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Critical Thinking and Content, Content, Content
I wrote a piece about critical thinking last week, and when I read over the comments, I see a backlash against teaching higher order thinking skills because the students need “FACTS” both in order to learn how to think critically and to survive out there in the world. I find this incredible.…
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Cognitive Enablers, Both Concrete and Abstract
Cognitive enablers are tools that we acquire through formal education – at least they should be. They are generic in nature and are not really linked to any particular job or occupation, but which lie at the heart (or should) of what we do as teachers. There are concrete cognitive enablers and…
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Metacognition Knowing what you Know Improvement Method
The foundation of metacognition is knowing what you know and what you don’t know. This is based on a feeling. When you know (or think that you know) that you know something, there is a feeling of certainty. My students and I looked into this a few years ago. Our measurements showed…
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Learning Metacognition as Higher Order Thinking
I have written in the past about the two levels of metacognition with the higher order allowing an individual to use a full suite of higher order thinking skills across any context. How is this kind of thinking achieved? The initial consideration is to consider the maturity of the brain. Metacognition is…
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Metacognition and Empathy
I have written a couple of times about the link between higher order thinking skills and moral development but a recent comment on another article has prompted me to visit the subject again The comment was that empathy is needed alongside higher order thinking skills in order for us to make the…
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Critical Thinking, Critical Analysis, and Critique – Same or Different?
Unfortunately, for many naïve teachers and students, these three things are thought of as the same thing. They are not. They are two different things (two of these things are closely related – one of these things just doesn’t belong). I can’t tell you how many scholarship applications that I have read…
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Critical Thinking and Sources of Evidence
I have posted several times about critical thinking in higher education today (or not), but have ignored a critical component of critical thinking – evidence. Even though critical thinking skills are missing in a significant proportion of our graduates, there is still a significant number who have gained critical thinking skills. We know that…
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Critical Thinking
Ninety-nine percent of teachers and professors list critical thinking as one of the most important skills that students should have or need to acquire before they leave college or university. That is pretty well all. In fact, I wonder who the 1% might be that are the holdouts in this statistic. I…
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Critical Thinking and Metacognition
One of the main problems with learning to think critically is the problem of transference. This is a problem that plagues learning in general. How do we take what we have learned and use it in a way that we have not been trained to use it? In almost every area of…
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Knowing what You Know – Metacognition
Metacognition is thinking about thinking or is a set of skills that allows us to control and direct our cognitive abilities. Metacognition? Cognition first. I was in my first cognition class as a 30-year-old adult before I had any idea what cognition is. I took the class because cognitive psychology was one…
