. These topics are likely better broached in manageable snippets rather than hefty single chapters.

The ideas addressed in Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking are accurate but at times notably political. While politics are effectively used to exemplify key concepts, some students may be distracted by distinct political leanings.

The terms and definitions included are relevant, but the examples are specific to the current political, cultural, and social climates, which could make the materials seem dated in a few years without intentional and consistent updates.

While the reasoning is accurate, the author tends to complicate rather than simplify -- perhaps in an effort to cover a spectrum of related concepts. Beginning readers are likely to be overwhelmed and under-encouraged by his approach.

Consistency rating: 3

The four chapters are somewhat consistent in their play of definition, explanation, and example, but the structure of each chapter varies according to the concepts covered. In the third chapter, for example, key ideas are divided into sub-topics numbering from 3.1 to 3.10. In the fourth chapter, the sub-divisions are further divided into sub-sections numbered 4.1.1-4.1.5, 4.2.1-4.2.2, and 4.3.1 to 4.3.6. Readers who are working quickly to master new concepts may find themselves mired in similarly numbered subheadings, longing for a grounded concepts on which to hinge other key principles.

Modularity rating: 3

The book's four chapters make it mostly self-referential. The author would do well to beak this text down into additional subsections, easing readers' accessibility.

The content of the book flows logically and well, but the information needs to be better sub-divided within each larger chapter, easing the student experience.

The book's interface is effective, allowing readers to move from one section to the next with a single click. Additional sub-sections would ease this interplay even further.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

Some minor errors throughout.

For the most part, the book is culturally neutral, avoiding direct cultural references in an effort to remain relevant.

Reviewed by Yoichi Ishida, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ohio University on 2/1/18

This textbook covers enough topics for a first-year course on logic and critical thinking. Chapter 1 covers the basics as in any standard textbook in this area. Chapter 2 covers propositional logic and categorical logic. In propositional logic,... read more

This textbook covers enough topics for a first-year course on logic and critical thinking. Chapter 1 covers the basics as in any standard textbook in this area. Chapter 2 covers propositional logic and categorical logic. In propositional logic, this textbook does not cover suppositional arguments, such as conditional proof and reductio ad absurdum. But other standard argument forms are covered. Chapter 3 covers inductive logic, and here this textbook introduces probability and its relationship with cognitive biases, which are rarely discussed in other textbooks. Chapter 4 introduces common informal fallacies. The answers to all the exercises are given at the end. However, the last set of exercises is in Chapter 3, Section 5. There are no exercises in the rest of the chapter. Chapter 4 has no exercises either. There is index, but no glossary.

The textbook is accurate.

The content of this textbook will not become obsolete soon.

The textbook is written clearly.

The textbook is internally consistent.

The textbook is fairly modular. For example, Chapter 3, together with a few sections from Chapter 1, can be used as a short introduction to inductive logic.

The textbook is well-organized.

There are no interface issues.

I did not find any grammatical errors.

This textbook is relevant to a first semester logic or critical thinking course.

Reviewed by Payal Doctor, Associate Professro, LaGuardia Community College on 2/1/18

This text is a beginner textbook for arguments and propositional logic. It covers the basics of identifying arguments, building arguments, and using basic logic to construct propositions and arguments. It is quite comprehensive for a beginner... read more

This text is a beginner textbook for arguments and propositional logic. It covers the basics of identifying arguments, building arguments, and using basic logic to construct propositions and arguments. It is quite comprehensive for a beginner book, but seems to be a good text for a course that needs a foundation for arguments. There are exercises on creating truth tables and proofs, so it could work as a logic primer in short sessions or with the addition of other course content.

The books is accurate in the information it presents. It does not contain errors and is unbiased. It covers the essential vocabulary clearly and givens ample examples and exercises to ensure the student understands the concepts

The content of the book is up to date and can be easily updated. Some examples are very current for analyzing the argument structure in a speech, but for this sort of text understandable examples are important and the author uses good examples.

The book is clear and easy to read. In particular, this is a good text for community college students who often have difficulty with reading comprehension. The language is straightforward and concepts are well explained.

The book is consistent in terminology, formatting, and examples. It flows well from one topic to the next, but it is also possible to jump around the text without loosing the voice of the text.

The books is broken down into sub units that make it easy to assign short blocks of content at a time. Later in the text, it does refer to a few concepts that appear early in that text, but these are all basic concepts that must be used to create a clear and understandable text. No sections are too long and each section stays on topic and relates the topic to those that have come before when necessary.

The flow of the text is logical and clear. It begins with the basic building blocks of arguments, and practice identifying more and more complex arguments is offered. Each chapter builds up from the previous chapter in introducing propositional logic, truth tables, and logical arguments. A select number of fallacies are presented at the end of the text, but these are related to topics that were presented before, so it makes sense to have these last.

The text is free if interface issues. I used the PDF and it worked fine on various devices without loosing formatting.

1. The book contains no grammatical errors.

The text is culturally sensitive, but examples used are a bit odd and may be objectionable to some students. For instance, President Obama's speech on Syria is used to evaluate an extended argument. This is an excellent example and it is explained well, but some who disagree with Obama's policies may have trouble moving beyond their own politics. However, other examples look at issues from all political viewpoints and ask students to evaluate the argument, fallacy, etc. and work towards looking past their own beliefs. Overall this book does use a variety of examples that most students can understand and evaluate.

My favorite part of this book is that it seems to be written for community college students. My students have trouble understanding readings in the New York Times, so it is nice to see a logic and critical thinking text use real language that students can understand and follow without the constant need of a dictionary.

Reviewed by Rebecca Owen, Adjunct Professor, Writing, Chemeketa Community College on 6/20/17

This textbook is quite thorough--there are conversational explanations of argument structure and logic. I think students will be happy with the conversational style this author employs. Also, there are many examples and exercises using current... read more

This textbook is quite thorough--there are conversational explanations of argument structure and logic. I think students will be happy with the conversational style this author employs. Also, there are many examples and exercises using current events, funny scenarios, or other interesting ways to evaluate argument structure and validity. The third section, which deals with logical fallacies, is very clear and comprehensive. My only critique of the material included in the book is that the middle section may be a bit dense and math-oriented for learners who appreciate the more informal, informative style of the first and third section. Also, the book ends rather abruptly--it moves from a description of a logical fallacy to the answers for the exercises earlier in the text.

The content is very reader-friendly, and the author writes with authority and clarity throughout the text. There are a few surface-level typos (Starbuck's instead of Starbucks, etc.). None of these small errors detract from the quality of the content, though.

One thing I really liked about this text was the author's wide variety of examples. To demonstrate different facets of logic, he used examples from current media, movies, literature, and many other concepts that students would recognize from their daily lives. The exercises in this text also included these types of pop-culture references, and I think students will enjoy the familiarity--as well as being able to see the logical structures behind these types of references. I don't think the text will need to be updated to reflect new instances and occurrences; the author did a fine job at picking examples that are relatively timeless. As far as the subject matter itself, I don't think it will become obsolete any time soon.

The author writes in a very conversational, easy-to-read manner. The examples used are quite helpful. The third section on logical fallacies is quite easy to read, follow, and understand. A student in an argument writing class could benefit from this section of the book. The middle section is less clear, though. A student learning about the basics of logic might have a hard time digesting all of the information contained in chapter two. This material might be better in two separate chapters. I think the author loses the balance of a conversational, helpful tone and focuses too heavily on equations.

Consistency rating: 4

Terminology in this book is quite consistent--the key words are highlighted in bold. Chapters 1 and 3 follow a similar organizational pattern, but chapter 2 is where the material becomes more dense and equation-heavy. I also would have liked a closing passage--something to indicate to the reader that we've reached the end of the chapter as well as the book.

I liked the overall structure of this book. If I'm teaching an argumentative writing class, I could easily point the students to the chapters where they can identify and practice identifying fallacies, for instance. The opening chapter is clear in defining the necessary terms, and it gives the students an understanding of the toolbox available to them in assessing and evaluating arguments. Even though I found the middle section to be dense, smaller portions could be assigned.

The author does a fine job connecting each defined term to the next. He provides examples of how each defined term works in a sentence or in an argument, and then he provides practice activities for students to try. The answers for each question are listed in the final pages of the book. The middle section feels like the heaviest part of the whole book--it would take the longest time for a student to digest if assigned the whole chapter. Even though this middle section is a bit heavy, it does fit the overall structure and flow of the book. New material builds on previous chapters and sub-chapters. It ends abruptly--I didn't realize that it had ended, and all of a sudden I found myself in the answer section for those earlier exercises.

The simple layout is quite helpful! There is nothing distracting, image-wise, in this text. The table of contents is clearly arranged, and each topic is easy to find.

Tiny edits could be made (Starbuck's/Starbucks, for one). Otherwise, it is free of distracting grammatical errors.

This text is quite culturally relevant. For instance, there is one example that mentions the rumors of Barack Obama's birthplace as somewhere other than the United States. This example is used to explain how to analyze an argument for validity. The more "sensational" examples (like the Obama one above) are helpful in showing argument structure, and they can also help students see how rumors like this might gain traction--as well as help to show students how to debunk them with their newfound understanding of argument and logic.

The writing style is excellent for the subject matter, especially in the third section explaining logical fallacies. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this text!

Reviewed by Laurel Panser, Instructor, Riverland Community College on 6/20/17

This is a review of Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, an open source book version 1.4 by Matthew Van Cleave. The comparison book used was Patrick J. Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic 12th Edition published by Cengage as well as... read more

This is a review of Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, an open source book version 1.4 by Matthew Van Cleave. The comparison book used was Patrick J. Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic 12th Edition published by Cengage as well as the 13th edition with the same title. Lori Watson is the second author on the 13th edition.

Competing with Hurley is difficult with respect to comprehensiveness. For example, Van Cleave’s book is comprehensive to the extent that it probably covers at least two-thirds or more of what is dealt with in most introductory, one-semester logic courses. Van Cleave’s chapter 1 provides an overview of argumentation including discerning non-arguments from arguments, premises versus conclusions, deductive from inductive arguments, validity, soundness and more. Much of Van Cleave’s chapter 1 parallel’s Hurley’s chapter 1. Hurley’s chapter 3 regarding informal fallacies is comprehensive while Van Cleave’s chapter 4 on this topic is less extensive. Categorical propositions are a topic in Van Cleave’s chapter 2; Hurley’s chapters 4 and 5 provide more instruction on this, however. Propositional logic is another topic in Van Cleave’s chapter 2; Hurley’s chapters 6 and 7 provide more information on this, though. Van Cleave did discuss messy issues of language meaning briefly in his chapter 1; that is the topic of Hurley’s chapter 2.

Van Cleave’s book includes exercises with answers and an index. A glossary was not included.

Reviews of open source textbooks typically include criteria besides comprehensiveness. These include comments on accuracy of the information, whether the book will become obsolete soon, jargon-free clarity to the extent that is possible, organization, navigation ease, freedom from grammar errors and cultural relevance; Van Cleave’s book is fine in all of these areas. Further criteria for open source books includes modularity and consistency of terminology. Modularity is defined as including blocks of learning material that are easy to assign to students. Hurley’s book has a greater degree of modularity than Van Cleave’s textbook. The prose Van Cleave used is consistent.

Van Cleave’s book will not become obsolete soon.

Van Cleave’s book has accessible prose.

Van Cleave used terminology consistently.

Van Cleave’s book has a reasonable degree of modularity.

Van Cleave’s book is organized. The structure and flow of his book is fine.

Problems with navigation are not present.

Grammar problems were not present.

Van Cleave’s book is culturally relevant.

Van Cleave’s book is appropriate for some first semester logic courses.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Reconstructing and analyzing arguments

• 1.1 What is an argument?
• 1.2 Identifying arguments
• 1.3 Arguments vs. explanations
• 1.4 More complex argument structures
• 1.5 Using your own paraphrases of premises and conclusions to reconstruct arguments in standard form
• 1.6 Validity
• 1.7 Soundness
• 1.8 Deductive vs. inductive arguments
• 1.9 Arguments with missing premises
• 1.10 Assuring, guarding, and discounting
• 1.11 Evaluative language
• 1.12 Evaluating a real-life argument

Chapter 2: Formal methods of evaluating arguments

• 2.1 What is a formal method of evaluation and why do we need them?
• 2.2 Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives
• 2.3 Negation and disjunction
• 2.4 Using parentheses to translate complex sentences
• 2.5 “Not both” and “neither nor”
• 2.6 The truth table test of validity
• 2.7 Conditionals
• 2.8 “Unless”
• 2.9 Material equivalence
• 2.10 Tautologies, contradictions, and contingent statements
• 2.11 Proofs and the 8 valid forms of inference
• 2.12 How to construct proofs
• 2.13 Short review of propositional logic
• 2.14 Categorical logic
• 2.15 The Venn test of validity for immediate categorical inferences
• 2.16 Universal statements and existential commitment
• 2.17 Venn validity for categorical syllogisms

Chapter 3: Evaluating inductive arguments and probabilistic and statistical fallacies

• 3.1 Inductive arguments and statistical generalizations
• 3.2 Inference to the best explanation and the seven explanatory virtues
• 3.3 Analogical arguments
• 3.4 Causal arguments
• 3.5 Probability
• 3.6 The conjunction fallacy
• 3.7 The base rate fallacy
• 3.8 The small numbers fallacy
• 3.9 Regression to the mean fallacy
• 3.10 Gambler's fallacy

Chapter 4: Informal fallacies

• 4.1 Formal vs. informal fallacies
• 4.1.1 Composition fallacy
• 4.1.2 Division fallacy
• 4.1.3 Begging the question fallacy
• 4.1.4 False dichotomy
• 4.1.5 Equivocation
• 4.2 Slippery slope fallacies
• 4.2.1 Conceptual slippery slope
• 4.2.2 Causal slippery slope
• 4.3 Fallacies of relevance
• 4.3.1 Ad hominem
• 4.3.2 Straw man
• 4.3.3 Tu quoque
• 4.3.4 Genetic
• 4.3.5 Appeal to consequences
• 4.3.6 Appeal to authority

Answers to exercises Glossary/Index

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal of the textbook is to provide the reader with a set of tools and skills that will enable them to identify and evaluate arguments. The book is intended for an introductory course that covers both formal and informal logic. As such, it is not a formal logic textbook, but is closer to what one would find marketed as a “critical thinking textbook.”

About the Contributors

Matthew Van Cleave ,   PhD, Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, 2007.  VAP at Concordia College (Moorhead), 2008-2012.  Assistant Professor at Lansing Community College, 2012-2016. Professor at Lansing Community College, 2016-

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How to build critical thinking skills for better decision-making

It’s simple in theory, but tougher in practice – here are five tips to get you started.

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Have you heard the riddle about two coins that equal thirty cents, but one of them is not a nickel? What about the one where a surgeon says they can’t operate on their own son?

Those brain teasers tap into your critical thinking skills. But your ability to think critically isn’t just helpful for solving those random puzzles – it plays a big role in your career. 

An impressive 81% of employers say critical thinking carries a lot of weight when they’re evaluating job candidates. It ranks as the top competency companies consider when hiring recent graduates (even ahead of communication ). Plus, once you’re hired, several studies show that critical thinking skills are highly correlated with better job performance.

So what exactly are critical thinking skills? And even more importantly, how do you build and improve them? 

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to evaluate facts and information, remain objective, and make a sound decision about how to move forward.

Does that sound like how you approach every decision or problem? Not so fast. Critical thinking seems simple in theory but is much tougher in practice, which helps explain why 65% of employers say their organization has a need for more critical thinking. 

In reality, critical thinking doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us. In order to do it well, you need to:

• Remain open-minded and inquisitive, rather than relying on assumptions or jumping to conclusions
• Ask questions and dig deep, rather than accepting information at face value
• Keep your own biases and perceptions in check to stay as objective as possible
• Rely on your emotional intelligence to fill in the blanks and gain a more well-rounded understanding of a situation

So, critical thinking isn’t just being intelligent or analytical. In many ways, it requires you to step outside of yourself, let go of your own preconceived notions, and approach a problem or situation with curiosity and fairness.

It’s a challenge, but it’s well worth it. Critical thinking skills will help you connect ideas, make reasonable decisions, and solve complex problems.

7 critical thinking skills to help you dig deeper

Critical thinking is often labeled as a skill itself (you’ll see it bulleted as a desired trait in a variety of job descriptions). But it’s better to think of critical thinking less as a distinct skill and more as a collection or category of skills. 

To think critically, you’ll need to tap into a bunch of your other soft skills. Here are seven of the most important. 

Open-mindedness

It’s important to kick off the critical thinking process with the idea that anything is possible. The more you’re able to set aside your own suspicions, beliefs, and agenda, the better prepared you are to approach the situation with the level of inquisitiveness you need. 

That means not closing yourself off to any possibilities and allowing yourself the space to pull on every thread – yes, even the ones that seem totally implausible.

As Christopher Dwyer, Ph.D. writes in a piece for Psychology Today , “Even if an idea appears foolish, sometimes its consideration can lead to an intelligent, critically considered conclusion.” He goes on to compare the critical thinking process to brainstorming . Sometimes the “bad” ideas are what lay the foundation for the good ones. 

Open-mindedness is challenging because it requires more effort and mental bandwidth than sticking with your own perceptions. Approaching problems or situations with true impartiality often means:

• Practicing self-regulation : Giving yourself a pause between when you feel something and when you actually react or take action.
• Challenging your own biases: Acknowledging your biases and seeking feedback are two powerful ways to get a broader understanding. 

Critical thinking example

In a team meeting, your boss mentioned that your company newsletter signups have been decreasing and she wants to figure out why.

At first, you feel offended and defensive – it feels like she’s blaming you for the dip in subscribers. You recognize and rationalize that emotion before thinking about potential causes. You have a hunch about what’s happening, but you will explore all possibilities and contributions from your team members.

Observation

Observation is, of course, your ability to notice and process the details all around you (even the subtle or seemingly inconsequential ones). Critical thinking demands that you’re flexible and willing to go beyond surface-level information, and solid observation skills help you do that.

Your observations help you pick up on clues from a variety of sources and experiences, all of which help you draw a final conclusion. After all, sometimes it’s the most minuscule realization that leads you to the strongest conclusion.

Over the next week or so, you keep a close eye on your company’s website and newsletter analytics to see if numbers are in fact declining or if your boss’s concerns were just a fluke. 

Critical thinking hinges on objectivity. And, to be objective, you need to base your judgments on the facts – which you collect through research. You’ll lean on your research skills to gather as much information as possible that’s relevant to your problem or situation. 

Keep in mind that this isn’t just about the quantity of information – quality matters too. You want to find data and details from a variety of trusted sources to drill past the surface and build a deeper understanding of what’s happening. 

You dig into your email and website analytics to identify trends in bounce rates, time on page, conversions, and more. You also review recent newsletters and email promotions to understand what customers have received, look through current customer feedback, and connect with your customer support team to learn what they’re hearing in their conversations with customers.

The critical thinking process is sort of like a treasure hunt – you’ll find some nuggets that are fundamental for your final conclusion and some that might be interesting but aren’t pertinent to the problem at hand.

That’s why you need analytical skills. They’re what help you separate the wheat from the chaff, prioritize information, identify trends or themes, and draw conclusions based on the most relevant and influential facts. 

It’s easy to confuse analytical thinking with critical thinking itself, and it’s true there is a lot of overlap between the two. But analytical thinking is just a piece of critical thinking. It focuses strictly on the facts and data, while critical thinking incorporates other factors like emotions, opinions, and experiences. 

As you analyze your research, you notice that one specific webpage has contributed to a significant decline in newsletter signups. While all of the other sources have stayed fairly steady with regard to conversions, that one has sharply decreased.

You decide to move on from your other hypotheses about newsletter quality and dig deeper into the analytics. 

One of the traps of critical thinking is that it’s easy to feel like you’re never done. There’s always more information you could collect and more rabbit holes you could fall down.

But at some point, you need to accept that you’ve done your due diligence and make a decision about how to move forward. That’s where inference comes in. It’s your ability to look at the evidence and facts available to you and draw an informed conclusion based on those. 

When you’re so focused on staying objective and pursuing all possibilities, inference can feel like the antithesis of critical thinking. But ultimately, it’s your inference skills that allow you to move out of the thinking process and onto the action steps. 

You dig deeper into the analytics for the page that hasn’t been converting and notice that the sharp drop-off happened around the same time you switched email providers.

After looking more into the backend, you realize that the signup form on that page isn’t correctly connected to your newsletter platform. It seems like anybody who has signed up on that page hasn’t been fed to your email list. 

Communication

3 ways to improve your communication skills at work

If and when you identify a solution or answer, you can’t keep it close to the vest. You’ll need to use your communication skills to share your findings with the relevant stakeholders – like your boss, team members, or anybody who needs to be involved in the next steps.

Your analysis skills will come in handy here too, as they’ll help you determine what information other people need to know so you can avoid bogging them down with unnecessary details. 

In your next team meeting, you pull up the analytics and show your team the sharp drop-off as well as the missing connection between that page and your email platform. You ask the web team to reinstall and double-check that connection and you also ask a member of the marketing team to draft an apology email to the subscribers who were missed. 

Problem-solving

Critical thinking and problem-solving are two more terms that are frequently confused. After all, when you think critically, you’re often doing so with the objective of solving a problem.

The best way to understand how problem-solving and critical thinking differ is to think of problem-solving as much more narrow. You’re focused on finding a solution.

In contrast, you can use critical thinking for a variety of use cases beyond solving a problem – like answering questions or identifying opportunities for improvement. Even so, within the critical thinking process, you’ll flex your problem-solving skills when it comes time to take action. 

Once the fix is implemented, you monitor the analytics to see if subscribers continue to increase. If not (or if they increase at a slower rate than you anticipated), you’ll roll out some other tests like changing the CTA language or the placement of the subscribe form on the page.

5 ways to improve your critical thinking skills

Beyond the buzzwords: Why interpersonal skills matter at work

Think critically about critical thinking and you’ll quickly realize that it’s not as instinctive as you’d like it to be. Fortunately, your critical thinking skills are learned competencies and not inherent gifts – and that means you can improve them. Here’s how:

• Practice active listening: Active listening helps you process and understand what other people share. That’s crucial as you aim to be open-minded and inquisitive.
• Ask open-ended questions: If your critical thinking process involves collecting feedback and opinions from others, ask open-ended questions (meaning, questions that can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”). Doing so will give you more valuable information and also prevent your own biases from influencing people’s input.
• Scrutinize your sources: Figuring out what to trust and prioritize is crucial for critical thinking. Boosting your media literacy and asking more questions will help you be more discerning about what to factor in. It’s hard to strike a balance between skepticism and open-mindedness, but approaching information with questions (rather than unquestioning trust) will help you draw better conclusions. 
• Play a game: Remember those riddles we mentioned at the beginning? As trivial as they might seem, games and exercises like those can help you boost your critical thinking skills. There are plenty of critical thinking exercises you can do individually or as a team . 
• Give yourself time: Research shows that rushed decisions are often regrettable ones. That’s likely because critical thinking takes time – you can’t do it under the wire. So, for big decisions or hairy problems, give yourself enough time and breathing room to work through the process. It’s hard enough to think critically without a countdown ticking in your brain. 

Critical thinking really is critical

The ability to think critically is important, but it doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It’s just easier to stick with biases, assumptions, and surface-level information. 

But that route often leads you to rash judgments, shaky conclusions, and disappointing decisions. So here’s a conclusion we can draw without any more noodling: Even if it is more demanding on your mental resources, critical thinking is well worth the effort.

Advice, stories, and expertise about work life today.

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Traits of Complex Thinking: A Bibliometric Review of a Disruptive Construct in Education

Jose jaime baena-rojas.

1 Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey 64849, Mexico; [email protected] (J.J.B.-R.); xm.cet@zerimarlos (M.S.R.-M.)

2 Fundación Universitaria CEIPA, Sabaneta 055450, Colombia; [email protected]

María Soledad Ramírez-Montoya

Diego mauricio mazo-cuervo, edgar omar lópez-caudana, associated data.

Not applicable.

The purpose of this research is to contextualize the behavior of publications on complex thinking in education. A total of 428 documents compiled in Scopus from 1937 to 2022 were analyzed with a bibliometric study considering criteria such as “complex thinking”, “complex thought”, and “reasoning for complexity”, all combined with education. The results show 153, 47, and 5 publications for each criterion with their related disciplines, citations, types of documents, universities, prominent authors, researching countries, and the general diachronic evolution of the subject, this allows to establish an idea about the implications of the present study according to one of the most important databases in the world. It is concluded that complex thinking and its relationship with education awakens a greater interest in the academy, not only because of its incidence in diverse fields that are nourished by it for the generation of new multidisciplinary knowledge but also because of the published research that demonstrates its transcendence.

1. Introduction

Complex thinking as a construct within epistemology alludes to the nature of associativity between a series of elements that unfailingly share an essential complementarity. Thus, although such elements may be heterogeneous, in any case, there is a dynamic relationship between all of them, which represents a paradox of the one and the multiple in systemic terms. Therefore, complexity is, by default, the filigree of events, interactions, retroactions, and other phenomenal circumstances that grow and integrate the world ( Morin 2005 ; Moraes and Petraglia 2021 ).

Thus, complex thinking brings together, from a systemic approach, the different interactions between objects, people, and the environment at a holistic level, which successively impacts knowledge. The latter must be considered in an integral and not fragmented way, all in order to achieve awareness that even the social system is in constant interaction with the diachronic reality and therefore depends not only on technology but also on the progress that humanity itself tends to achieve over time ( Pereira 2010 ).

In this sense, complex thinking concerns not only part of the process of thinking and understanding reality but also the way in which people manage uncertainty from learning and education. The above, because it is from education that people have partially been able to solve adversities as well as different problems of life, trying to give concrete answers to the infinite questions that from the phenomenal surround him, questions that are also presented as binding elements to continue understanding life and the environment ( González Velasco 2018 ).

Even from education itself, in whatever discipline it may be, it becomes necessary to establish other ways of understanding the construction of subjects in the world, and the ideal is starting from the incorporation of the dimensions of knowledge and directing them from the totality of what the human being can learn. In this sense, education becomes determinant and must, epistemologically speaking, have precise tools that show people new paths for the development of skills from the complexity that surrounds them; thus, allowing a better interpretation of reality ( Santos 2000 ). Learning experiences, creative autonomy, and the current context will be determining elements for future systemic transformations. Because of this, the notion of complexity makes possible the debate within the educational tradition and the elements of change to practical reflexivity around educational processes in general that involve new cognitive horizons regarding the teaching of different disciplines ( Ferrada Sullivan 2018 ).

In this way, complex thought tends to take a notable and significant relevance within the becoming of epistemology as well as within multiple scientific fields and disciplines, including educational sciences. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to contextualize the behavior of publications on complex thought and other known variants, such as complex thinking and reasoning for complexity. All of this is considered in the frame of education through a bibliometric analysis.

It is important to note that bibliometric reviews matter in research because all of these can show the interests of some universities which currently work on some specific fields to delve into some trending topics or even produce new knowledge. In this way, a universities’ publications represent one of its greatest intangible assets because all of them show the impact of these higher education institutions on society at a national as well as an international level for solving problems or explaining. Likewise, these publications can be construed as an effective, relevant, and above all, a disruptive means for emerging into academia as a potential leader in some scientific disciplines where universities and some research centers are investing resources and outstanding efforts. Therefore, bibliometrics describe publication patterns, using quantitative analysis and statistics, which in some cases inspire other universities and institutions for working and moving forward with new articles, books, conference proceedings, among other publications, influenced by subsequent research by others. Bibliometrics can be decisive for identifying how many articles universities and research centers have published or even how many all of them have assessed, then using citation analysis to look at how those scientific papers are impacting new research. Counting publications can be useful for doing some comparisons, but a citation analysis grants researchers and academia a look at the impact those articles have had on others by determining how often they are considered. A citation analysis can also reveal what journals, universities, scientific organizations, and even countries have a remarkable impact in different fields of research ( McBurney and Novak 2002 ; Wallin 2005 ; Belter 2014 ; Rüdiger et al. 2021 ).

Therefore, as the main contribution, the current study reveals the leaders’ regions, universities, and even authors who currently work in the indicated field to produce new knowledge in this regard. Mainly, this is because some specific topics can become intangible assets, increasing the recognition of universities and research centers when all of them produce new scientific research for other researchers interested in better understanding and explaining some phenomena depending on the study which is being dealt with. Likewise, the paper will delve into aspects such as the origin of the concept, the total number of publications, related disciplines, citations, types of documents, universities, prominent authors, and the regions where most work is conducted and published on the subject under study.

2. Literature Review

2.1. origins and reflections on complex thinking.

Knowledge is completely dynamic and adapts itself to the circumstances in time as well as revolutions that are reached at certain moments. For this reason, the confrontation of the sciences with the truth is a praiseworthy attempt to achieve the best possible interpretation of reality ( Tsoukas 2005 ). All this is obviously according to the available instruments provided by human ingenuity to achieve the immanent purpose of understanding it. Hence, knowledge is only one element of a more general system, where education and didactic strategies to facilitate the solution of problems can be the effective means to achieve the assimilation of all the complexity involved in explaining the world from the sciences and humanities ( Ryoo and Linn 2015 ; Sigahi and Sznelwar 2022 ).

Thus, and considering the different revolutions of knowledge and, with this, the various changes in the Western paradigm that involved a remarkable reductionism in the separation of knowledge during the twentieth century, the French philosopher Edgar Morin ends up precisely proposing the construct of complex thinking, whose purpose is to articulate the scientific culture, the culture of the humanities, and the artistic culture in a transdisciplinary way. This is based on the integration of ideas, concepts, and notions derived from different theoretical sources. What has led to complex thinking is to experience a dialectical confrontation that has been leaving an original legacy of social and rational transformation within the theory of knowledge ( Marshall 2016 ; Barberousse 2008 ).

Obviously, complex thinking focuses on formulating questions that attempt to address the reality of phenomena, whatever it may be, and that has to do with the way in which people interact with it, rather than arriving at the answer because complexity involves an imperfection that will always unfailingly be accompanied by uncertainty as well as the recognition of the irreducible. Likewise, although simplification is essential in most cases for general understanding, it must be accompanied by relativization because it can be deliberately accepted in order to better assimilate any event or phenomenon but not to reduce it because it is believed that the absolute truth has been reached. In other words, complexity is the union and interaction of the simple and the complex, where hierarchization, disintegration, and the reduction in different aspects integrate a whole that, at the same time, possesses stages from the infinite mental compression ( Morin 2005 ).

The very notion of what is understood by complex thinking is as dynamic as the raison d’être of what it tries to explain; in fact, it can be said that there is no exclusive and unique definition for which it is also considered a construct. It is for this reason that both the knowledge revolution and the scientific–technical revolution continue to advance, and with them, new questions are raised, as is necessary in this case with the social sciences (see Table 1 ), about the role of the different forms of knowledge and the way in which they interpret the world. In other words, complex or complexity thinking is concerned with reconciling the classical perspectives of thought, which persist, with the new quantum-relativist and scientific–technical revolutions ( Delgado 2002 ).

Notions of complex thinking in some social science approaches *.

* Although all fields of knowledge are analyzed in this research. In this case, a specific example is applied to this branch of knowledge focused on the study of society and human behavior. Source: own elaboration based on Zoya and Aguirre ( 2011 ).

Thus, considering all the previous ideas, it can also be added that one of the most significant moments for the human being, at a phenomenal level, is their own daily life, where an infinity of facts, circumstances, relationships, and experiences converge, fluctuating between the micro and macro world, which one seeks to interpret in order to build a worldview of reality. In this way, daily society life through education is not only transmitted from generation to generation but evolves together with the new tools offered by technology, such as the internet, information communications technologies (ICT), software, artificial intelligence (AI), robots, devices, among a long list that grows every single year. All of them positively impact the performance of complex thinking, in general, as well as education from a troubleshooting perspective ( González Velasco 2018 ; Marshall 2016 ; Baena et al. 2017 ; Yanchar et al. 2017 ).

2.2. Complex Thinking and Education

Clearly, complex thinking is a determinant for the sciences in general because it induces those who research and teach to seek new learning skills that adapt both to the realities of knowledge in permanent construction and to the realities that are also present within the educational process. In other words, the daily work of learning and teaching should not decline in the face of the need to rethink scientific knowledge and the imperative of making use of new techniques to solve problems that subsequently also involve the implementation of new values and learning according to the circumstances ( Álvarez Nieto 2016 ).

There is also an imperative to readapt the way in which people process factual and non-factual facts, so that this processing coincides with the characteristics of complex thinking, see Figure 1 , and therefore the same is more in line with the needs of society, including in education. This situation requires the integration of all knowledge, considering the separation that was established during the twentieth century within the different scientific specialties as well as within the academy itself. Therefore, all this integration previously mentioned constitutes a complementation process that may end up resulting in the cognitive and interpretative improvement of reality ( Varona Domínguez 2020 ).

Some characteristics of complex thinking. Source: own elaboration based on Salcedo ( 2014 ).

Therefore, it can be said that complex thinking is the result of the new scientific paradigm, which was built in the mid-twentieth century and whose initial theoretical contributions were intended to clarify systemic behaviors that were anomalous in principle. In any case, although complex thinking is more typical of the exact sciences, all its methodological postulates have also been implemented within social systems, as well as within the different forms of social organization ( Vásquez and Viguri 2020 ).

Nowadays, philosophers and experts in different fields of science are increasingly reflecting on the modes of perception that generate historical knowledge and its adaptations to the reality of the present itself within the culture of the different social organizations. This implies the need to include the notion of complex thinking as a new type of rationality considering its trans-disciplinarity and influence in the most holistic context for decision making that generates precedents in a kind of co-evolution, both for learning and for education itself ( Chernikova 2015 ; Chekantseva 2017 ).

In fact, the trend is that more and more new studies on complex thinking applied in the field of education are being developed (not only because of the interest of the academy itself but also because of the disruptive implementation of technological tools). These not only seek to analyze, from the logic of cognitive processes, the way in which students understand the daily interactions with other people and the world, but also how they, from their abilities, solve certain problems that may arise at the level of social interaction. Therefore, it can be said that studies on complex thinking consider the learning and reasoning achieved on academia that clearly lies in the competencies, values, and tools that education itself offers to face various challenges and problems ( Ovens et al. 2013 ; Smith and Knowles 2017 ).

It is for all these reasons that complex thinking is dynamic and clearly, from education, plays a determining role in overcoming important challenges related to the strengthening of reasoning competencies for complexity based on critical thinking and creative thinking. Therefore, it is undeniable that literature reviews and bibliometric studies can also influence the evaluation and interpretation of specific thematic areas within scientific research ( Ramírez-Montoya et al. 2022 ).

3. Materials and Methods

In this section, the authors define the adopted techniques for processing and, above all, for analyzing the information and databases consulted according to main purpose of the entire paper. Hence, the research question of this study aimed to answer is: What is the behavior of publications in complex thinking within education considering its influence as a potential intangible asset for universities and research centers?

Then, this current article carries out a bibliometric review where documents such as scientific articles, books, book chapters, and conference proceedings, among other publications, are identified through the Scopus database. The above allows to know the development of new contributions regarding complex thinking in education, in addition to its evolution over time concerning certain topics and publications. This denotes the interest of the academy to work more in depth with a general and comprehensive view of any analyzed phenomenon, just like that which happens in this study with the behavior of publications in complex thought ( Donthu et al. 2021 ).

Thus, Elsevier’s Scopus was consulted; it is considered one of the largest and most prestigious databases of citations and peer-reviewed literature, launched to the public in 2004 and whose content provides a comprehensive summary of research results worldwide in various fields of science, including technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities ( Ball 2021 ).

Similarly, the present research completes a bibliometric process defined as a segment of scientometrics that applies mathematical and statistical methods to any type of scientific literature, as well as to the authors that generate it, to study and analyze the behavior around the production of new knowledge. This is also understood as a study of productivity, which involves creative methodologies and a conceptual structure for the creation of research metrics, which are subject to both the financing, transformation, generation, and impact of such publications that ultimately represent new trends as well as scientific contributions regarding what is being researched nowadays ( Cortés Vargas 2007 ; Marais and Meylaerts 2022 ). On the other hand, the research also completes a descriptive process, which alludes to the analysis that characterizes any phenomenon or occurrence in various disciplinary fields as in this case with the field of social and human sciences. Thus, this methodology allows to deduce a situation that is presented (in this case from bibliometrics); considering also all its dimensions, due to the present proposal focuses on collecting data that describe the situation as it essentially manifests itself ( Lahitte et al. 2010 ; Shields 2020 ).

The search for information in Scopus was completed using technical terms such as “complex thinking (CTH)”, “complex thought (COT)”, and “reasoning for complexity (RFC)”, all of which are also combined with “education (EDU)”. These concepts were also searched in the English language in order to guarantee the coverage of documents in the database under study. After verifying the content of the documents with the indicated terms, we proceeded to process all this information with the indicated methodology as shown in Figure 2 .

Processing of information from the methodological approach. Source: own elaboration based on Cortés Vargas ( 2007 ) and Lahitte et al. ( 2010 ).

Similarly, the total number of publications, related disciplines, and citations were then determined as the behavior over time of this notion as other bibliometric works usually characterize publications in a given field ( Baena-Rojas and Alzate-Rendón 2020 ). Then, the origin of such publications as the regions where most work is currently being conducted and, subsequently, the types of documents, citations, universities, and most prominent authors from the published literature that specialized in the topic of complex thinking and education were determined.

In the first part of this section, the total number of documents tracked in Scopus according to the keywords previously defined and recognized are characterized, see Figure 3 . For the case of “complex thinking (CTH)”, a total of 428 documents with 5341 citations; for the case of “complex thought (COT)”, 361 documents with 7097 citations; and for the term “reasoning for complexity (RFC)”, 5 documents with 7 citations. The above, then, implies that these are usually the most recurrent terms to refer to the subject of study of this work and that there is also a relationship between this multidisciplinary construct with other fields, mainly with the social sciences.

Documents and citations within the field of complex thinking and education. Source: own elaboration based on Scopus ( 2022 ).

Figure 3 also indicates that when the additional term “Education (EDU)” is included in the filter for each of the previous potential synonyms of complex thinking, a smaller number of 153 documents and 1407 citations are generated for the first term, 47 documents and 472 citations for the second term, and then, after the filter, the 5 documents and 7 citations are maintained for the third term which seems to be directly linked to the field of education. After this new filter, it is evident, despite the decrease in research, that complex thinking in general within education maintains a more notable relationship with the social sciences concerning other disciplines.

The second part shows the behavior over time of this notion, see Figure 4 , where the investigation on central theme of the study in Scopus began in the first half of the 20th century, in 1937, specifically with the term “complex thought (COT)” and with higher notoriety compared to “complex thinking (CTH)”; the latter had publications only until 1987. Nevertheless, to date, there has been a considerable increase in the publications of “complex thinking (CTH)” that began in the 21st century during the year 2000 and finally exceeded the total of the works on “complex thought (COT)” despite this last term starting before in the publication of scientific documents. Similarly, and specifically for the field of “reasoning for complexity (RPC)” within the central theme of the study, publications barely begun in 2019, which suggests then that this research topic is new, and new contributions are just beginning in this regard.

Historical behavior and variation of publications on complex thinking and education. Source: own elaboration based on Scopus ( 2022 ).

Similarly, Figure 4 shows that the number of papers on the areas of “complex thinking (CTH)” and “complex thought (COT)” when combined with the area of “education (EDU)” tends to decrease to less than half of the original publications. However, when combining the “reasoning for complexity (RFC)” domain with “education (EDU)”, the number of publications remains the same as the original, decreasing by only one publication, which suggests that this domain has a close relationship with education, which is why there are no changes when refining.

In the third part, the origin of such publications is determined by country and by the regions where most work is conducted on the central theme of this work, focusing on the areas of “complex thinking (CTH)”, “complex thought (COT)”, and “reasoning for complexity (RFC)”, each of these combined with “education (EDU)”. It is important to note that the number of papers, see Figure 5 , does not coincide with most of the total publications previously indicated, (153 and 47 papers—except the last case of 5 papers) because Scopus counts the origin of the papers according to the origin and the number of authors of the papers, who evidently can be from different places. This means that the same document can be registered several times in the database to recognize the origin of one or more authors who may originate from different countries.

Origin of documents on complex thinking and education. Source: own elaboration based on Scopus ( 2022 ).

Thus, according to Figure 5 , the countries with the largest number of publications in the areas of “complex thinking (CTH)” and “education (EDU)” are the United States with 46, Brazil with 22, and Mexico with 12 publications, equivalent to 25.56%, 12.22%, and 6.66%, respectively, of this new total, which includes documents with more than one country of origin. In the area of “complex thought (COT)” and “education (EDU)” are the United States with 12, Brazil with 10, and Spain with 6 publications, equivalent in this case to 21.82%, 18.18%, and 10.91%, respectively. Finally, for the area of “reasoning for complexity (RFC)” and “education (EDU)”, the country with the most publications is Mexico with four followed by Germany with one, equivalent to 80% and 20%, respectively.

In the fourth part of this section, for each combination of fields, the types of documents, the total number of citations, the universities that developed the documents (articles, conference proceedings, books, etc.), and the most prominent authors, within the framework of the central theme of this research, are recognized. Thus, the results show that, see Table 2 , in the case of “complex thinking (CTH)” and “education (EDU)”, the documents are specifically articles with 104, conference proceedings with 31, book chapters 8, books 2, and other 8 works, equivalent to, respectively, 67.97%, 20.26%, 5.23%, 1.31%, and 5.23%. In the case of “complex thought (COT)” and “education (EDU)”, the papers are articles with 39, conference proceedings with 3, book chapters with 1, books 2, and others with 2 papers, which are equivalent to, respectively, 82.98%, 6.38%, 2.13%, 4.26%, and 4.26% papers. Then, for the case of “reasoning for complexity (RFC)” and “education (EDU)”, papers are articles with two, conference proceedings with two, and others with two, which subsequently equal 40%, 40%, and 20%.

Types of publications and other relevant features on complex thinking.

Source: own elaboration based on Scopus ( 2022 ).

Table 2 also shows how, with the filter “complex thinking (CTH)” and “education (EDU)”, there are 1407 citations in Scopus. Then, when analyzing the most cited documents, it is identified that they come mainly from the United States universities, such as Stanford University, University of California, University of Connecticut, Claremont McKenna College, and University of Maryland, among other universities that join the top five. With the filter “complex thought (COT)” and “education (EDU)”, there are 472 citations which, when analyzing the most cited document in this category, comes from Vanderbilt University in the United States with a total of 184 citations, in addition to the other universities that complete the ranking of the top five. Finally, with the filter “reasoning for complexity (RFC)” and “education (EDU)”, there are only seven citations, which come from Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen and the International School of Management, both from Germany, as well as from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, which shows how recent this last field is within the central theme of this article.

In the fifth and last part of this section, it is evident that there are some interesting patterns among all the papers and published research on Scopus. In this case, the graphical representation of the co-occurrence networks shows the inferences and relationships between entities, terms, and in general, the most relevant words according to their frequency in the works obviously considered in this study. In other words, according to previous identified criteria, see Figure 3 and Figure 6 reveals the most recurrent matters within the documents considered for this bibliometric study.

Co-occurrence analysis for all papers selected for this study from 1937 to 2022. Source: own elaboration based on Scopus ( 2022 ).

Then, considering a minimum number of seven occurrences per 100 keywords, it is possible to point out that there are five clusters related with the terms most repeated from the set of data downloaded from Scopus. The first, in this case, “human”, with 951 total links strength, 152 occurrences, and 88 links. The second, “article”, with 770 total links strength, 126 occurrences, and 83; the third, “complex thinking”, with 179 total links strength, 93 occurrences, and 49 links. The fourth, “thinking”, with 319 total links strength, 46 occurrences, and 65 links, and the fifth, “learning”, with 132 total links strength, 22 occurrences, and 52 links. Thereby, the evidence shows that recurrent patterns exist in the analyzed papers, for instance, the most relevant matters by co-occurrence and their relationships with others. All of this, when academia considers “complex thinking (CTH)”, “complex thought (COT)”, “reasoning for complexity (RFC)”, and “education” (EDU) as the designated criteria in this case.

In this manner, Figure 6 also indicates that, in the first case, within “human”, some relevant subthemes exist, such as humans, male, and female with 693, 501, and 408 total links strength, respectively. In the second case, with “article”, there are relevant subthemes such as controlled study, nonhuman, and animals with 259, 234, and 195 total links strength, respectively. In the third case, within “complex thinking”, there are relevant subthemes such as students, decision making, and education with 178, 152, and 144 total links strength, respectively. Subsequently, in the fourth case, with “thinking”, there are subthemes such as psychological aspect, comparative study, and intelligence with 73, 68, and 38 total links strength, respectively. Lastly, in the fifth case, “learning” highlights some subthemes such as clinical competence, nursing education, and medical education with 78, 78, and 70 total links strength, respectively.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

Bibliometric studies are gaining more and more importance due to the development of new computer tools and scientific databases such as Scopus. Thus, epistemologically speaking, complex thinking as a construct is evidence of a constant process of development since its origins, starting in the mid-twentieth century. This is not only because its multidisciplinary nature enriches its raison d’être but also because it is usually interpreted as a paradigm of knowledge and/or a type of rationality that can favor the way phenomena or occurrences are approached in general to understand them and provide answers to the problems they entail according to the historical context. All of the above becomes congruent with what some theorists argue regarding why complex thinking and education present more and more research over time, a situation that supposes a progressive interest within the academy to understand the subject in more depth ( Ovens et al. 2013 ; Smith and Knowles 2017 ; Donthu et al. 2021 ), as seen in Figure 4 , Figure 5 and Figure 6 and Table 2 .

While it is true that complex thinking brings together various fields of scientific knowledge precisely because of its conditional and multidisciplinary nature, the present work reveals that, according to the scientific literature itself, most of the publications on this topic come mainly from the field of social sciences with other thematic connections as reflected in Figure 3 . Therefore, it can be stated that this relationship of complex thinking with the field of social sciences stems from the possibilities that the latter offers to complement the different branches that integrate it and whose purpose is to analyze human behavior and the different interactions with its reality and environment.

Education as a process to promote learning and strengthen the mastery of certain knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and other key elements to understand reality is an essential aspect to deepen and expose the role that complex thinking can have in the acquisition of skills and competencies within the sciences in general. Therefore, there is a huge potential for growth in the creation of new research and literature that specializes in the use of complex thinking to improve didactic and learning processes in education in general, considering the interest of the academy to enhance in this section of educational innovation, considering the constant advances in information and communication technologies, as well as the possibilities offered by the latest industrial revolutions.

All of the above is merely related to the position of McBurney and Novak ( 2002 ) who state that scientific organization and university publications are one of its greatest intangible assets. Obviously, this is because this new and corroborated knowledge can catapult these institutions to the cutting edge of scientific and technological knowledge around the world as well as improving their metrics for international rankings. Hence, these are some critical reasons why bibliometrics matter in order to measure the behavior of publishing scientific papers and their impact within academia.

Finally, at present, according to the search criteria in Scopus, the main countries that lead the production of complex thinking and education are the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, concentrating together almost half of the world’s production with 44.44% in this subject, where this production also corresponds to 67.97% of articles, 20.26% of conference proceedings, 5.23% of book chapters, and the remaining 6.54% of other types of documents. Likewise, in the case of complex thought and education, the countries that stand out are the United States, Brazil, and Spain with 50.91% of the publications, where 82.98% of the production corresponds to articles, 6.38% to conference proceedings, 2.13% to book chapters, and 8.51% to other types of documents.

It is striking that the main countries that lead the production of scientific papers in the main object of this study are currently in the top of the research and development expenditure (% of GDP) of their regions. This proves, according to Baena Rojas et al. ( 2020 ), that a clear incidence exists between the state budget and scientific research production based on a potential budget for public policies in this regard. Although, in Mexico’s case, this research and development expenditure (% of GDP) is less than one percent, and lower regarding some countries of its region; this does not mean that the same pattern is similar for private universities because some of them are leading in the production of scientific papers in complex thinking. In fact, regarding this last analyzed country, in the case of reasoning for complexity and education, the countries that stand out are Mexico and Germany as the only producers of literature on this subject, with 80% and 20%, respectively, where this production corresponds to 40% of articles, 40% of conference proceedings, and the remaining 20% of other types of documents.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the enthusiastic participation of the involved institutions within this research particularly the Institute for the Future of Education (IFE). Similarly, the authors wish to acknowledge the financial and technical support of the Writing Lab, Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in the production of this work.

Funding Statement

This research received no external funding.

Author Contributions

Introduction J.J.B.-R. and M.S.R.-M.; literature review J.J.B.-R. and M.S.R.-M.; methodology; J.J.B.-R.; D.M.M.-C., and E.O.L.-C.; results and discussion J.J.B.-R.; E.O.L.-C. and M.S.R.-M.; conclusions D.M.M.-C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Ethical review and approval has been waived for this study, as it was not an intrusive study, only observation and questionnaires with caregivers.

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from subjects involved in the study. Written informed consent has been obtained from all the participants to publish this paper.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Scientific Thinking and Critical Thinking in Science Education 

Two Distinct but Symbiotically Related Intellectual Processes

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Scientific thinking and critical thinking are two intellectual processes that are considered keys in the basic and comprehensive education of citizens. For this reason, their development is also contemplated as among the main objectives of science education. However, in the literature about the two types of thinking in the context of science education, there are quite frequent allusions to one or the other indistinctly to refer to the same cognitive and metacognitive skills, usually leaving unclear what are their differences and what are their common aspects. The present work therefore was aimed at elucidating what the differences and relationships between these two types of thinking are. The conclusion reached was that, while they differ in regard to the purposes of their application and some skills or processes, they also share others and are related symbiotically in a metaphorical sense; i.e., each one makes sense or develops appropriately when it is nourished or enriched by the other. Finally, an orientative proposal is presented for an integrated development of the two types of thinking in science classes.

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Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think. Albert Einstein

1 Introduction

In consulting technical reports, theoretical frameworks, research, and curricular reforms related to science education, one commonly finds appeals to scientific thinking and critical thinking as essential educational processes or objectives. This is confirmed in some studies that include exhaustive reviews of the literature in this regard such as those of Bailin ( 2002 ), Costa et al. ( 2020 ), and Santos ( 2017 ) on critical thinking, and of Klarh et al. ( 2019 ) and Lehrer and Schauble ( 2006 ) on scientific thinking. However, conceptualizing and differentiating between both types of thinking based on the above-mentioned documents of science education are generally difficult. In many cases, they are referred to without defining them, or they are used interchangeably to represent virtually the same thing. Thus, for example, the document A Framework for K-12 Science Education points out that “Critical thinking is required, whether in developing and refining an idea (an explanation or design) or in conducting an investigation” (National Research Council (NRC), 2012 , p. 46). The same document also refers to scientific thinking when it suggests that basic scientific education should “provide students with opportunities for a range of scientific activities and scientific thinking , including, but not limited to inquiry and investigation, collection and analysis of evidence, logical reasoning, and communication and application of information” (NRC, 2012 , p. 251).

A few years earlier, the report Science Teaching in Schools in Europe: Policies and Research (European Commission/Eurydice, 2006 ) included the dimension “scientific thinking” as part of standardized national science tests in European countries. This dimension consisted of three basic abilities: (i) to solve problems formulated in theoretical terms , (ii) to frame a problem in scientific terms , and (iii) to formulate scientific hypotheses . In contrast, critical thinking was not even mentioned in such a report. However, in subsequent similar reports by the European Commission/Eurydice ( 2011 , 2022 ), there are some references to the fact that the development of critical thinking should be a basic objective of science teaching, although these reports do not define it at any point.

The ENCIENDE report on early-year science education in Spain also includes an explicit allusion to critical thinking among its recommendations: “Providing students with learning tools means helping them to develop critical thinking , to form their own opinions, to distinguish between knowledge founded on the evidence available at a certain moment (evidence which can change) and unfounded beliefs” (Confederation of Scientific Societies in Spain (COSCE), 2011 , p. 62). However, the report makes no explicit mention to scientific thinking. More recently, the document “ Enseñando ciencia con ciencia ” (Teaching science with science) (Couso et al., 2020 ), sponsored by Spain’s Ministry of Education, also addresses critical thinking:

(…) with the teaching approach through guided inquiry students learn scientific content, learn to do science (procedures), learn what science is and how it is built, and this (...) helps to develop critical thinking , that is, to question any statement that is not supported by evidence. (Couso et al., 2020 , p. 54)

On the other hand, in referring to what is practically the same thing, the European report Science Education for Responsible Citizenship speaks of scientific thinking when it establishes that one of the challenges of scientific education should be: “To promote a culture of scientific thinking and inspire citizens to use evidence-based reasoning for decision making” (European Commission, 2015 , p. 14). However, the Pisa 2024 Strategic Vision and Direction for Science report does not mention scientific thinking but does mention critical thinking in noting that “More generally, (students) should be able to recognize the limitations of scientific inquiry and apply critical thinking when engaging with its results” (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2020 , p. 9).

The new Spanish science curriculum for basic education (Royal Decree 217/ 2022 ) does make explicit reference to scientific thinking. For example, one of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) competency descriptors for compulsory secondary education reads:

Use scientific thinking to understand and explain the phenomena that occur around them, trusting in knowledge as a motor for development, asking questions and checking hypotheses through experimentation and inquiry (...) showing a critical attitude about the scope and limitations of science. (p. 41,599)

Furthermore, when developing the curriculum for the subjects of physics and chemistry, the same provision clarifies that “The essence of scientific thinking is to understand what are the reasons for the phenomena that occur in the natural environment to then try to explain them through the appropriate laws of physics and chemistry” (Royal Decree 217/ 2022 , p. 41,659). However, within the science subjects (i.e., Biology and Geology, and Physics and Chemistry), critical thinking is not mentioned as such. Footnote 1 It is only more or less directly alluded to with such expressions as “critical analysis”, “critical assessment”, “critical reflection”, “critical attitude”, and “critical spirit”, with no attempt to conceptualize it as is done with regard to scientific thinking.

The above is just a small sample of the concepts of scientific thinking and critical thinking only being differentiated in some cases, while in others they are presented as interchangeable, using one or the other indistinctly to talk about the same cognitive/metacognitive processes or practices. In fairness, however, it has to be acknowledged—as said at the beginning—that it is far from easy to conceptualize these two types of thinking (Bailin, 2002 ; Dwyer et al., 2014 ; Ennis, 2018 ; Lehrer & Schauble, 2006 ; Kuhn, 1993 , 1999 ) since they feed back on each other, partially overlap, and share certain features (Cáceres et al., 2020 ; Vázquez-Alonso & Manassero-Mas, 2018 ). Neither is there unanimity in the literature on how to characterize each of them, and rarely have they been analyzed comparatively (e.g., Hyytinen et al., 2019 ). For these reasons, I believed it necessary to address this issue with the present work in order to offer some guidelines for science teachers interested in deepening into these two intellectual processes to promote them in their classes.

2 An Attempt to Delimit Scientific Thinking in Science Education

For many years, cognitive science has been interested in studying what scientific thinking is and how it can be taught in order to improve students’ science learning (Klarh et al., 2019 ; Zimmerman & Klarh, 2018 ). To this end, Kuhn et al. propose taking a characterization of science as argument (Kuhn, 1993 ; Kuhn et al., 2008 ). They argue that this is a suitable way of linking the activity of how scientists think with that of the students and of the public in general, since science is a social activity which is subject to ongoing debate, in which the construction of arguments plays a key role. Lehrer and Schauble ( 2006 ) link scientific thinking with scientific literacy, paying especial attention to the different images of science. According to those authors, these images would guide the development of the said literacy in class. The images of science that Leherer and Schauble highlight as characterizing scientific thinking are: (i) science-as-logical reasoning (role of domain-general forms of scientific reasoning, including formal logic, heuristic, and strategies applied in different fields of science), (ii) science-as-theory change (science is subject to permanent revision and change), and (iii) science-as-practice (scientific knowledge and reasoning are components of a larger set of activities that include rules of participation, procedural skills, epistemological knowledge, etc.).

Based on a literature review, Jirout ( 2020 ) defines scientific thinking as an intellectual process whose purpose is the intentional search for information about a phenomenon or facts by formulating questions, checking hypotheses, carrying out observations, recognizing patterns, and making inferences (a detailed description of all these scientific practices or competencies can be found, for example, in NRC, 2012 ; OECD, 2019 ). Therefore, for Jirout, the development of scientific thinking would involve bringing into play the basic science skills/practices common to the inquiry-based approach to learning science (García-Carmona, 2020 ; Harlen, 2014 ). For other authors, scientific thinking would include a whole spectrum of scientific reasoning competencies (Krell et al., 2022 ; Moore, 2019 ; Tytler & Peterson, 2004 ). However, these competences usually cover the same science skills/practices mentioned above. Indeed, a conceptual overlap between scientific thinking, scientific reasoning, and scientific inquiry is often found in science education goals (Krell et al., 2022 ). Although, according to Leherer and Schauble ( 2006 ), scientific thinking is a broader construct that encompasses the other two.

It could be said that scientific thinking is a particular way of searching for information using science practices Footnote 2 (Klarh et al., 2019 ; Zimmerman & Klarh, 2018 ; Vázquez-Alonso & Manassero-Mas, 2018 ). This intellectual process provides the individual with the ability to evaluate the robustness of evidence for or against a certain idea, in order to explain a phenomenon (Clouse, 2017 ). But the development of scientific thinking also requires metacognition processes. According to what Kuhn ( 2022 ) argues, metacognition is fundamental to the permanent control or revision of what an individual thinks and knows, as well as that of the other individuals with whom it interacts, when engaging in scientific practices. In short, scientific thinking demands a good connection between reasoning and metacognition (Kuhn, 2022 ). Footnote 3

From that perspective, Zimmerman and Klarh ( 2018 ) have synthesized a taxonomy categorizing scientific thinking, relating cognitive processes with the corresponding science practices (Table 1 ). It has to be noted that this taxonomy was prepared in line with the categorization of scientific practices proposed in the document A Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012 ). This is why one needs to understand that, for example, the cognitive process of elaboration and refinement of hypotheses is not explicitly associated with the scientific practice of hypothesizing but only with the formulation of questions. Indeed, the K-12 Framework document does not establish hypothesis formulation as a basic scientific practice. Lederman et al. ( 2014 ) justify it by arguing that not all scientific research necessarily allows or requires the verification of hypotheses, for example, in cases of exploratory or descriptive research. However, the aforementioned document (NRC, 2012 , p. 50) does refer to hypotheses when describing the practice of developing and using models , appealing to the fact that they facilitate the testing of hypothetical explanations .

In the literature, there are also other interesting taxonomies characterizing scientific thinking for educational purposes. One of them is that of Vázquez-Alonso and Manassero-Mas ( 2018 ) who, instead of science practices, refer to skills associated with scientific thinking . Their characterization basically consists of breaking down into greater detail the content of those science practices that would be related to the different cognitive and metacognitive processes of scientific thinking. Also, unlike Zimmerman and Klarh’s ( 2018 ) proposal, Vázquez-Alonso and Manassero-Mas’s ( 2018 ) proposal explicitly mentions metacognition as one of the aspects of scientific thinking, which they call meta-process . In my opinion, the proposal of the latter authors, which shells out scientific thinking into a broader range of skills/practices, can be more conducive in order to favor its approach in science classes, as teachers would have more options to choose from to address components of this intellectual process depending on their teaching interests, the educational needs of their students and/or the learning objectives pursued. Table 2 presents an adapted characterization of the Vázquez-Alonso and Manassero-Mas’s ( 2018 ) proposal to address scientific thinking in science education.

3 Contextualization of Critical Thinking in Science Education

Theorization and research about critical thinking also has a long tradition in the field of the psychology of learning (Ennis, 2018 ; Kuhn, 1999 ), and its application extends far beyond science education (Dwyer et al., 2014 ). Indeed, the development of critical thinking is commonly accepted as being an essential goal of people’s overall education (Ennis, 2018 ; Hitchcock, 2017 ; Kuhn, 1999 ; Willingham, 2008 ). However, its conceptualization is not simple and there is no unanimous position taken on it in the literature (Costa et al., 2020 ; Dwyer et al., 2014 ); especially when trying to relate it to scientific thinking. Thus, while Tena-Sánchez and León-Medina ( 2022 ) Footnote 4 and McBain et al. ( 2020 ) consider critical thinking to be the basis of or forms part of scientific thinking, Dowd et al. ( 2018 ) understand scientific thinking to be just a subset of critical thinking. However, Vázquez-Alonso and Manassero-Mas ( 2018 ) do not seek to determine whether critical thinking encompasses scientific thinking or vice versa. They consider that both types of knowledge share numerous skills/practices and the progressive development of one fosters the development of the other as a virtuous circle of improvement. Other authors, such as Schafersman ( 1991 ), even go so far as to say that critical thinking and scientific thinking are the same thing. In addition, some views on the relationship between critical thinking and scientific thinking seem to be context-dependent. For example, Hyytine et al. ( 2019 ) point out that in the perspective of scientific thinking as a component of critical thinking, the former is often used to designate evidence-based thinking in the sciences, although this view tends to dominate in Europe but not in the USA context. Perhaps because of this lack of consensus, the two types of thinking are often confused, overlapping, or conceived as interchangeable in education.

Even with such a lack of unanimous or consensus vision, there are some interesting theoretical frameworks and definitions for the development of critical thinking in education. One of the most popular definitions of critical thinking is that proposed by The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking (1987, cited in Inter-American Teacher Education Network, 2015 , p. 6). This conceives of it as “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action”. In other words, critical thinking can be regarded as a reflective and reasonable class of thinking that provides people with the ability to evaluate multiple statements or positions that are defensible to then decide which is the most defensible (Clouse, 2017 ; Ennis, 2018 ). It thus requires, in addition to a basic scientific competency, notions about epistemology (Kuhn, 1999 ) to understand how knowledge is constructed. Similarly, it requires skills for metacognition (Hyytine et al., 2019 ; Kuhn, 1999 ; Magno, 2010 ) since critical thinking “entails awareness of one’s own thinking and reflection on the thinking of self and others as objects of cognition” (Dean & Kuhn, 2003 , p. 3).

In science education, one of the most suitable scenarios or resources, but not the only one, Footnote 5 to address all these aspects of critical thinking is through the analysis of socioscientific issues (SSI) (Taylor et al., 2006 ; Zeidler & Nichols, 2009 ). Without wishing to expand on this here, I will only say that interesting works can be found in the literature that have analyzed how the discussion of SSIs can favor the development of critical thinking skills (see, e.g., López-Fernández et al., 2022 ; Solbes et al., 2018 ). For example, López-Fernández et al. ( 2022 ) focused their teaching-learning sequence on the following critical thinking skills: information analysis, argumentation, decision making, and communication of decisions. Even some authors add the nature of science (NOS) to this framework (i.e., SSI-NOS-critical thinking), as, for example, Yacoubian and Khishfe ( 2018 ) in order to develop critical thinking and how this can also favor the understanding of NOS (Yacoubian, 2020 ). In effect, as I argued in another work on the COVID-19 pandemic as an SSI, in which special emphasis was placed on critical thinking, an informed understanding of how science works would have helped the public understand why scientists were changing their criteria to face the pandemic in the light of new data and its reinterpretations, or that it was not possible to go faster to get an effective and secure medical treatment for the disease (García-Carmona, 2021b ).

In the recent literature, there have also been some proposals intended to characterize critical thinking in the context of science education. Table 3 presents two of these by way of example. As can be seen, both proposals share various components for the development of critical thinking (respect for evidence, critically analyzing/assessing the validity/reliability of information, adoption of independent opinions/decisions, participation, etc.), but that of Blanco et al. ( 2017 ) is more clearly contextualized in science education. Likewise, that of these authors includes some more aspects (or at least does so more explicitly), such as developing epistemological Footnote 6 knowledge of science (vision of science…) and on its interactions with technology, society, and environment (STSA relationships), and communication skills. Therefore, it offers a wider range of options for choosing critical thinking skills/processes to promote it in science classes. However, neither proposal refers to metacognitive skills, which are also essential for developing critical thinking (Kuhn, 1999 ).

3.1 Critical thinking vs. scientific thinking in science education: differences and similarities

In accordance with the above, it could be said that scientific thinking is nourished by critical thinking, especially when deciding between several possible interpretations and explanations of the same phenomenon since this generally takes place in a context of debate in the scientific community (Acevedo-Díaz & García-Carmona, 2017 ). Thus, the scientific attitude that is perhaps most clearly linked to critical thinking is the skepticism with which scientists tend to welcome new ideas (Normand, 2008 ; Sagan, 1987 ; Tena-Sánchez and León-Medina, 2022 ), especially if they are contrary to well-established scientific knowledge (Bell, 2009 ). A good example of this was the OPERA experiment (García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2016a ), which initially seemed to find that neutrinos could move faster than the speed of light. This finding was supposed to invalidate Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (the finding was later proved wrong). In response, Nobel laureate in physics Sheldon L. Glashow went so far as to state that:

the result obtained by the OPERA collaboration cannot be correct. If it were, we would have to give up so many things, it would be such a huge sacrifice... But if it is, I am officially announcing it: I will shout to Mother Nature: I’m giving up! And I will give up Physics. (BBVA Foundation, 2011 )

Indeed, scientific thinking is ultimately focused on getting evidence that may support an idea or explanation about a phenomenon, and consequently allow others that are less convincing or precise to be discarded. Therefore when, with the evidence available, science has more than one equally defensible position with respect to a problem, the investigation is considered inconclusive (Clouse, 2017 ). In certain cases, this gives rise to scientific controversies (Acevedo-Díaz & García-Carmona, 2017 ) which are not always resolved based exclusively on epistemic or rational factors (Elliott & McKaughan, 2014 ; Vallverdú, 2005 ). Hence, it is also necessary to integrate non-epistemic practices into the framework of scientific thinking (García-Carmona, 2021a ; García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2018 ), practices that transcend the purely rational or cognitive processes, including, for example, those related to emotional or affective issues (Sinatra & Hofer, 2021 ). From an educational point of view, this suggests that for students to become more authentically immersed in the way of working or thinking scientifically, they should also learn to feel as scientists do when they carry out their work (Davidson et al., 2020 ). Davidson et al. ( 2020 ) call it epistemic affect , and they suggest that it could be approach in science classes by teaching students to manage their frustrations when they fail to achieve the expected results; Footnote 7 or, for example, to moderate their enthusiasm with favorable results in a scientific inquiry by activating a certain skepticism that encourages them to do more testing. And, as mentioned above, for some authors, having a skeptical attitude is one of the actions that best visualize the application of critical thinking in the framework of scientific thinking (Normand, 2008 ; Sagan, 1987 ; Tena-Sánchez and León-Medina, 2022 ).

On the other hand, critical thinking also draws on many of the skills or practices of scientific thinking, as discussed above. However, in contrast to scientific thinking, the coexistence of two or more defensible ideas is not, in principle, a problem for critical thinking since its purpose is not so much to invalidate some ideas or explanations with respect to others, but rather to provide the individual with the foundations on which to position themself with the idea/argument they find most defensible among several that are possible (Ennis, 2018 ). For example, science with its methods has managed to explain the greenhouse effect, the phenomenon of the tides, or the transmission mechanism of the coronavirus. For this, it had to discard other possible explanations as they were less valid in the investigations carried out. These are therefore issues resolved by the scientific community which create hardly any discussion at the present time. However, taking a position for or against the production of energy in nuclear power plants transcends the scope of scientific thinking since both positions are, in principle, equally defensible. Indeed, within the scientific community itself there are supporters and detractors of the two positions, based on the same scientific knowledge. Consequently, it is critical thinking, which requires the management of knowledge and scientific skills, a basic understanding of epistemic (rational or cognitive) and non-epistemic (social, ethical/moral, economic, psychological, cultural, ...) aspects of the nature of science, as well as metacognitive skills, which helps the individual forge a personal foundation on which to position themself in one place or another, or maintain an uncertain, undecided opinion.

In view of the above, one can summarize that scientific thinking and critical thinking are two different intellectual processes in terms of purpose, but are related symbiotically (i.e., one would make no sense without the other or both feed on each other) and that, in their performance, they share a fair number of features, actions, or mental skills. According to Cáceres et al. ( 2020 ) and Hyytine et al. ( 2019 ), the intellectual skills that are most clearly common to both types of thinking would be searching for relationships between evidence and explanations , as well as investigating and logical thinking to make inferences . To this common space, I would also add skills for metacognition in accordance with what has been discussed about both types of knowledge (Khun, 1999 , 2022 ).

In order to compile in a compact way all that has been argued so far, in Table 4 , I present my overview of the relationship between scientific thinking and critical thinking. I would like to point out that I do not intend to be extremely extensive in the compilation, in the sense that possibly more elements could be added in the different sections, but rather to represent above all the aspects that distinguish and share them, as well as the mutual enrichment (or symbiosis) between them.

4 A Proposal for the Integrated Development of Critical Thinking and Scientific Thinking in Science Classes

Once the differences, common aspects, and relationships between critical thinking and scientific thinking have been discussed, it would be relevant to establish some type of specific proposal to foster them in science classes. Table 5 includes a possible script to address various skills or processes of both types of thinking in an integrated manner. However, before giving guidance on how such skills/processes could be approached, I would like to clarify that while all of them could be dealt within the context of a single school activity, I will not do so in this way. First, because I think that it can give the impression that the proposal is only valid if it is applied all at once in a specific learning situation, which can also discourage science teachers from implementing it in class due to lack of time or training to do so. Second, I think it can be more interesting to conceive the proposal as a set of thinking skills or actions that can be dealt with throughout the different science contents, selecting only (if so decided) some of them, according to educational needs or characteristics of the learning situation posed in each case. Therefore, in the orientations for each point of the script or grouping of these, I will use different examples and/or contexts. Likewise, these orientations in the form of comments, although founded in the literature, should be considered only as possibilities to do so, among many others possible.

Motivation and predisposition to reflect and discuss (point i ) demands, on the one hand, that issues are chosen which are attractive for the students. This can be achieved, for example, by asking the students directly what current issues, related to science and its impact or repercussions, they would like to learn about, and then decide on which issue to focus on (García-Carmona, 2008 ). Or the teacher puts forward the issue directly in class, trying for it be current, to be present in the media, social networks, etc., or what they think may be of interest to their students based on their teaching experience. In this way, each student is encouraged to feel questioned or concerned as a citizen because of the issue that is going to be addressed (García-Carmona, 2008 ). Also of possible interest is the analysis of contemporary, as yet unresolved socioscientific affairs (Solbes et al., 2018 ), such as climate change, science and social justice, transgenic foods, homeopathy, and alcohol and drug use in society. But also, everyday questions can be investigated which demand a decision to be made, such as “What car to buy?” (Moreno-Fontiveros et al., 2022 ), or “How can we prevent the arrival of another pandemic?” (Ushola & Puig, 2023 ).

On the other hand, it is essential that the discussion about the chosen issue is planned through an instructional process that generates an environment conducive to reflection and debate, with a view to engaging the students’ participation in it. This can be achieved, for example, by setting up a role-play game (Blanco-López et al., 2017 ), especially if the issue is socioscientific, or by critical and reflective reading of advertisements with scientific content (Campanario et al., 2001 ) or of science-related news in the daily media (García-Carmona, 2014 , 2021a ; Guerrero-Márquez & García-Carmona, 2020 ; Oliveras et al., 2013 ), etc., for subsequent discussion—all this, in a collaborative learning setting and with a clear democratic spirit.

Respect for scientific evidence (point ii ) should be the indispensable condition in any analysis and discussion from the prisms of scientific and of critical thinking (Erduran, 2021 ). Although scientific knowledge may be impregnated with subjectivity during its construction and is revisable in the light of new evidence ( tentativeness of scientific knowledge), when it is accepted by the scientific community it is as objective as possible (García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2016b ). Therefore, promoting trust and respect for scientific evidence should be one of the primary educational challenges to combating pseudoscientists and science deniers (Díaz & Cabrera, 2022 ), whose arguments are based on false beliefs and assumptions, anecdotes, and conspiracy theories (Normand, 2008 ). Nevertheless, it is no simple task to achieve the promotion or respect for scientific evidence (Fackler, 2021 ) since science deniers, for example, consider that science is unreliable because it is imperfect (McIntyre, 2021 ). Hence the need to promote a basic understanding of NOS (point iii ) as a fundamental pillar for the development of both scientific thinking and critical thinking. A good way to do this would be through explicit and reflective discussion about controversies from the history of science (Acevedo-Díaz & García-Carmona, 2017 ) or contemporary controversies (García-Carmona, 2021b ; García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2016a ).

Also, with respect to point iii of the proposal, it is necessary to manage basic scientific knowledge in the development of scientific and critical thinking skills (Willingham, 2008 ). Without this, it will be impossible to develop a minimally serious and convincing argument on the issue being analyzed. For example, if one does not know the transmission mechanism of a certain disease, it is likely to be very difficult to understand or justify certain patterns of social behavior when faced with it. In general, possessing appropriate scientific knowledge on the issue in question helps to make the best interpretation of the data and evidence available on this issue (OECD, 2019 ).

The search for information from reliable sources, together with its analysis and interpretation (points iv to vi ), are essential practices both in purely scientific contexts (e.g., learning about the behavior of a given physical phenomenon from literature or through enquiry) and in the application of critical thinking (e.g., when one wishes to take a personal, but informed, position on a particular socio-scientific issue). With regard to determining the credibility of information with scientific content on the Internet, Osborne et al. ( 2022 ) propose, among other strategies, to check whether the source is free of conflicts of interest, i.e., whether or not it is biased by ideological, political or economic motives. Also, it should be checked whether the source and the author(s) of the information are sufficiently reputable.

Regarding the interpretation of data and evidence, several studies have shown the difficulties that students often have with this practice in the context of enquiry activities (e.g., Gobert et al., 2018 ; Kanari & Millar, 2004 ; Pols et al., 2021 ), or when analyzing science news in the press (Norris et al., 2003 ). It is also found that they have significant difficulties in choosing the most appropriate data to support their arguments in causal analyses (Kuhn & Modrek, 2022 ). However, it must be recognized that making interpretations or inferences from data is not a simple task; among other reasons, because their construction is influenced by multiple factors, both epistemic (prior knowledge, experimental designs, etc.) and non-epistemic (personal expectations, ideology, sociopolitical context, etc.), which means that such interpretations are not always the same for all scientists (García-Carmona, 2021a ; García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2018 ). For this reason, the performance of this scientific practice constitutes one of the phases or processes that generate the most debate or discussion in a scientific community, as long as no consensus is reached. In order to improve the practice of making inferences among students, Kuhn and Lerman ( 2021 ) propose activities that help them develop their own epistemological norms to connect causally their statements with the available evidence.

Point vii refers, on the one hand, to an essential scientific practice: the elaboration of evidence-based scientific explanations which generally, in a reasoned way, account for the causality, properties, and/or behavior of the phenomena (Brigandt, 2016 ). In addition, point vii concerns the practice of argumentation . Unlike scientific explanations, argumentation tries to justify an idea, explanation, or position with the clear purpose of persuading those who defend other different ones (Osborne & Patterson, 2011 ). As noted above, the complexity of most socioscientific issues implies that they have no unique valid solution or response. Therefore, the content of the arguments used to defend one position or another are not always based solely on purely rational factors such as data and scientific evidence. Some authors defend the need to also deal with non-epistemic aspects of the nature of science when teaching it (García-Carmona, 2021a ; García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2018 ) since many scientific and socioscientific controversies are resolved by different factors or go beyond just the epistemic (Vallverdú, 2005 ).

To defend an idea or position taken on an issue, it is not enough to have scientific evidence that supports it. It is also essential to have skills for the communication and discussion of ideas (point viii ). The history of science shows how the difficulties some scientists had in communicating their ideas scientifically led to those ideas not being accepted at the time. A good example for students to become aware of this is the historical case of Semmelweis and puerperal fever (Aragón-Méndez et al., 2019 ). Its reflective reading makes it possible to conclude that the proposal of this doctor that gynecologists disinfect their hands, when passing from one parturient to another to avoid contagions that provoked the fever, was rejected by the medical community not only for epistemic reasons, but also for the difficulties that he had to communicate his idea. The history of science also reveals that some scientific interpretations were imposed on others at certain historical moments due to the rhetorical skills of their proponents although none of the explanations would convincingly explain the phenomenon studied. An example is the case of the controversy between Pasteur and Liebig about the phenomenon of fermentation (García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2017 ), whose reading and discussion in science class would also be recommended in this context of this critical and scientific thinking skill. With the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the arguments of some charlatans in the media and on social networks managed to gain a certain influence in the population, even though scientifically they were muddled nonsense (García-Carmona, 2021b ). Therefore, the reflective reading of news on current SSIs such as this also constitutes a good resource for the same educational purpose. In general, according to Spektor-Levy et al. ( 2009 ), scientific communication skills should be addressed explicitly in class, in a progressive and continuous manner, including tasks of information seeking, reading, scientific writing, representation of information, and representation of the knowledge acquired.

Finally (point ix ), a good scientific/critical thinker must be aware of what they know, of what they have doubts about or do not know, to this end continuously practicing metacognitive exercises (Dean & Kuhn, 2003 ; Hyytine et al., 2019 ; Magno, 2010 ; Willingham, 2008 ). At the same time, they must recognize the weaknesses and strengths of the arguments of their peers in the debate in order to be self-critical if necessary, as well as to revising their own ideas and arguments to improve and reorient them, etc. ( self-regulation ). I see one of the keys of both scientific and critical thinking being the capacity or willingness to change one’s mind, without it being frowned upon. Indeed, quite the opposite since one assumes it to occur thanks to the arguments being enriched and more solidly founded. In other words, scientific and critical thinking and arrogance or haughtiness towards the rectification of ideas or opinions do not stick well together.

5 Final Remarks

For decades, scientific thinking and critical thinking have received particular attention from different disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, and specific areas of this last such as science education. The two types of knowledge represent intellectual processes whose development in students, and in society in general, is considered indispensable for the exercise of responsible citizenship in accord with the demands of today’s society (European Commission, 2006 , 2015 ; NRC, 2012 ; OECD, 2020 ). As has been shown however, the task of their conceptualization is complex, and teaching students to think scientifically and critically is a difficult educational challenge (Willingham, 2008 ).

Aware of this, and after many years dedicated to science education, I felt the need to organize my ideas regarding the aforementioned two types of thinking. In consulting the literature about these, I found that, in many publications, scientific thinking and critical thinking are presented or perceived as being interchangeable or indistinguishable; a conclusion also shared by Hyytine et al. ( 2019 ). Rarely have their differences, relationships, or common features been explicitly studied. So, I considered that it was a matter needing to be addressed because, in science education, the development of scientific thinking is an inherent objective, but, when critical thinking is added to the learning objectives, there arise more than reasonable doubts about when one or the other would be used, or both at the same time. The present work came about motivated by this, with the intention of making a particular contribution, but based on the relevant literature, to advance in the question raised. This converges in conceiving scientific thinking and critical thinking as two intellectual processes that overlap and feed into each other in many aspects but are different with respect to certain cognitive skills and in terms of their purpose. Thus, in the case of scientific thinking, the aim is to choose the best possible explanation of a phenomenon based on the available evidence, and it therefore involves the rejection of alternative explanatory proposals that are shown to be less coherent or convincing. Whereas, from the perspective of critical thinking, the purpose is to choose the most defensible idea/option among others that are also defensible, using both scientific and extra-scientific (i.e., moral, ethical, political, etc.) arguments. With this in mind, I have described a proposal to guide their development in the classroom, integrating them under a conception that I have called, metaphorically, a symbiotic relationship between two modes of thinking.

Critical thinking is mentioned literally in other of the curricular provisions’ subjects such as in Education in Civics and Ethical Values or in Geography and History (Royal Decree 217/2022).

García-Carmona ( 2021a ) conceives of them as activities that require the comprehensive application of procedural skills, cognitive and metacognitive processes, and both scientific knowledge and knowledge of the nature of scientific practice .

Kuhn ( 2021 ) argues that the relationship between scientific reasoning and metacognition is especially fostered by what she calls inhibitory control , which basically consists of breaking down the whole of a thought into parts in such a way that attention is inhibited on some of those parts to allow a focused examination of the intended mental content.

Specifically, Tena-Sánchez and León-Medina (2020) assume that critical thinking is at the basis of rational or scientific skepticism that leads to questioning any claim that does not have empirical support.

As discussed in the introduction, the inquiry-based approach is also considered conducive to addressing critical thinking in science education (Couso et al., 2020 ; NRC, 2012 ).

Epistemic skills should not be confused with epistemological knowledge (García-Carmona, 2021a ). The former refers to skills to construct, evaluate, and use knowledge, and the latter to understanding about the origin, nature, scope, and limits of scientific knowledge.

For this purpose, it can be very useful to address in class, with the help of the history and philosophy of science, that scientists get more wrong than right in their research, and that error is always an opportunity to learn (García-Carmona & Acevedo-Díaz, 2018 ).

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What is Critical Thinking in Nursing? (Explained W/ Examples)

Last updated on August 23rd, 2023

Critical thinking is a foundational skill applicable across various domains, including education, problem-solving, decision-making, and professional fields such as science, business, healthcare, and more.

It plays a crucial role in promoting logical and rational thinking, fostering informed decision-making, and enabling individuals to navigate complex and rapidly changing environments.

In this article, we will look at what is critical thinking in nursing practice, its importance, and how it enables nurses to excel in their roles while also positively impacting patient outcomes.

What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is a cognitive process that involves analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information to make reasoned and informed decisions.

It’s a mental activity that goes beyond simple memorization or acceptance of information at face value.

Critical thinking involves careful, reflective, and logical thinking to understand complex problems, consider various perspectives, and arrive at well-reasoned conclusions or solutions.

Key aspects of critical thinking include:

• Analysis: Critical thinking begins with the thorough examination of information, ideas, or situations. It involves breaking down complex concepts into smaller parts to better understand their components and relationships.
• Evaluation: Critical thinkers assess the quality and reliability of information or arguments. They weigh evidence, identify strengths and weaknesses, and determine the credibility of sources.
• Synthesis: Critical thinking involves combining different pieces of information or ideas to create a new understanding or perspective. This involves connecting the dots between various sources and integrating them into a coherent whole.
• Inference: Critical thinkers draw logical and well-supported conclusions based on the information and evidence available. They use reasoning to make educated guesses about situations where complete information might be lacking.
• Problem-Solving: Critical thinking is essential in solving complex problems. It allows individuals to identify and define problems, generate potential solutions, evaluate the pros and cons of each solution, and choose the most appropriate course of action.
• Creativity: Critical thinking involves thinking outside the box and considering alternative viewpoints or approaches. It encourages the exploration of new ideas and solutions beyond conventional thinking.
• Reflection: Critical thinkers engage in self-assessment and reflection on their thought processes. They consider their own biases, assumptions, and potential errors in reasoning, aiming to improve their thinking skills over time.
• Open-Mindedness: Critical thinkers approach ideas and information with an open mind, willing to consider different viewpoints and perspectives even if they challenge their own beliefs.
• Effective Communication: Critical thinkers can articulate their thoughts and reasoning clearly and persuasively to others. They can express complex ideas in a coherent and understandable manner.
• Continuous Learning: Critical thinking encourages a commitment to ongoing learning and intellectual growth. It involves seeking out new knowledge, refining thinking skills, and staying receptive to new information.

Definition of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is an intellectual process of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information to make reasoned and informed decisions.

What is Critical Thinking in Nursing?

Critical thinking in nursing is a vital cognitive skill that involves analyzing, evaluating, and making reasoned decisions about patient care.

It’s an essential aspect of a nurse’s professional practice as it enables them to provide safe and effective care to patients.

Critical thinking involves a careful and deliberate thought process to gather and assess information, consider alternative solutions, and make informed decisions based on evidence and sound judgment.

This skill helps nurses to:

• Assess Information: Critical thinking allows nurses to thoroughly assess patient information, including medical history, symptoms, and test results. By analyzing this data, nurses can identify patterns, discrepancies, and potential issues that may require further investigation.
• Diagnose: Nurses use critical thinking to analyze patient data and collaboratively work with other healthcare professionals to formulate accurate nursing diagnoses. This is crucial for developing appropriate care plans that address the unique needs of each patient.
• Plan and Implement Care: Once a nursing diagnosis is established, critical thinking helps nurses develop effective care plans. They consider various interventions and treatment options, considering the patient’s preferences, medical history, and evidence-based practices.
• Evaluate Outcomes: After implementing interventions, critical thinking enables nurses to evaluate the outcomes of their actions. If the desired outcomes are not achieved, nurses can adapt their approach and make necessary changes to the care plan.
• Prioritize Care: In busy healthcare environments, nurses often face situations where they must prioritize patient care. Critical thinking helps them determine which patients require immediate attention and which interventions are most essential.
• Communicate Effectively: Critical thinking skills allow nurses to communicate clearly and confidently with patients, their families, and other members of the healthcare team. They can explain complex medical information and treatment plans in a way that is easily understood by all parties involved.
• Identify Problems: Nurses use critical thinking to identify potential complications or problems in a patient’s condition. This early recognition can lead to timely interventions and prevent further deterioration.
• Collaborate: Healthcare is a collaborative effort involving various professionals. Critical thinking enables nurses to actively participate in interdisciplinary discussions, share their insights, and contribute to holistic patient care.
• Ethical Decision-Making: Critical thinking helps nurses navigate ethical dilemmas that can arise in patient care. They can analyze different perspectives, consider ethical principles, and make morally sound decisions.
• Continual Learning: Critical thinking encourages nurses to seek out new knowledge, stay up-to-date with the latest research and medical advancements, and incorporate evidence-based practices into their care.

In summary, critical thinking is an integral skill for nurses, allowing them to provide high-quality, patient-centered care by analyzing information, making informed decisions, and adapting their approaches as needed.

It’s a dynamic process that enhances clinical reasoning , problem-solving, and overall patient outcomes.

What are the Levels of Critical Thinking in Nursing?

The development of critical thinking in nursing practice involves progressing through three levels: basic, complex, and commitment.

The Kataoka-Yahiro and Saylor model outlines this progression.

1. Basic Critical Thinking:

At this level, learners trust experts for solutions. Thinking is based on rules and principles. For instance, nursing students may strictly follow a procedure manual without personalization, as they lack experience. Answers are seen as right or wrong, and the opinions of experts are accepted.

2. Complex Critical Thinking:

Learners start to analyze choices independently and think creatively. They recognize conflicting solutions and weigh benefits and risks. Thinking becomes innovative, with a willingness to consider various approaches in complex situations.

3. Commitment:

At this level, individuals anticipate decision points without external help and take responsibility for their choices. They choose actions or beliefs based on available alternatives, considering consequences and accountability.

As nurses gain knowledge and experience, their critical thinking evolves from relying on experts to independent analysis and decision-making, ultimately leading to committed and accountable choices in patient care.

Why Critical Thinking is Important in Nursing?

Critical thinking is important in nursing for several crucial reasons:

Patient Safety:

Nursing decisions directly impact patient well-being. Critical thinking helps nurses identify potential risks, make informed choices, and prevent errors.

Clinical Judgment:

Nursing decisions often involve evaluating information from various sources, such as patient history, lab results, and medical literature.

Critical thinking assists nurses in critically appraising this information, distinguishing credible sources, and making rational judgments that align with evidence-based practices.

Enhances Decision-Making:

In nursing, critical thinking allows nurses to gather relevant patient information, assess it objectively, and weigh different options based on evidence and analysis.

This process empowers them to make informed decisions about patient care, treatment plans, and interventions, ultimately leading to better outcomes.

Promotes Problem-Solving:

Nurses encounter complex patient issues that require effective problem-solving.

Critical thinking equips them to break down problems into manageable parts, analyze root causes, and explore creative solutions that consider the unique needs of each patient.

Drives Creativity:

Nursing care is not always straightforward. Critical thinking encourages nurses to think creatively and explore innovative approaches to challenges, especially when standard protocols might not suffice for unique patient situations.

Fosters Effective Communication:

Communication is central to nursing. Critical thinking enables nurses to clearly express their thoughts, provide logical explanations for their decisions, and engage in meaningful dialogues with patients, families, and other healthcare professionals.

Aids Learning:

Nursing is a field of continuous learning. Critical thinking encourages nurses to engage in ongoing self-directed education, seeking out new knowledge, embracing new techniques, and staying current with the latest research and developments.

Improves Relationships:

Open-mindedness and empathy are essential in nursing relationships.

Critical thinking encourages nurses to consider diverse viewpoints, understand patients’ perspectives, and communicate compassionately, leading to stronger therapeutic relationships.

Empowers Independence:

Nursing often requires autonomous decision-making. Critical thinking empowers nurses to analyze situations independently, make judgments without undue influence, and take responsibility for their actions.

Facilitates Adaptability:

Healthcare environments are ever-changing. Critical thinking equips nurses with the ability to quickly assess new information, adjust care plans, and navigate unexpected situations while maintaining patient safety and well-being.

Strengthens Critical Analysis:

In the era of vast information, nurses must discern reliable data from misinformation.

Critical thinking helps them scrutinize sources, question assumptions, and make well-founded choices based on credible information.

How to Apply Critical Thinking in Nursing? (With Examples)

Here are some examples of how nurses can apply critical thinking.

Assess Patient Data:

Critical Thinking Action: Carefully review patient history, symptoms, and test results.

Example: A nurse notices a change in a diabetic patient’s blood sugar levels. Instead of just administering insulin, the nurse considers recent dietary changes, activity levels, and possible medication interactions before adjusting the treatment plan.

Diagnose Patient Needs:

Critical Thinking Action: Analyze patient data to identify potential nursing diagnoses.

Example: After reviewing a patient’s lab results, vital signs, and observations, a nurse identifies “ Risk for Impaired Skin Integrity ” due to the patient’s limited mobility.

Plan and Implement Care:

Critical Thinking Action: Develop a care plan based on patient needs and evidence-based practices.

Example: For a patient at risk of falls, the nurse plans interventions such as hourly rounding, non-slip footwear, and bed alarms to ensure patient safety.

Evaluate Interventions:

Critical Thinking Action: Assess the effectiveness of interventions and modify the care plan as needed.

Example: After administering pain medication, the nurse evaluates its impact on the patient’s comfort level and considers adjusting the dosage or trying an alternative pain management approach.

Prioritize Care:

Critical Thinking Action: Determine the order of interventions based on patient acuity and needs.

Example: In a busy emergency department, the nurse triages patients by considering the severity of their conditions, ensuring that critical cases receive immediate attention.

Collaborate with the Healthcare Team:

Critical Thinking Action: Participate in interdisciplinary discussions and share insights.

Example: During rounds, a nurse provides input on a patient’s response to treatment, which prompts the team to adjust the care plan for better outcomes.

Ethical Decision-Making:

Critical Thinking Action: Analyze ethical dilemmas and make morally sound choices.

Example: When a terminally ill patient expresses a desire to stop treatment, the nurse engages in ethical discussions, respecting the patient’s autonomy and ensuring proper end-of-life care.

Patient Education:

Critical Thinking Action: Tailor patient education to individual needs and comprehension levels.

Example: A nurse uses visual aids and simplified language to explain medication administration to a patient with limited literacy skills.

Adapt to Changes:

Critical Thinking Action: Quickly adjust care plans when patient conditions change.

Example: During post-operative recovery, a nurse notices signs of infection and promptly informs the healthcare team to initiate appropriate treatment adjustments.

Critical Analysis of Information:

Critical Thinking Action: Evaluate information sources for reliability and relevance.

Example: When presented with conflicting research studies, a nurse critically examines the methodologies and sample sizes to determine which study is more credible.

Making Sense of Critical Thinking Skills

What is the purpose of critical thinking in nursing.

The purpose of critical thinking in nursing is to enable nurses to effectively analyze, interpret, and evaluate patient information, make informed clinical judgments, develop appropriate care plans, prioritize interventions, and adapt their approaches as needed, thereby ensuring safe, evidence-based, and patient-centered care.

Why critical thinking is important in nursing?

Critical thinking is important in nursing because it promotes safe decision-making, accurate clinical judgment, problem-solving, evidence-based practice, holistic patient care, ethical reasoning, collaboration, and adapting to dynamic healthcare environments.

Critical thinking skill also enhances patient safety, improves outcomes, and supports nurses’ professional growth.

How is critical thinking used in the nursing process?

Critical thinking is integral to the nursing process as it guides nurses through the systematic approach of assessing, diagnosing, planning, implementing, and evaluating patient care. It involves:

• Assessment: Critical thinking enables nurses to gather and interpret patient data accurately, recognizing relevant patterns and cues.
• Diagnosis: Nurses use critical thinking to analyze patient data, identify nursing diagnoses, and differentiate actual issues from potential complications.
• Planning: Critical thinking helps nurses develop tailored care plans, selecting appropriate interventions based on patient needs and evidence.
• Implementation: Nurses make informed decisions during interventions, considering patient responses and adjusting plans as needed.
• Evaluation: Critical thinking supports the assessment of patient outcomes, determining the effectiveness of intervention, and adapting care accordingly.

Throughout the nursing process , critical thinking ensures comprehensive, patient-centered care and fosters continuous improvement in clinical judgment and decision-making.

What is an example of the critical thinking attitude of independent thinking in nursing practice?

An example of the critical thinking attitude of independent thinking in nursing practice could be:

A nurse is caring for a patient with a complex medical history who is experiencing a new set of symptoms. The nurse carefully reviews the patient’s history, recent test results, and medication list.

While discussing the case with the healthcare team, the nurse realizes that the current treatment plan might not be addressing all aspects of the patient’s condition.

Instead of simply following the established protocol, the nurse independently considers alternative approaches based on their assessment.

The nurse proposes a modification to the treatment plan, citing the rationale and evidence supporting the change.

This demonstrates independent thinking by critically evaluating the situation, challenging assumptions, and advocating for a more personalized and effective patient care approach.

How to use Costa’s level of questioning for critical thinking in nursing?

Costa’s levels of questioning can be applied in nursing to facilitate critical thinking and stimulate a deeper understanding of patient situations. The levels of questioning are as follows:

• 15 Attitudes of Critical Thinking in Nursing (Explained W/ Examples)
• Nursing Concept Map (FREE Template)
• Clinical Reasoning In Nursing (Explained W/ Example)
• 8 Stages Of The Clinical Reasoning Cycle
• How To Improve Critical Thinking Skills In Nursing? 24 Strategies With Examples
• What is the “5 Whys” Technique?
• What Are Socratic Questions?

Critical thinking in nursing is the foundation that underpins safe, effective, and patient-centered care.

Critical thinking skills empower nurses to navigate the complexities of their profession while consistently providing high-quality care to diverse patient populations.

Reading Recommendation

Potter, P.A., Perry, A.G., Stockert, P. and Hall, A. (2013) Fundamentals of Nursing

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2.2: Propositional Logic and the Four Basic Truth Functional Connectives

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• Page ID 26808

• Matthew Van Cleave
• Lansing Community College

Propositional logic (also called “sentential logic”) is the area of formal logic that deals with the logical relationships between propositions. A proposition is simply what I called in section 1.1 a statement. 1 Some examples of propositions are:

Snow is white

Snow is cold

Tom is an astronaut

The floor has been mopped

The dishes have been washed

We can also connect propositions together using certain English words, such as “and” like this:

The floor has been mopped and the dishes have been washed.

This proposition is called a complex proposition because it contains the connective “and” which connects two separate propositions. In contrast, “the floor has been mopped” and “the dishes have been washed” are what are called atomic propositions. Atomic propositions are those that do not contain any truth-functional connectives. The word “and” in this complex proposition is a truth-functional connective. A truth-functional connective is a way of connecting propositions such that the truth value of the resulting complex proposition can be determined by the truth value of the propositions that compose it. Suppose that the floor has not been mopped but the dishes have been washed. In that case, if I assert the conjunction, “the floor has been mopped and the dishes have been washed,” then I have asserted something that is false. The reason is that a conjunction, like the one above, is only true when each conjunct (i.e., each statement that is conjoined by the “and”) is true. If either one of the conjuncts is false, then the whole conjunction is false. This should be pretty obvious. If Bob and Sally split chores and Bob’s chore was to both vacuum and dust whereas Sally’s chore was to both mop and do the dishes, then if Sally said she mopped the floor and did the dishes when in reality she only did the dishes (but did not mop the floor), then Bob could rightly complain that it isn’t true that Sally both mopped the floor and did the dishes! What this shows is that conjunctions are true only if both conjuncts are true. This is true of all conjunctions. The conjunction above has a certain form—the same form as any conjunction. We can represent that form using placeholders—lowercase letters like p and q to stand for any statement whatsoever. Thus, we represent the form of a conjunction like this:

Any conjunction has this same form. For example, the complex proposition, “it is sunny and hot today,” has this same form which we can see by writing the conjunction this way:

It is sunny today and it is hot today .

Although we could write the conjunction that way, it is more natural in English to conjoin the adjectives “sunny” and “hot” to get “it is sunny and hot today.” Nevertheless, these two sentences mean the same thing (it’s just that one sounds more natural in English than the other). In any case, we can see that “it is sunny today” is the proposition in the “p” place of the form of the conjunction, whereas “it is hot today” is the proposition in the “q” place of the form of the conjunction. As before, this conjunction is true only if both conjuncts are true. For example, suppose that it is a sunny but bitterly cold winter’s day. In that case, while it is true that it is sunny today, it is false that it is hot today—in which case the conjunction is false. If someone were to assert that it is sunny and hot today in those circumstances, you would tell them that isn’t true. Conversely, if it were a cloudy but hot and humid summer’s day, the conjunction would still be false. The only way the statement would be true is if both conjuncts were true.

In the formal language that we are developing in this chapter, we will represent conjunctions using a symbol called the “dot,” which looks like this: “⋅” Using this symbol, here is how we will represent a conjunction in symbolic notation:

In the following sections we will introduce four basic truth-functional connectives, each of which have their own symbol and meaning. The four basic truth-functional connectives are: conjunction, disjunction, negation, and conditional. In the remainder of this section, we will discuss only conjunction. As we’ve seen, a conjunction conjoins two separate propositions to form a complex proposition. The conjunction is true if and only if both conjuncts are true. We can represent this information using what is called a truth table . Truth tables represent how the truth value of a complex proposition depends on the truth values of the propositions that compose it. Here is the truth table for conjunction:

Here is how to understand this truth table. The header row lists the atomic propositions, p and q, that the conjunction is composed of, as well as the conjunction itself, p ⋅ q. Each of the following four rows represents a possible scenario regarding the truth of each conjunct, and there are only four possible scenarios: either p and q could both be true (as in row 1), p and q could both be false (as in row 4), p could be true while q is false (row 2), or p could be false while q is true (row 3). The final column (the truth values under the conjunction, p ⋅ q) represents how the truth value of the conjunction depends on the truth value of each conjunct (p and q). As we have seen, a conjunction is true if and only if both conjuncts are true. This is what the truth table represents. Since there is only one row (one possible scenario) in which both p and q are true (i.e., row 1), that is the only circumstance in which the conjunction is true. Since in every other row at least one of the conjuncts is false, the conjunction is false in the remaining three scenarios.

At this point, some students will start to lose a handle on what we are doing with truth tables. Often, this is because one thinks the concept is much more complicated than it actually is. (For some, this may stem, in part, from a math phobia that is triggered by the use of symbolic notation.) But a truth table is actually a very simple idea: it is simply a representation of the meaning of a truth-functional operator. When I say that a conjunction is true only if both conjuncts are true, that is just what the table is representing. There is nothing more to it than that. (Later on in this chapter we will use truth tables to prove whether an argument is valid or invalid. Understanding that will require more subtlety, but what I have so far introduced is not complicated at all.)

There is more than one way to represent conjunctions in English besides the English word “and.” Below are some common English words and phrases that commonly function as truth-functional conjunctions.

It is important to point out that many times English conjunctions carry more information than simply that the two propositions are true (which is the only information carried by our symbolic connective, the dot). We can see this with English conjunctions like “but” and “however” which have a contrastive sense. If I were to say, “Bob voted, but Caroline didn’t,” then I am contrasting what Bob and Caroline did. Nevertheless, I am still asserting two independent propositions. Another kind of information that English conjunctions represent but the dot connective doesn’t is temporal information. For example, in the conjunction:

Bob brushed his teeth and got into bed

There is clearly a temporal implication that Bob brushed his teeth first and then got into bed. It might sound strange to say:

Bob got into bed and brushed his teeth

since this would seem to imply that Bob brushed his teeth while in bed. But each of these conjunctions would be represented in the same way by our dot connective, since the dot connective does not care about the temporal aspects of things. If we were to represent “Bob got into bed” with the capital letter A and “Bob brushed his teeth” with the capital letter B, then both of these propositions would be represented exactly the same, namely, like this:

Sometimes a conjunction can be represented in English with just a comma or semicolon, like this:

While Bob vacuumed the floor, Sally washed the dishes.

Bob vacuumed the floor; Sally washed the dishes.

Both of these are conjunctions that are represented in the same way. You should see that both of them have the form, p ⋅ q.

Not every conjunction is a truth-function conjunction. We can see this by considering a proposition like the following:

Maya and Alice are married.

If this were a truth-functional proposition, then we should be able to identify the two, independent propositions involved. But we cannot. What would those propositions be? You might think two propositions would be these:

Maya is married

Alice is married

But that cannot be right since the fact that Maya is married and that Alice is married is not the same as saying that Maya and Alice are married to each other, which is clearly the implication of the original sentence. Furthermore, if you tried to add “to each other” to each proposition, it would no longer make sense:

Maya is married to each other

Alice is married to each other

Perhaps we could say that the two conjuncts are “Maya is married to Alice” and “Alice is married to Maya,” but the truth values of those two conjuncts are not independent of each other since if Maya is married to Alice it must also be true that Alice is married to Maya. In contrast, the following is an example of a truth-functional conjunction:

Maya and Alice are women.

Unlike the previous example, in this case we can clearly identify two propositions whose truth values are independent of each other:

Maya is a woman

Alice is a woman

Whether or not Maya is a woman is an issue that is totally independent of whether Alice is a woman (and vice versa). That is, the fact that Maya is a woman tells us nothing about whether Alice is a woman. In contrast, the fact that Maya is married to Alice implies that Alice is married to Maya. So the way to determine whether or not a conjunction is truth-functional is to ask whether it is formed from two propositions whose truth is independent of each other. If there are two propositions whose truth is independent of each other, then the conjunction is truth-functional; if there are not two propositions whose truth is independent of each other, the conjunction is not truth-functional.

Identify which of the following sentences are truth-functional conjunctions. If the sentence is a truth-functional conjunction, identify the two conjuncts (by writing them down).

1. Jack and Jill are coworkers. 2. Tom is a fireman and a father. 3. Ringo Starr and John Lennon were bandmates. 4. Lucy loves steak and onion sandwiches. 5. Cameron Dias has had several relationships, although she has never married. 6. Bob and Sally kissed. 7. A person who plays both mandolin and guitar is a multi- instrumentalist. 8. No one has ever contracted rabies and lived. 9. Jack and Jill are cowboys. 10. Josiah is Amish; nevertheless, he is also a drug dealer. 11. The Tigers are the best baseball team in the state, but they are not as good as the Yankees. 12. Bob went to the beach to enjoy some rest and relaxation. 13. Lauren isn’t the fastest runner on the team; still, she is fast enough to have made it to the national championship. 14. The ring is beautiful, but expensive. 15. It is sad, but true that many Americans do not know where their next meal will come from.

1 Some philosophers would claim that a proposition is not the same as a statement, but the reasons for doing so are not relevant to what we’ll be doing in this chapter. Thus, for our purposes, we can treat a proposition as the same thing as a statement.