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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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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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Science of Learning: Thinking & Understanding
In addition to teaching content, the primary, avowed purpose of higher education is to teach people how to think, and take information and turn it into knowledge. The difference between information and knowledge is understanding. Knowing that 2X2=4 is nothing more than information if you really don’t understand that 2X2 means two…
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ACEs, Critical Thinking, Metacognition, Rational Thinking, Science of Learning - General, Society, Training
It’s Not How we do Higher Education, It’s What we do in Higher Education
We live in a complex world with a myriad of problems that need attention. We have what we need to seriously address them, but we have failed to develop what we most need – our human capital. Students enter higher education by the millions with 87% wanting nothing more than a degree…
