INQUIRY

CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Special Issue:

Critical Thinking and Disability in Higher Education

Amy L. Skinner, Guest Editor

Contents Contents

Amy L.H. Skinner Robert Ennis Amy L. Skinner, Michael A. Gillespie Lee Ann R. Raylins, and Cynthia Hughes

Guest Editorial Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part I................. 4 Critical Thinking and Disability in Higher Education ........... 5

Assessing Critical Thinking about Values: A Quasi-Experimental Study................................................... 19 A Preliminary Investigation Comparing Academic Locus of Control and Perceived Quality of Academic Life across College Students with and Articles from the Members of the Lone Star College CyFair Campus Critical Thinking Based without Disabilities ................................................................ 7 Faculty Learning Community (CTB-FLC) Donna Gilbertson, Maria Sanders Sherrie Mecham, Kara Mickelson, and Seth Wilhelmsen Maria Sanders & Jason Moulenbelt Juliann Mathis and Amy L. Skinner Frank Codispoti Embracing Critical Thinking as a Model for Professional Development: Creating CTB-FLCs On Your Campus..................................................................... 29 Training and Generalization of Study Skills for College Students with Disabilities ......................................... 15 Defining Critical Thinking: How Far Have We Come?........... 38 Enhancing Pre-service Students Learning and The Academic College Course is anLecturer Argument ...................... 47 Thinking about Bipolar Disorder Via Descriptions of Living with Mental Illness ........................... 27 Critical Thinking and Social Interaction in the Online Environment ................................................................ 55 Thinking about Critical Thinking: Disabilities and Learner-Centered Instructional Design from the Perspective of Mediated Learning Experience Theory ......... 37 Review of David Levys Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psychology .................................................. 62 For Goodness Sake: Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry by Walter Feinberg, reviewed by Graham McDonough ............. 45 Qu'est-ce qu'un homme? Dialogue de Leo, Chien sagace, et de son Philosophe, Dessins de Lionel Koechlin [What is a man? A dialogue between Leo the wise dog and his philosopher. Drawings by Lionel Koechin.] by Cecile Robelin, Jean Robelin, reviewed by David Kennedy .................................................

Idolina Hernandez Katherine Greenberg Heather Mong & Ben Clegg Book Review

Book Review

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Copyright Permission and Disclaimer

It is the policy of this journal to obtain and hold the copyrights for all articles published with the exception of those articles or parts of articles in the public domain. Authors are allowed to make copies of their articles for any scholarly purpose of their own. Other scholars are hereby given permission to make single or multiple copies of single articles for personal scholarly use without explicit written permission, providing that no such copies are sold or used for commercial purposes. It is the obligation of any user to acknowledge sources explicitly and to obtain permission from the journal if extensive use is to be made of materials or information contained in an article. Extensive use of copy privileges in such a way would be unethical. These policies will be followed until further notice. This journal is not responsible for the statements of any contributor. Statements or opinions expressed in the journal reflect the views of the author(s) and not the Editor, the Editorial Advisory Board, or ad hoc reviewers. Publication should not be construed as endorsement.

Frank Fair, Managing Editor

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1

From the Editors Desk

Frank Fair
I am very pleased that in this issue of INQUIRY we continue the series of reflection pieces that Gerald Nosich began so well in the previous issue. Now it is Bob Enniss turn, and his contribution is so rich, so replete with relevant detail, that it has been split into two parts. Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part I appears in this issue and covers Bobs initial involvement with the field of critical thinking and the evolution of his conceptualization of critical thinking. Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part II has equally meaty content, and it will appear in the next issue, INQUIRY Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2011). It will cover Bobs perspective on issues involved in the assessment and teaching of critical thinking. Next comes a piece by Michael Gillespie Assessing Critical Thinking about Values: A Quasi-experimental Study that reports on a study of an innovative program at Bowling Green State University whose goal is to foster critical thinking in the context of considering values. Many universities have programs with similar intent, and Gillespies careful study provides a model for how one might assess such programs. Then we have a series of articles contributed by faculty members from the Cypress Fairbanks (CyFair) campus of the Lone Star College System. With an enrollment of 85,000 students on its several campuses, the Lone Star system is the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area and the fastest growing community college system in Texas. A faculty member and administrator from Lone Star-CyFair, Maria Sanders, describes in Embracing Critical Thinking as a Model for Faculty Development how she and a number of other faculty members from diverse disciplines formed a CTB-FLC, a Critical Thinking Based Faculty Learning Community, in which critical thinking served as a focus for a low-cost, potentially highimpact faculty development effort. Then come three essays that are fruits of this effort. The first essay by Maria Sanders and Jason Moulenbelt Defining Critical Thinking: How Far Have We Come? surveys the often bewildering variety of conceptions of critical thinking with a view toward noting difficulties this variety poses for critical thinking assessments and for interdisciplinary collaborations. The second essay, The Academic College Course is an Argument, is a spirited defense by Frank Codispoti of the lecture as an instructional mode when done well and when approached with an emphasis on the same sort of critical thinking skills that students are supposed to bring to course reading matter. (Note: anyone interested in improving lectures might also look at the article on Successful Lecturing by Patricia deWinstanley and Robert Bjork in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond, edited by Diane Halpern and Milton Hakel, a 2002 collection from Jossey-Bass.) Finally, Idolina Hernandezs essay Critical Thinking and Social Interaction in the Online Environment considers how the use of discussion boards in the online course environment can foster critical thinking by encouraging the appropriate processes of social interaction. The last contribution is a review of David Levys Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psychology. Heather Mong and Ben Clegg give an informative account of the book and a generally favorable review, but they have a few caveats, mainly about what might be needed to avoid some of the thinking pitfalls that the Levy discusses.

INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part I

Robert Ennis This is Part I of a two-part reflection by Robert Ennis on his involvement in the critical thinking movement. Part I deals with how he got started in the movement and with the development of his influential definition of critical thinking and his conception of what critical thinking involves. Part II of the reflection will appear in the next issue of INQUIRY, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2011), and it will cover topics concerned with assessing critical thinking, teaching critical thinking, and what the future may hold. Key words: critical thinking definition, rigor, criteria, logic, looseness, progressive education, Vietnam War protests, subject matter, critical thinking movement I am uneasy to think I decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed. (David Hume) It is an honor to have received Editor Frank Fairs request to write a personal historical report about the development of critical thinking education.1 My response emphasizes the period 1950-2010, but does reach further into the past, and is by no means a historians history of critical thinking. It is a personal view of the critical thinking movement and my involvement in it. Part I deals with how I became involved in the critical thinking movement and how my definition and conception of critical thinking have evolved. Part II will deal with efforts to assess and to teach critical thinking and with problems and future prospects. decided to obtain a bachelors degree in philosophy rather than engineering, having done no investigating about the nature of academic philosophy. MIT at that time had no philosophy courses, so I cautiously took a leave of absence, never to return. I transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There the contemporary philosophy to which I was exposed was logical positivism, but also some of John Deweys work. Neither satisfied me. Logical positivism seemed to be an interesting, challenging system, like chess, but without relevance to wisdom; and Deweys defense of his positions, as well as some of his positions, seemed weak. Furthermore, even though his advocacy of reflective thinking (Dewey, 1933) would later appeal to me, that was not part of what was presented to me as Deweys philosophy. Nor did I see relevance to wisdom in my history of philosophy courses. The content came too thick and fast for me to grapple with and to discuss what I now see as important ideas and issues. Grappling and discussing were not part of the total curriculum that I experienced, though they are what I now think are crucial elements in critical thinking instruction, though of course not in themselves sufficient. As a result of frustration in my search for wisdom, I instead considered a career in the theater because my extra-curricular experiences there were exciting and fun, and the theater actually is a way of promoting wisdom (e.g., Twelve Angry Men, a timeless play). But I rejected the theater, partly because I saw so many unemployed actors and dancers who were much more talented than I. There was a bit of critical thinking here: making observations and using the information in considering and being open to alternatives (to some extent) when making decisions. But these practices were not part of my traditional education.

Abstract

My Background: How I Arrived at Critical Thinking

Although in my K-12 years I was exposed to an excellent traditional education, I, like Gerald Nosich (2010), was quite ignorant and naive in making my early decisions. Because I did well in high school math and physics, and because of the encouragement of my teachers and parents, I went to MIT in 1945, right at the end of World War II, planning to become an engineer. Although I did well for four semesters in the math, engineering, and science aspects of the curriculum, I developed some misgivings. For those and other personal reasons, I interrupted my studies and joined the US Army, serving in the Army of Occupation in Japan in 1947. There I experienced a 19-year-old-type total revision of my goals and interests. The war-making technology and its effects (including what I saw in Hiroshima during a visit there on the second anniversary of the bomb) convinced me that the world did not need engineers or more science and technology. It needed a population suffused with wisdom. At the time I thought that philosophy was the ultimate repository of wisdom, so I

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 In 1950 I managed to get a BA in philosophy without any knowledge of the ordinary-language philosophical developments associated with the later Wittgenstein. More ignorance. Then I heard about philosophy of education. It struck me (still naively, given what I believed about philosophy) that what I had learned and had not yet learned about philosophy could somehow help the field of education. There was some equivocation going on in my head regarding philosophy, but I had not been sensitized to equivocation or ambiguity in my logic course, or any other courses. And I rightly believed that education could have an important role in developing a world population suffused with wisdom. I decided to go into philosophy of education. I then received some wise (though unrequested) advice: Learn first-hand as a teacher what goes on in our education system before launching into a career in educational theory. Though I had not sought that advice, I followed it and became a high school physical science teacher, who also had to teach two sections of a combination of English and social studies. It was called a core or common learnings course in progressive education parlance, and it was a precursor to writing across the curriculum. In the process, I heard about critical thinking from the progressive-education movements advocacy of it, and realized that the promotion of critical thinking would be very important for our personal, vocational, and civic lives, and that the survival of a democratic way of life depended on the critical thinking of the voters. I still believe this, even more strongly, and am pleased that I have been able to spend as much time as I have on critical thinking, only wishing that I could have accomplished more. I tried to incorporate critical thinking in my teaching. But I had little notion of how to teach it or even of what critical thinking was other than propaganda analysis (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938), which was heavily negative and oversimplified in its approach (as is commonly the case with the current fallacies approach to teaching critical thinking). After three years of high school teaching I became a graduate student at the University of Illinois, and enrolled in a philosophy of education program with minors in philosophy and educational measurement. I was lucky to get an assistantship with the Illinois Project for the Improvement of Thinking under the leadership of B. Othanel Smith and Kenneth Henderson. We tried to help three Chicago-area high schools embed critical thinking in their subject-matter instruction, physics being the area on which I focused. I also found myself immersed in, and fascinated by, the later-Wittgenstein movement in philosophy, which I saw and still see to be quite relevant to education, wisdom, and critical thinking, in spite of its excesses. I had finally found a home combining philosophy and education. The above-described background is, among other things, a generalizable argument-by-example in support of

5 the supplementation of our subject-matter courses and other courses with a heavy dose of critical thinking instruction. Notice that I said supplementation, not supplanting. A necessary condition for thinking critically about anything is being well informed, which includes subject-matter content where relevant. Unfortunately, aside from simple deduction, principles of critical thinking were not included in the content that I encountered with two minor exceptions: In high school English I was taught to make classification (genus-differentia) definitions, and in college physics labs I was taught to make three measurements (instead of just one) and average the three in order to secure a more reliable measure of a quantity. In my undergraduate deductive logic course I was not shown that strict deductive logic rarely applies to everyday reasoning (including that of scholars, voters, and Supreme Court Justices). However, imprecise derivation or qualified reasoning (Ennis, 1969a & 1969b, 1981a, 1996a, 2004; discussed later in this essay) does apply to everyday reasoning. Fortunately, material implication and its implausible cohorts were, as I remember it, not promoted in that logic course. The fact that I did receive advice from an experienced person about how to pursue my career is not to my credit. I did not know enough to seek it out. It was in effect imposed on me by the father of a high school friend. In none of my courses was I told the critical thinking principle that one needs to make a special effort to get all the relevant information appropriate for a decision, and to seek, consider, and get informed about alternatives before making an important decision. In sum, in my K-12 and undergraduate education there was virtually no attention to the principles, procedures, and criteria for thinking critically in or out of the subjects I studied. Basically I was engaged in acquiring, and was tested on, straight subject-matter knowledge only.

The Critical Thinking Movement as I Saw It and Associated with It: From Progressive Education and the Later Wittgenstein to the Present
Early philosophical concerns about critical thinking can be found, among other places, in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Hume, and especially John Stuart Mill, but John Dewey (Dewey, 1933, first edition 1910) was the source of inspiration for the progressive-education K-12 critical thinking movement of which the Illinois Project for the Improvement of Thinking was a part. The Progressive Education Movement The progressive-education movement, which was strong in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, adopted and developed Deweys emphasis on reflective thinking. Tests called Interpretation of Data,

INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES war (1941-1945 for the United States) when the Eight-Year Studys results appeared; the excesses that inevitably occur in any movement; the strong criticisms of the movement by academic subject-matter specialists (especially Arthur Bestor of the University of Illinois); and (the final nail in the coffin) Russias beating the USA to having a successful satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Sputniks appearing before the USAs first satellite was blamed by many on the schools, which were still somewhat under the influence of progressive education. I have a vivid recollection of the large front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune right after Sputnik, What went wrong with U.S. schools? According to popular insight, the schools had failed to teach science to their students. Progressive education was held by many to be the problem. As a result, straight subject-matter acquisition became very popular, and was the theme in former scientist and Harvard President James B. Conants influential The American High School Today (Conant, 1959). In spite of the opposition to, and the disintegration of, the progressive-education movement, there were continuing expressions of interest in critical thinking in the 1930s through the 1970s, mostly by philosophers. Cohen and Nagels Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934) introduced me as a graduate student to many aspects of critical thinking. Max Blacks Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1946) and W. H. Werkmeisters An Introduction to Critical Thinking (1948) were college textbooks that to my knowledge were the earliest college textbooks that used the words critical thinking in their titles. Another early text was Monroe Beardsleys Practical Logic (1950). All four of these early works were guides used by the staff of the Illinois Project for the Improvement of Thinking, of which I was a member from 1954 to 1957. Even Conant was a participant in the early promotion of critical thinking at the college level with his general editorship of the series, Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science (Conant, 1950-1954), and his authorship of On Understanding Science (Conant, 1951). Using detailed cases from the history of science, his series and his book illustrated certain principles in the strategy and tactics of science (Conant, 1951, pp. 102-111). A principal theme of Conants in these works was opposition to a simple fivestep concept of the scientific method (promoted I believe by the progressive-education movement), which he felt vastly oversimplified how scientists think. I agreed with him in his emphasis on principles in scientific thinking (Ennis, 1974b, 1979, 1991a, 1991b), and his complaint about oversimplification. From Sputnik through the mid-1970s, I was part of the philosophically-oriented minority pressing for the incorporation of critical thinking in K-12 and higher education. During this period (1959-1970), I authored 12 articles

Application of Principles of Science, Application of Principles of Logical Reasoning, and Nature of Proof (Smith and Tyler, 1942, pp. 35-156) were developed to appraise students in the Progressive Education Associations monumental Eight-Year Study, which took place in the 1930s. (See Aiken, 1942, for an overview.) In that study, the words critical thinking and clear thinking replaced reflective thinking (Smith & Tyler, pp. 35-37), and a 1942 yearbook of the National Council for Social Studies used critical thinking in its title, Teaching Critical Thinking in the Social Studies (Anderson, 1942). My first published article was about the teaching of critical thinking (Critical Thinking: More on Its Motivation, Ennis, 1956), and appeared in the journal, Progressive Education. I submitted to that journal because the progressive-education movement was the primary promoter of critical thinking at the time. In addition to my focus on the teaching of critical thinking, I became the statistician for the Illinois Project for the Improvement of Thinking, and produced conclusions from the data obtained with the tests we used and from our observations in the classrooms. I saw the importance of having valid tests of critical thinking, and I realized the dependence of such tests on ones conception of critical thinking. As a result, my Ph.D. dissertation topic was The Development of a Critical Thinking Test (Ennis, 1959b). Given the state of critical thinking theory in use at the time, I believed that the development of a critical thinking test required the prior development and specification of a conception of critical thinking. So my dissertation combined the development of a conception with the development of a test. The conception leaned heavily on my philosophical forbears, as well as this question: How do people go wrong in their thinking? Because of my assistantship and thesis work I was able at the time to contribute directly to the literature on the teaching of (Ennis, 1956), the nature of (Ennis, 1962, 1964b), and assessment of (Ennis, 1958, 1959b) critical thinking. In particular, my 1962 article on the nature of critical thinking, A Concept of Critical Thinking, has received much attention. Michael Roth (Roth, 2010), in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education challenging critical thinking, attributed critical thinkings becoming popular to this article. Harvey Seigel (Siegel, 1988) deemed the article highly influential (p. 5). John McPeck (McPeck, 1981), perhaps the critical thinking movements most vociferous critic, treated this article as presenting the prevailing view of the conception of critical thinking (pp. 39-57). From Progressive Education to Emphasizing Subject Matter Results of the Eight-Year Study were published in 1942, when everyone was focused on World War II. I believe that the progressive-education movement disintegrated because of the overwhelming importance of the

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 and two books concerned with the nature, teaching, and assessment of critical thinking. The Vietnam War Protests From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Vietnam War and student-based concerns about relevance, authenticity, and the war itself overwhelmed the subject-matter emphasis of Conant and others. But it was not only students who challenged the academic establishment. I vividly remember a scholarly professor in the English Department at Cornell University in 1968 expressing at a university faculty meeting his contempt for the academic establishment by gravely pronouncing, Were in bad trouble. Bad trouble is not the sort of expression I expected to hear from a scholar in the English Department at a University Faculty meeting. It was protest language. To use it in those circumstances in 1968 was a powerful expression from within of a rejection of academia. In that context, critical thinking struggled along, but was not very popular because of its emphasis on rigor, reflection, and, alternatives, as opposed to action now. For example, the activists of the period judged that neutrality by our educational institutions was impossible (generally, in that period, neutrality toward the Vietnam War, and in one instance, toward the administration in the late 1960s by some colleges and universities of a draftexemption examination, an unpopular action in the eyes of most activists because it constituted what they felt was complicity in the war effort). Though I opposed the war, I disagreed with the judgment that neutrality for colleges and universities was impossible. I argued that neutrality on any specific issue (though not on every issue at once) was possible, unless the argument assumed from its beginning that its position and recommendation on the specific issue were correct, in which case the argument became essentially circular (Ennis, 1969d, an improvement on an early version, 1959a). My argument in this case involved an ordinary-language sensitivity to reported definition and equivocation, sub-aspects of the definition aspect of critical thinking to be considered later and listed in the appendix (Abilities 9b1 and 9d). Renewed Emphasis on Critical Thinking In the late 1970s, concern about critical thinking moved back into the foreground, I believe because of the excesses of the protest movement, because the war was over, and because the protestors emphasis on relevance had strong appeal. Howard Kahanes popular Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric (1971) contributed to the revival of attention to critical thinking at the time. It was written . . . in an attempt to raise the level of political argument and reasoning by acquainting students with the devices and ploys which drag that level down (Kahane, 1971, Preface). But the renewed emphasis on critical thinking was

7 not as part of a rejuvenation of the progressive-education movement. Critical thinking was advocated because it provided the rigor, reflection, and reasonableness that both the anti- and pro-war forces had ignored, as evidenced by Howard Kahanes influential efforts. Around 1980, interest in critical thinking suddenly exploded. The First International Conference on Informal Logic was held at the University of Windsor in 1978. Canada, as I understand it, had not experienced the extreme reaction against academia that we had in the United States. Nevertheless, there was some, and emphasis on critical thinking and informal logic was a step back to rigor and reflection. Significant establishment institutions contributed. The Commission on the Humanities (1980), sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, placed heavy emphasis on critical thinking, as did the Carnegie Foundations Ernest Boyer (Boyer, 1983). The College Board (College Board, 1983), which is responsible for the SAT test, specified reasoning as one of the six basic academic competencies in Academic Preparation for College. In 1983, Executive Order # 338 in the California State University System required that in order to graduate from one of the State University units, a student must have had nine hours of instruction in communication and in critical thinking. At the Second International Conference on Informal Logic at Windsor in 1983, The Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT) was established, the membership of which then consisted mostly of philosophers from Canada and the United States and it still does. The American Philosophical Associations Board of Officers (1985) urged philosophers to help with attempts to test for critical thinking and attempts to include critical thinking in elementary and secondary curricula. This explosion of interest was neither a return to straight subject matter exclusively, nor to the progressiveeducation movement. It was a marriage of subject matter and one important feature of the progressive movement, critical thinking, a marriage that to this day we struggle to implement. In going beyond straight subject-matter acquisition, The College Board exhibited this attempted marriage in its Academic Preparation for College: The learning outcomes described here [including reasoning] are rigorous as well as comprehensive (College Board, 1983, p. 3). The roots of three current, philosopher-led, critical-thinking-promoting organizations developed in the 1980s. One, led by Richard Paul (and currently also Linda Elder), developed at Sonoma State University, California, with large annual conferences of educators at the K-12 and university levels at which many of us in AILACT made presentations. Its current titles are Foundation for Critical Thinking, Center for Critical Thinking, and The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking. A second, led by Robert Swartz, developed at the University of Massachusetts-Boston with a masters

INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES The multiplicity of critical-thinking-promoting activities from 1980 through the present involved not only philosophers, but also people in all subject-matter areas. The principal academics with whom I interacted at workshops and conferences were philosophers, psychologists, and speech/communication experts, each with a somewhat different emphasis. To oversimplify, the philosophers tended to emphasize seeking the truth (or the rightness or correctness of a process or result), and using rational methods of doing so; psychologists tended to emphasize empirical relationships, such as what causes what, including such processes as metacognition, transfer of critical thinking learning to a new area of application, and problem solving. Speech/communication experts tended to emphasize effective persuasion. But all three were generally interested at least to some extent in the others emphases. During this period I contributed to general critical thinking and critical thinking in science, and authored some 41 articles and one book, as well as co-authoring two articles, one book, three published tests, and several unpublished tests, each relevant to at least one of the above-listed controversial areas in critical thinking. In the 1980s, the critical thinking movement emphasized critical thinking in K-12, as well as at the undergraduate level. Extending into the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, emphasis on critical thinking increased in college and universities, at least in mission statements. This occurred partly at the behest of accrediting agencies and partly because people realized that critical thinking is important and that existing subject-matter acquisition generally did not adequately prepare people to think critically in their vocational, civic, and personal lives. All the controversies I have mentioned continue today, though progress has been made. Because critical thinking is so important, I have devoted much of my career to the task.

program in critical and creative thinking, and is currently titled the National Center for Teaching Thinking (NCTT). I have participated in some of its workshops. A third, led by Peter Facione, had its origins at Santa Clara University, California, where Facione led an effort to arrive at an agreement by mail among forty-six specialists in critical thinking (of which I was one) on a fairly-detailed dispositions-and-abilities definition of critical thinking. Facione called the results The Delphi Report (Facione, 1990). His organization operates under the title Insight Assessment. The first two of these organizations focus on teaching, and the third focuses on a conception of and on the assessment of critical thinking, although all are concerned with all three elements. All three have extensive web sites. The first and second claim national status, but I see no interaction or cooperation between them. AILACT, of which I am a member and past president, is open to new members on application, has elections for its leaders, and is not publicized as well as the above three, though it is trying to catch up. On its web site at http://ailact.mcmaster.ca, it provides material dealing with the nature of, teaching of, and assessment of critical thinking and informal logic, lists available consultants from its membership, lists institutions providing advanced instruction in critical thinking, and will be listing available critical thinking tests. AILACT also sponsors critical thinking and informal logic sessions at annual APA meetings. More information about all four of these critical thinking organizations can be found on their web sites. Throughout the 1980s there was a large amount of activity in critical thinking: workshops, conferences, test development, new curricula, restatement of goals, books, articles, etc., accompanied by controversies about all aspects of the movement. These controversies live on, and include the basic nature of critical thinking; the details of the nature of critical thinking; the relationship between critical thinking and subject matter; promoting critical thinking in the different subjects as opposed to doing it in separate critical thinking courses (often unfortunately assumed to be mutually-exclusive alternatives); the role of metacognition (being aware of and thinking about ones own thinking) in critical thinking; the nature of the deduction involved in critical thinking; the role of persuasion in critical thinking; the relation between critical thinking and problem solving; the degree to which critical thinking is broader than argumentation and deduction, if at all; the possibility of assessing critical thinking; how to assess critical thinking on a large scale and on a small scale; the possibility of teaching critical thinking; the role of critical thinking principles in critical thinking instruction; whether to seek and how to achieve transfer of the learning of critical thinking to topics other than those used in instruction; and of course, the value of critical thinking.

My Contributions to the Content of the Critical Thinking Movement

Because I am probably best known for my development of a conception of critical thinking, and because teaching and assessment both assume a conception of critical thinking, the nature of critical thinking is the first topic to be addressed. It will be followed in Part II in the next issue of Inquiry by discussions of assessment, teaching (including incorporation in a curriculum), and future prospects. The Nature of Critical Thinking Early on I developed a definition and an associated elaborated conception of critical thinking (Ennis, 1962). I am here employing the distinction between concept and conception that John Rawls offered (Rawls, 1971,

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 p. 5), following H. L. A. Hart (Hart, 1961, pp. 155-159): A concept is that which different, more detailed conceptions of a particular idea have in common. But I use the terms definition and conception instead of concept and conception in order to minimize confusion. In 1962 I was not aware of the distinction and called the whole presentation a concept of critical thinking (Ennis, 1962, p. 81), though a more appropriate title might have been a definition and a conception of critical thinking. As a result not only of the intense discussions of the late 1970s and the early 1980s, but also further investigation from 1962 to 1987 of a number of critical thinking aspects, my first definition and conception of critical thinking developed into a new pair (Ennis 1987b, 1991c, 1996a, 2002), which I shall call my second definition and conception. In this section, I shall present and discuss the features of the two pairs, the second conception having evolved from the first, and the second definition being radically different from the first, though they both treat critical thinking as a term of approbation. An unexemplified presentation of the total second definition/conception can be found in the appendix to this essay. My First Critical Thinking Definition and the Associated First Conception of Critical Thinking The critical thinking definition that was presented to me as a graduate student was the one advanced by B. Othanel Smith (Smith, 1953), my advisor, mentor, teacher, model, and supervisor in the Illinois Project for the Improvement of Thinking. Smith held that critical thinking is both determining the meaning of statements and assessing these statements (p. 130). For my first definition, I amended Smiths definition by holding that critical thinking is the correct assessing of statements (Ennis, 1962, p. 83). The key change from Smiths definition was the addition of the word correct. I felt that the determining-the-meaning part was implicit, although I now would make it explicit because it is so important. I added correct because I believed and still do believe (somewhat under the ordinary-language influence of the later Wittgenstein) that critical thinking, as used in the critical thinking movement, was not merely a descriptive term, but also a term of approbation. This approbation feature of the first definition is one of several features of particular note in the 1962 definition/conception. Three other features are (a) emphasis on detailed criteria, (b) emphasis on good judgment in an imprecise environment because criteria do not automatically yield critical thinking decisions, and (c) attention to credibility of sources. I shall elaborate. (a) Criteria One basic idea in both the first and second of my conceptions of critical thinking came from my high school

9 teaching experience. It is that in order to do critical thinking, students need criteria for making decisions. These criteria would give them guidance that is as precise as is feasible in making decisions. That meant, for example, not just that students should learn or know that they should take into account the credibility of their sources, or that they should judge a hypothesis by looking at the evidence; but also that they should learn or know criteria (and accompanying distinctions) for deciding whether a source is credible, or for judging whether the evidence supports the hypothesis. As a high school teacher I had no such criteria to promote with my students. (b) Good Judgment: Qualifications, Tolerating Lack of Precision, and SEBKUS One cannot expect the application of these criteria to yield a result automatically, except in mathematics and deductive logic. And even deductive logic in real life applications usually has to deal with implicit or explicit qualifying words like ceteris paribus (other things being equal), probably, tends to, roughly, etc., making the application of criteria not logically necessary in most cases (Ennis, 1969b); hence, in a way, imprecise or loose. So good judgment in applying the criteria is needed as well. Criteria used in making a good judgment are generally aided by Sensitivity, Experience, Background Knowledge, and Understanding of the Situation, that is, SEBKUS (an acronym I developed fairly recently (Ennis, 2004)). These emphases on criteria and good judgment (expressed with varying degrees of qualification, and made with SEBKUS) have permeated all my work on critical thinking, even my work on operational definition (Ennis, 1964a), but the basic ideas started to develop when I was a graduate student involved in the Illinois Project for the Improvement of Thinking. They are key features of my 1962 concept article. Many of my articles since then have elaborated these emphases in different contexts and with respect to different aspects of critical thinking. If I am right about the need for good judgment (which often requires a tolerance of some lack of precision, that is, tolerance of some looseness), then I see no hope for computerizing critical thinking, though I admit that expert computer systems can probably ((!) See my paper Probably (Ennis, 2006) for a discussion of some details of imprecision.) do a better job in tight time limits than many professionals. The emphases on qualifications, tolerance of imprecision, and SEBKUS are not original. For example, Aristotle suggested them in The Nichomachean Ethics (I, 3). I have attempted to implement them in numerous places (Ennis, 1964a, 1969b Ch. 5, 1981a, 1987a, 1987b, 1991c, 1996a, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007). But although they seem obvious to me, they are controversial, both in and out of philosophy.

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do. (Ennis, 1987a, 1987b, 1991a, 1996a, 2002). During the early 1980s when I was developing this definition, Gerald Nosich urged me to add or do to believe, on the ground that decisions about actions (not only decisions about beliefs) are a type of decision that is ordinarily included in the concerns of people in the critical thinking movement and incorporated in their use of the term. I appreciate his suggestion and did implement it. It is not a precise definition, which fact befits the general imprecision in the everyday use of the term critical thinking (thus illustrating the tolerance of imprecision as suits the circumstances, which was a topic in the previous section). If the definition is a true though imprecise report of usage in the critical thinking movement, which is what I hold it to be, then it describes the current notion of critical thinking in that movement. But it is also positional in that in offering it I take the position that this definition represents something worth implementing in our education system and elsewhere. So I offer it also as a defensible positional definition (a definition that takes a position on some issue for which rational arguments can be offered). I hold this position because I think that reasonable and reflective thinking focused on what to believe or do should be a very important part of our personal, civic, and vocational lives, and should receive attention in our education system. (b) Dispositions The first conception has been criticized for omitting critical thinking dispositions (e.g., Siegel, 1988, p. 6), such as the dispositions to be open-minded, to try to be well informed, to be alert for alternatives, and to exercise ones critical thinking abilities. Although I believe that critical thinking dispositions are implicit in my first conception, I explicitly included them in the second conception because they are so important and might otherwise be neglected. Over the years, I have reorganized my presentation of critical thinking dispositions (Ennis, 1987a, 1991c, 1996a, 1996b, 2002). See the latest version in the appendix. It is a brief list with no examples, containing I believe the most important ones. (c) Qualified Deduction The basic ideas of deduction are important in many aspects of thought, as I argued in A Conception of Deductive Logic Competence (Ennis, 1981a), although logical necessity is too strict for many practical applications (discussed under Good Judgment above), and although material implication and its cohorts make trouble and must be ignored in critical thinking (Lewis,

(c) Credibility of Sources Another feature I introduced that was not original, but that to my knowledge was new to the philosophical critical thinking literature is the emphasis on judging the credibility of sources. I introduced it in my dissertation, leaning heavily on a legal source, John Henry Wigmore. (Wigmore, 1942) In the first definition/conception article (1962), I discussed credibility of sources and later, at the time of challenges to President Nixons credibility, elaborated the imprecision of credibility criteria (Ennis, 1974a). I also incorporated credibility of sources in my second conception of critical thinking (Ennis, 1980, 1981b, 1987a, 1991c, 1996a, 2002). Credibility of sources is now fairly widely accepted as an aspect of critical thinking. I suspect that it was not mentioned in early philosophical works on critical thinking because of philosophers traditional emphasis on argument and reasoning (especially deductive logic). However, I do realize that there was some philosophical concern with this topic, for example in consideration of fallacies, and in Francis Bacons idols, but criteria for judging credibility of a source (such as the desirability of a sources not having a conflict of interest) were not at that time advanced in the philosophical literature (so far as I know). However, they are in both of my conceptions of critical thinking. My Second Critical Thinking Definition and Conception of Critical Thinking Going beyond the special features of the first definition/conception, (criteria, judgment/imprecision, and credibility of sources) my second definition/conception has several additional special features. These are (a) the definition itself, (b) explicit inclusion of critical thinking dispositions, (c) qualified deduction, (d) detailing of assumption ascription, (e) expansion of inference-to-bestexplanation, (f) special emphasis on equivocation, and (g) inclusion of value judging. All of these except the first and the last, were present in some form or were implicit in the first conception. I shall discuss each in turn. (a) The Definition John Dewey provided two informative examples of critical thinking in How We Think. The first involves what to believe about the cause of bubbling coming from under hot, recently-washed glasses (which involved formulating alternative hypotheses and checking predictions from them with observations). The second concerned selecting a subway train for a timely trip to his destination (involving alternative possible decisions, exploring their probable consequences, and making one decision, which was implemented and found satisfactory). He thus exemplified the two main emphases (belief and action) in my second and current definition of critical thinking:

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 C. I., 1912 and Strawson, P. F., 1952). Criteria for useful deduction have not been specified in most versions of my second conception of critical thinking in order to save space, but can be found in a few places (Ennis, 1969a, 1969b, 1981a, 1996a, with further application discussed in 2004). Deduction is usually included in attempts by philosophers to teach critical thinking. What is unique in my conception is my emphasis on qualifying deductive reasoning so as to accommodate the implicit and explicit use of words like probably and ceteris paribus. The explicit rejection of material implication and its cohorts is not unique, but is controversial. Keeping deduction simple is also a feature of my approach, but it is not unique in the field of critical thinking. (d) Assumption Ascription This second conception goes more deeply into types of assumptions and criteria for ascribing assumptions than is widely advocated, perhaps because of the complexity of the topic. Ordinarily students are urged to identify their and others assumptions, but are not told how to do this. There are different sorts of assumptions, which need to be distinguished from each other because different criteria apply to each. Some are presuppositions, which must be true for another proposition to make sense (but see Donnellan, 1966,1968). Some are assumptions in the pejorative sense. Some are also needed assumptions (called assumptions of the argument by Hitchcock, 1985), which, however, are not logically necessary conditions for drawing the conclusion, as some people think. And some are used assumptions (called assumptions of the arguer by Hitchcock, 1985), that is, those that someone cognitively used, either explicitly or implicitly. Reasonable space limits preclude giving more details here, but the distinctions and criteria for ascribing assumptions can be found most completely in Identifying Implicit Assumptions (Ennis, 1982c), and to a lesser extent also in Critical Thinking (Ennis, 1996a), Argument Appraisal Strategy (Ennis, 2001), and Applying Soundness Standards to Qualified Reasoning (Ennis, 2004). (e) Inference-to-best-explanation Although inference-to-best-explanation (IBE) is well known in the philosophical literature as exemplified by Gilbert Harman (Harman, 1965, 1973), a discussion by me of one feature of Harmans approach (Ennis, 1968) with a reply by him, and Peter Liptons book (Lipton, 2004). But outside of my work (Ennis, 1996a), IBE is not generally advocated in the critical thinking literature. There are three features about IBE that I should mention: (1) the confusion that might be introduced by the name, (2) its widespread applicability in fields other than science, and (3) its relation to causality.

11 First with regard to a confusion, IBE basically consists of an approach to evaluation of hypotheses that considers the explanatory power of the hypothesis and the inability of competitors to explain evidence or the outright inconsistency of the alternatives with the evidence. There are details that are more controversial. But calling it inference might misleadingly suggest that it is a set of rules for generating hypotheses, that is, of inferring the hypothesis directly from the evidence, which it is not. Rather IBE is an approach containing a set of rules or criteria for evaluating a hypothesis, and in many situations is the evaluation part of the exploratory process of refining and developing a final hypothesis, which is also evaluated by IBE. However, IBE can also be used as a label for the intuitive leap from the known facts in a situation to a hypothesis which should then be judged for its adequacy by the rules or criteria of IBE. Thus IBE is both an intuitive generation and an approach to evaluating the product resulting from this intuitive process. This dual meaning can be confusing. Second, as far as applicability is concerned, IBE applies not only to scientific hypotheses, but also to historical claims about what happened, such as, Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning; interpretive claims in literature, such as the claim that in Othello, Desdemonas maid, Emelia, never dreamed he [Iago] was a villain. (Bradley, 1937, p. 213 an example suggested to me by Bruce Warner). It also applies to test validity claims, such as a claim I have made to the effect that a particular critical thinking test is a substantially valid test of college-level critical thinking ability under standard conditions (Ennis, 2009). I have discussed the Napoleon and Emelia examples elsewhere (Ennis, 1996a). Third, to consider IBE in relation to causality, as I see it, all explanatory hypotheses that account for an occurrence or type of occurrence are implicitly or explicitly causal. There are some, including Bertrand Russell, who have urged abandoning causality in our disciplined thinking, and there are various views about what it is and how we identify it. This is a controversial area. In the past, I have argued that we should not abandon causality (Ennis, 1982a), and that being a necessary condition for an effect is not necessarily necessary (Ennis, 1982b), contrary to necessary-condition and counterfactual analyses of specific (singular) causal claims, e.g., the analyses of John Mackie (1974) and David Lewis (1973). I have also tried to sketch out a broad picture of causality (Ennis, 1973), especially specific causal claims like The bad decisions by BP caused the 2010 Gulf oil spill and Lack of adequate regulation caused the spill (two seemingly inconsistent claims), and am now working on a sufficient-condition speech-act interpretation of specific causal claims. However, I am convinced that causality itself is an irreducible notion. There is still much work to be done here.

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Two Overall Summaries (a) The appendix The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities, which is the appendix to this paper and is in outline form, contains all of the above-described second-conception ideas, as well as additional features that are fairly standard in the critical thinking literature. This outline, though unexemplified, is comprehensive and thorough enough to be used in planning for an overall curriculum, or as a basis for a table of specifications for a critical thinking test or test series. But it makes for difficult reading if read straight through, especially for beginners, and it contains more than can be incorporated in an introductory course in critical thinking. (b) A brief summary of the second conception Table 1 provides a very brief (super-streamlined) overall presentation with neither listings of criteria nor detailed listing of aspects of critical thinking. I call it super-streamlined to show that it is a streamlined version of A streamlined conception of critical thinking (Ennis, 1991c) and other article-length presentations of the second conception. It also merges critical thinking abilities and dispositions. But it can be useful as someones first encounter with critical thinking, or as a rough checklist for a students paper or thesis, or for anyones act of deciding what to believe or do. Table 1 A Super-Streamlined Conception of Critical Thinking
Assuming that critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do, a critical thinker: 1. Is open-minded and mindful of alternatives 2. Desires to be, and is, well-informed 3. Judges well the credibility of sources 4. Identifies conclusions, reasons, and assumptions 5. Asks appropriate clarifying questions 6. Judges well the quality of an argument, including its reasons, assumptions, evidence, and their degree of support for the conclusion 7. Can well develop and defend a reasonable position, doing justice to challenges 8. Formulates plausible hypotheses 9. Plans and conducts experiments well 10. Defines terms in a way appropriate for the context 11. Draws conclusions when warranted but with caution 12. Integrates all items in this list

(f) Equivocation Although equivocation is a standard item in a list of fallacies, I treat it as deserving special mention because it is particularly insidious. In my first conception I called it merely ambiguity, but actually it is more serious than ambiguity. It is often connected with definitions, and I usually mention it in association with definitions. As I use the term, equivocation is the process of shifting between two meanings of a term in an argument, generally proving a proposition using one sense of the term and applying the proposition using a different sense. For example someone might charge that my conception of critical thinking is biased because it takes a position on what makes for good thinking. In this example the definition of bias that is assumed is that a person is biased if he or she has a position on something. But the application of the term bias seems to be a charge of unfairness (unfairness not having been mentioned in the definition of bias, but a characteristic ordinarily associated with the use of the term bias). So it seems to follow that critical thinking is unfair, if one ignores the shift in meaning. But of course, it does not follow. Actually, blatant cases of equivocation (in which the arguer explicitly adopts two meanings, and deliberately exploits the shift between them) are rare. Most actual cases of equivocation are more subtle, and must be uncovered by probing. One of the subtleties is in what I have called impact equivocation (Ennis, 1980) which is found in arguments that have the impact of equivocation but in which the arguer does not explicitly adopt both of the meanings of the crucial term. Rather the arguer adopts a special meaning for a term that is at variance with ordinary use of the audience, makes a statement using the term in that special meaning, which will be taken by the audience to assume the ordinary meaning of the term, and thus be misleading. This sometimes happens with the word bias, and with the word reliability, a psychometric term used in the discussion of tests. Concern with equivocation, including impact equivocation, is one of the good things that was part of the ordinary-language movement inspired by the later Wittgenstein. (g) Value judgments Value judgments were omitted in my first conception, making it what I then called a truncated conception. Appraising value judgments is an aspect of the second conception, and some criteria are offered, such as getting the facts straight (including facts about the likely consequences of an action), prima facie application of acceptable principles, and attention to alternatives. But a heavy dose of good judgment is needed as well.

Incidentally I have argued (Ennis, 1981c) that another brief characterization of good thinking, Benjamin Blooms popular Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 Domain (Bloom, 1956) is inspiring, but not very helpful as guidance. Among other things, its six categories do not have useful criteria that can be applied across topics and subject-matter areas. For example, his category, analysis, covers a range of important activities that vary considerably from, for example, chemistry to literature, with not much in common that is worth teaching as critical thinking or higher-order thinking (a term in use by Blooms followers). There is not much to teach in general about analysis, making Blooms taxonomy vulnerable to McPecks (1981, 1990a) complaints about the emptiness of attempts to teach general thinking. However, in providing a list with a five-to-one ratio of thinking categories to knowledge (Bloom behaviorally defined knowledge as recall, but most people have taken it in its ordinary sense), his taxonomy is an apparently persuasive counter to demands for exclusive attention to subject-matter knowledge, as opposed to higher-order thinking. Other Topics Related to the second conception, though not explicitly mentioned in it, is the relationship between critical thinking and creativity. In agreement with Sharon Bailin (1985), I hold that they are somewhat interdependent (Ennis, 1985). Judgments that some act of thinking is creative generally assume a positive evaluation of the thinking (thus requiring critical thinking). Furthermore, creativity is needed in generating hypotheses, definitions, and alternatives, in planning experiments, and conceiving of counter-examples. Another so-far-undiscussed topic in this essay is the possibility of critical thinkings being gender or culturally biased (Wheary & Ennis, 1995; Ennis, 1998). My view is that critical thinking is basically not gender or culturally biased, as can be seen in a point-by-point examination of the second conception in the Appendix. Later, in the section labeled Teaching Critical Thinking in Part II, I will consider the question of whether critical thinking is subject-specific, and the question of the appropriate allocation of responsibility for teaching critical thinking among various teachers, subject-matter areas, and other units. Both questions are related to ones conception of critical thinking, but perhaps better considered under teaching. [To be continued in INQUIRY Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2011).]

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Anderson, H. R. (1942). Teaching critical thinking in the social studies. Washington: The National Council for the Social Studies. Bailin, S. (1985). Creativity and quality. In E. Robertson (Ed.), Philosophy of education 1984 (Proceedings of the fortieth annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society). Normal, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. Beardsley, M. (1950). Practical logic. New York: Prentice Hall. Black, M. (1946). Critical thinking. New York: Prentice Hall. Bloom, B. S. (Ed.), (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives The classification of educational goals Handbook 1: The cognitive domain. New York: Longmans Green and Co. Boyer, E. (1983). High school. New York: Harper & Rowe. Bradley, A. C. (1937). Shakespearean tragedy. London: Macmillan. Cohen, M. B., & Nagel, E. (1934). An introduction to logic and scientific method. New York: Harcourt Brace. College Board (1983). Academic preparation for college. New York College Entrance Examination Board. Commission on the Humanities (1980). The humanities in American life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Conant, J. B. (1951). On understanding science. New York, Mentor. Conant, J. B. (Ed.) (1950-1954). Harvard case histories in experimental science, #1 through #8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Conant, J. B. (1959). The American high school today: A first report to interested citizens. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Dewey, J. (1933, first edition 1910). How we think. Boston: D. C. Heath. Donnellan, K. S. (1966). Reference and definite descriptions. The Philosophical Review, 75, 281-304. Donnellan, K. S. (1968). Putting Humpty Dumpty together again. The Philosophical Review, 77, 203-315. Ennis, R. H. (May, 1956). Critical thinking: More on its motivation. Progressive Education, 75-78. Ennis, R. H. (1958). An appraisal of the Watson-Glaser critical thinking appraisal. Journal of Educational Research, 52, 155-158. Ennis, R. H. (1959a). The impossibility of neutrality. Harvard Educational Review, 29, 128-136. Reprinted as Is it impossible for the schools to be neutral? (1961), Language and concepts in education, 1961, B. O. Smith, & R. H. Ennis (Eds.), Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, pp. 102-111; and (1971) Es imposible que las escueles sean neutrales? in B. O. Smith, & R. H. Ennis (Eds.), Lenguaje y conceptos en la educacion, 1971, Buenos Aires: Al Ateneo, 113-123. Ennis, R. H. (1959b). The development of a critical thinking test. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, University Microfilms #59-00505. Ennis, R. H. (1961). Assumption-finding. In B. O. Smith, & R. H. Ennis (Eds.), Language and concepts in education. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, pp. 161-178. Reprinted as La identificacion de supestos, in B. O. Smith, & R. H. Ennis (Eds.), Lenguaje y conceptos en la educacion, 1971, Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 177-194.

References
Aiken, W. M. (1942). The story of the eight-year study. New York: Harper & Brothers. The American Philosophical Association (1985). Board of Officers statement on critical thinking. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 58, 484.

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Ennis, R. H. (1987a). A taxonomy of critical thinking dispositions and abilities. In J. Baron & R. Sternberg (Eds.), Teaching thinking skills: Theory and practice. New York: W. H. Freeman, 9-26. Ennis, R. H. (1987b). A conception of critical thinking With some curriculum suggestions. APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy, Summer, 1-5. Ennis, R. H. (1991a). The State of Illinois goals and sample learning objectives for scientific thinking and methods: Strengths, weaknesses and suggestions. Spectrum, 17(1), 10-16. Ennis, R. H. (1991b). An elaboration of a cardinal goal of science instruction: Scientific thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 23(1), 31-45. Ennis, R. H. (1991c). Critical thinking: A streamlined conception. Teaching Philosophy, 14(1), 5-25. Ennis, R. H. (1996a) Critical thinking. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Ennis, R. H. (1996b). Critical thinking dispositions: Their nature and assessability. Informal Logic, 18(2 & 3), 165-182 . Ennis, R. H. (March, 1998). Is critical thinking culturally biased? Teaching Philosophy, 21(1), 15-33. Ennis, R. H. (2001). Argument appraisal strategy: A comprehensive approach. Informal Logic, 21(2), 97-140. Ennis, Robert H. (2002). Goals for a critical thinking curriculum and its assessment. In A. L. Costa (Ed.), Developing minds (3rd Edition). Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 44-46. Ennis, R. H. (2004). Applying soundness standards to qualified reasoning. Informal Logic, 24(1), 23-39. Ennis, R. H. (2006). Probably. In D. Hitchcock, & B. Verheij (Eds.), Arguing on the Toulmin model. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 145-164. Ennis, R. H. (2007). Probable and its equivalents. In H. V. Hansen & R. C. Pinto (Eds.), Reason reclaimed: Essays in honor of J. Anthony Blair and Ralph H. Johnson. Newport News, VA: Vale Press, 243-256. Ennis, R. H. (2009). Investigating and assessing multiple-choice critical thinking tests. In J. Sobocan, & L. Groarke (Eds.), Critical thinking education and assessment: Can higher order thinking be tested? London, Ontario, CA: Althouse, 75-97. Ennis, R. H. (in process). Situational test validity. Facione, P. A. (1990). Critical thinking: A statement of expert consensus for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Executive summary of The Delphi Report) Millbrae, CA: California Academic Press. Harman, G. (1965). The inference to the best explanation. Philosophical Review, 74(1), 88-95. Harman, G. (1968). Enumerative induction as inference to the best explanation. Journal of Philosophy, 65(18), 529-533. Harman, G. (1973). Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hart, H. L. A. (1961). The concept of law. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Hitchcock, D. (1985). Enthymematic arguments. Informal Logic, 7(2 & 3), 83-97. Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1938). Propaganda analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Kahane, H. (1971). Logic and contemporary rhetoric. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Ennis, R. H. (1962). A concept of critical thinking. Harvard Educational Review, 32, pp. 81-111. Reprinted in B. P. Komisar, & C. J. B. Macmillan (Eds.), Psychological concepts in education, 1967, Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 114-148. Ennis, R. H. (1964a). Operational definitions. American Educational Research Journal, 1, 183-201. Ennis, Robert H. (1964b). A definition of critical thinking. The Reading Teacher, 17(8), 599-612. Ennis, R. H. (1968). Enumerative induction and best explanation. The Journal of Philosophy, 65, 523-530. Ennis, R. H. (1969a). Logic in teaching. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Ennis, R. H. (1969b). Ordinary logic. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Ennis, R. H. (1969c). Operationism can and should be divorced from covering law assumptions (a reprint of Operational Definitions (1964). In L. I. Krimerman (Ed.), The nature and scope of social science: A critical anthology, 1969, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 431-444. Ennis, R. H. (1969d). The possibility of neutrality. Journal of Educational Theory, 19, 347-356. Ennis, R. H. (1973). On causality. Educational Researcher, 2(6), 4-11. Ennis, R. H. (1974a). The believability of people. Educational Forum, 38, 347-354. Ennis, R. H. (1974b). Definition in science teaching. Instructional Science, 3, 285-298. Ennis, R. H. (1979). Research in philosophy of science and science education. In P. Asquith, & H. Kyburg (Eds.), Current research in philosophy of science. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 138-170. Ennis, R. H. (1980). Presidential address: A conception of rational thinking. In J. Coombs (Ed.), Philosophy of education 1979. Bloomington, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1-30. Ennis, R. H. (1981a). A conception of deductive logic competence. Teaching Philosophy, 4, 337-385. Ennis, R. H. (1981b) Rational thinking and educational practice. In J. Soltis (Ed.), Philosophy of education 1981 (Eightieth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I). Chicago: The National Society for the Study of Education, 143-183. Ennis, R. H. (1981c). Eight fallacies in Blooms taxonomy. In C. J. B. Macmillan (Ed.), Philosophy of education 1980. Bloomington, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 269273. Ennis, R. H. (1982a). Abandon causality? Educational Researcher, 11(7), 25-27. Ennis, R. H. (1982b). Mackies singular causality and linked overdetermination. In P. D. Asquith, & T. Nickles (Eds.), PSA 1982. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 55-64. Ennis, R. H. (1982c). Identifying implicit assumptions. Synthese, 51, 61-86. Ennis, R. H. (1985). Quality and creativity. In E. Robertson (Ed.), Philosophy of education, 1984 (pp. 323-328). Bloomington, IL: Philosophy of Education Society.

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Lewis, C. I. (1912). Implication and the algebra of logic. Mind, 522-531. Lewis, D. (1973). Causation. Journal of Philosophy, 70, 556567. Lipton, P. (2004). Inference to best explanation. London: Routledge. Mackie, J. L. (1974). The cement of the universe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McPeck, J. (1981). Critical thinking and education. New York: St. Martins Press. McPeck, J. (1990a). Teaching critical thinking. New York: Routledge. McPeck, J. (1990b). Critical thinking and subject specificity: A reply to Ennis. Educational Researcher, 19(4), 10-12. Nosich, G. (2010). From argument and philosophy to critical thinking across the curriculum. INQUIRY: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, 25(3), 4-13. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Roth, M. (2010). Beyond critical thinking. The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3. Siegel, H. (1988). Educating reason. New York: Routledge. Smith, B. O. (March, 1953). The improvement of critical thinking. Progressive Education, 30(5), 130. Smith E. R., & Tyler, R. W. (1942). Appraising and recording student progress. New York: Harper & Brothers. Strawson, P. F. (1952). Introduction to logical theory. London: Methuen & Co. Werkmeister, W. H. (1948). An introduction to critical thinking, 2nd Edition. Lincoln, NE: Johnsen Publishing Co. Wheary, J., & Ennis, R. H. (1995). Gender bias in critical thinking: continuing the dialogue. Educational Theory, 45(2), 213-224. Wigmore, J. H. (1942). Wigmores code of the rules of evidence in trials at law, 3rd Edition. Boston: Little Brown and Co,

15 outline. For the sake of brevity, clarification in the form of examples, qualifications, and more detail, including more criteria, are omitted, but can be found in sources listed below, but most fully in my Critical Thinking (1996a). This outline is the encapsulation of many years of work in the elaboration of the simple definition of critical thinking given above, and it distinguishes between critical thinking dispositions and abilities. It is only a critical thinking content outline. It does not specify grade level, curriculum sequence, emphasis, teaching approach, or type of subject-matter content involved (standard subject-matter content, general knowledge content, streetwise-knowledge content, special knowledge content, etc.). For assessment purposes it can only provide a basis for developing a table of specifications and the preparation of assessment rubrics. Critical Thinking Dispositions Ideal critical thinkers are disposed to 1. Care that their beliefs be true,4 and that their decisions be justified; that is, care to get it right to the extent possible; including to a. Seek alternative hypotheses, explanations, conclusions, plans, sources, etc.; and be open to them b. Consider seriously other points of view than their own c. Try to be well informed d. Endorse a position to the extent that, but only to the extent that, it is justified by the information that is available e. Use their critical thinking abilities 2. Care to understand and present a position honestly and clearly, theirs as well as others; including to a. Discover and listen to others view and reasons b. Be clear about the intended meaning of what is said, written, or otherwise communicated, seeking as much precision as the situation requires c. Determine, and maintain focus on, the conclusion or question d. Seek and offer reasons e. Take into account the total situation f. Be reflectively aware of their own basic beliefs 3. Care about every person. (This one is an auxiliary, not constitutive, disposition. Although this concern for people is not constitutive, critical thinking can be dangerous without it.) Caring critical thinkers a. Avoid intimidating or confusing others with their critical thinking prowess, taking into account others feelings and level of understanding b. Are concerned about others welfare

Web sites
AILACT Web Site: ailact.mcmaster.ca/ Ennis, Robert H. Academic Web Site: faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/rhennis Ennis, Robert H. Critical Thinking Web Site: www.criticalthinking.net

Appendix
The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities3 Critical thinking is reasonable and reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do. This definition I believe captures the core of the way the term is used in the critical thinking movement. In deciding what to believe or do, one is helped by the employment of a set of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that I shall outline. These can serve as a set of comprehensive goals for a critical thinking curriculum and its assessment. Usefulness in curriculum decisions, teaching, and assessment, not elegance or mutual exclusiveness, is the purpose of this

16 Critical Thinking Abilities

INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES 5. Observe, and judge observation reports. Major criteria (but not necessary conditions, except for the first): a. Minimal inferring involved b. Short time interval between observation and report c. Report by the observer, rather than someone else (that is, the report is not hearsay) d. Provision of records e. Corroboration f. Possibility of corroboration g. Good access h. Competent employment of technology, if technology applies i. Satisfaction by observer (and reporter, if a different person) of the credibility criteria in Ability # 4 above (Note: A third basis is your own established conclusions.) (Inference, 6 to 8) 6. Deduce, and judge deduction: a. Class logic b. Conditional logic c. Interpretation of logical terminology, including i. Negation and double negation ii. Necessary and sufficient condition language iii. Such words as only, if and only if, or, some, unless, and not both d. Qualified deductive reasoning (a loosening for practical purposes) 7. Make material inferences (roughly induction): a. To generalizations. Broad considerations: i. Typicality of data, including valid sampling where appropriate ii. Volume of instances iii. Conformity of instances to generalization iv. Having a principled way of dealing with outliers b. To explanatory hypotheses (IBE: inference-tobest-explanation): i. Major types of explanatory conclusions and hypotheses: a. Specific and general causal claims b. Claims about the beliefs and attitudes of people c. Interpretation of authors intended meanings d. Historical claims that certain things happened (including criminal accusations) e. Reported definitions f. Claims that some proposition is an unstated, but used, reason ii. Characteristic investigative activities a. Designing experiments, including planning to control variables

The following abilities numbered 1 to 3 involve basic clarification; 4 and 5, the bases for a decision; 6 to 8, inference; 9 and 10, advanced clarification; and 11 and 12, supposition and integration. Abilities 13 to 15 are auxiliary abilities, not constitutive of critical thinking, but very helpful. Ideal critical thinkers have the ability to: (Basic Clarification, 1 to 3) 1. Focus on a question: a. Identify or formulate a question b. Identify or formulate criteria for judging possible answers c. Keep the question and situation in mind Analyze arguments: a. Identify conclusions b. Identify reasons or premises c. Ascribe or identify simple assumptions (see also ability 10) c. Identify and handle irrelevance d. See the structure of an argument e. Summarize 2. 3. Ask and answer clarification and/or challenge questions, such as: a. Why? b. What is your main point? c. What do you mean by______________________? d. What would be an example? e. What would not be an example (though close to being one)? f. How does that apply to this case (describe a case, which appears to be a counterexample)? g. What difference does it make? h. What are the facts? i. Is this what you are saying:__________________? j. Would you say more about that? (Two Bases for a Decision: 4 and 5) 4. Judge the credibility of a source. Major criteria (but not necessary conditions): a. Expertise b. Lack of conflict of interest c. Agreement with other sources d. Reputation e. Use of established procedures f. Known risk to reputation (the sources knowing of a risk to reputation, if wrong) g. Ability to give reasons h. Careful habits

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 b. Seeking evidence and counterevidence, including statistical significance c. Seeking other possible explanations iii. Criteria, the first four being essential, the fifth being desirable a. The proposed conclusion would explain or help explain the evidence b. The proposed conclusion is consistent with all known facts c. Competitive alternative explanations are inconsistent with facts d. A competent sincere effort has been made to find supporting and opposing data, and alternative hypotheses e. The proposed conclusion seems plausible and simple, fitting into the broader picture Make and judge value judgments Important factors: a. Background facts b. Consequences of accepting or rejecting the judgment c. Prima facie application of acceptable principles d. Alternatives e. Balancing, weighing, deciding 8. (Advanced Clarification, 9 and 10) 9. Define terms and judge definitions, using appropriate criteria Three basic dimensions are form, function (act), and content. A fourth, more advanced dimension is handling equivocation. a. Definition form. For criteria for 1 through 4 and 6, see Ennis (1996, Ch 12 & 13). For #5 see Ennis (1964, 1969c). i. Synonym ii. Classification iii. Range iv. Equivalent-expression v. Operational vi. Example and non-example b. Definitional functions (acts) i. Report a meaning (criteria: the five for an explanatory hypothesis) ii. Stipulate a meaning (criteria: convenience, consistency, avoidance of impact equivocation) iii. Express a position on an issue (positional definitions, including programmatic and persuasive definitions) Criteria: those for a position (Ennis 2001) c. Content of the definition d. Identifying and handling equivocation (Ennis 1996)

17 10. Attribute unstated assumptions (an ability that belongs under both basic clarification (2b) and inference (7bif) a. Pejorative flavor (dubiousness or falsity): commonly but not always associated to some degree with the different types. Criteria: See #8 above. b. Types: i. Presuppositions (required for a proposition to make sense) ii. Needed assumptions (needed by the reasoning to be at its strongest, but not logically necessary (Ennis 1982)), (called assumptions of the argument by Hitchcock (1985)) iii. Used assumptions (judged by hypothesis-testing criteria, Ennis 1982), called assumptions of the arguer by Hitchcock (1985) (Supposition and Integration, 11 and 12) 11. Consider and reason from premises, reasons, assump tions, positions, and other propositions with which they disagree or about which they are in doubt, without letting the disagreement or doubt interfere with their thinking (suppositional thinking) 12. Integrate the dispositions and other abilities in making and defending a decision (Auxiliary abilities, 13 to 15) 13. Proceed in an orderly manner appropriate to the situ ation: a. Follow problem solving steps b. Monitor their own thinking (that is, engage in metacognition) c. Employ a reasonable critical thinking checklist 14. Be sensitive to the feelings, level of knowledge, and degree of sophistication of others 15. Employ appropriate rhetorical strategies in discussion and presentation (oral and written), including employing and reacting to fallacy labels in an appropriate manner. Examples of fallacy labels are circularity, bandwagon, post hoc, equivocation, non sequitur, and straw person

Summary and Comments

In brief, the ideal critical thinker is disposed to try to get it right, to present a position honestly and clearly, and to care about others (this last being auxiliary, not constitutive); furthermore the ideal critical thinker has the ability to clarify, to seek and judge well the basis for a view, to infer wisely from the basis, to imaginatively suppose and integrate, and to do these things with dispatch, sensitivity, and rhetorical skill.

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES for critical thinking research, and the invaluable help of my students and colleagues at both universities and in AILACT. 2. Assessing, not assessment, thus avoiding the process-product ambiguity of assessment, an ambiguity that John McPeck (1981, pp. 44-46), and others in his footsteps have tried to exploit after misquoting me as saying assessment. If one says assessment and assumes the result (product) sense of assessment, then correct assessment, if it were in the definition, would fail to recognize that what makes some bit of thinking critical is a function not of the result but of the way in which a particular result is pursued (p. 44). After misquoting me, McPeck (p. 44) mistakenly attributed this sort of failure to my first definition. 3. This is a thoroughly revised version of a presentation at the Sixth International Conference on Thinking at MIT, Cambridge, MA, July, 1994. Last revised January, 2011. Developed by Robert H. Ennis, University of Illinois. rhennis@illinois.edu 4. With respect to epistemological constructivism (the view that truth is constructed): In expressing a concern about true belief, this conception of critical thinking accepts the view that our concepts and vocabulary are constructed by us, but also that (to oversimplify somewhat) the relationships among the referents of our concepts and terms are not constructed by us. We can have true or false beliefs about these. With respect to pedagogical constructivism (the view that students learn best when they construct their own answers to problems and questions): For some (but not all) goals and types of learning, this view has empirical support, but it should not be confused with epistemological constructivism. In particular, the validity of pedagogical constructivism (to the extent that it is valid) does not imply the validity of epistemological constructivism. They are totally different ideas. 5. My complete list of publications is to be found in the publications sections of my academic web site, faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/rhennis

In presenting this outline of critical thinking dispositions and abilities, I have only attempted to depict, rather than defend, them. The defense would require much more space than is available, but would follow two general paths: 1) examining the traditions of good thinking in existing successful disciplines of inquiry, and 2) seeing how we go wrong when we attempt to decide what to believe or do. In any teaching situation for which critical thinking is a goal, whether it be a separate critical thinking course or module, or one in which the critical thinking content is infused in (making critical thinking principles explicit) or immersed in (not making critical thinking principles explicit) standard subject-matter content, or some mixture of these; all of the dispositions, as well as the suppositional and integrational abilities (# 11 and #12) and auxiliary abilities (#13 through #15) are applicable all the time and should permeate the instruction to the extent that time and student ability permit. I have only attempted to outline a usable and defensible set of critical thinking goals, including criteria for making judgments. Space limitations have precluded exemplifying their application to curriculum, teaching, and assessment, though I have done so elsewhere.5 However, goals are the place to start. I hope that this outline provides a useful basis on which to build curriculum, teaching, and assessment procedures. Sources of exemplification, elaboration, and more criteria. The meaning, significance, and application of some of the above aspects might not be apparent to some, who might find the following items, which contain many examples, to be of help. Furthermore criteria for deduction, assumption ascription and definition are not provided in the above outline of the nature of critical thinking because they are too complex for a brief listing. Elaboration of these criteria and this conception by me are listed in References (above): 2007, 2006, 2004, 2002, 2001, 1991c, 1987a, 1987b, 1982b, 1982a, 1981a, 1980, 1974a, 1974b, 1973, 1969a, 1969b, 1969c, 1968, 1964a, 1964b, and 1962, but most comprehensively in three others (1996a, 1991, 1987a.)

Endnotes
1. I deeply appreciate the suggestions for this essay made by Jennie Berg, Lindley Darden, and Frank Fair. I also appreciate the fact that my two universities, Cornell and Illinois, provided me the research time to work on critical thinking, the fact that the United States Department of Education and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences each provided me a year of study, the research grants from New York State and the United States Department of Education

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1

19

Assessing Critical Thinking about Values: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Michael Gillespie Bowling Green State University Critical thinking and values are fundamental topics of interest in higher education. The current study is an empirical validation of a universitys effort to teach students to apply critical thinking to the recognition and articulation of values contained in focal essays. A Critical Thinking about Values Assessment (CTVA) is provided, which evaluates students responses regarding (1) key components of critical thinking, and (2) critical thinking about values, in response to the essays. These two criteria were assessed at the beginning and end of the semester as part of a naturally-occurring quasiexperiment. Results provide some support for the reliability and validity of the CTVA and suggest that the program has a tenuous relationship with students critical thinking, but a moderate to strong relationship with students ability to recognize and articulate values. Keywords: critical thinking, values, assessment Colleges and universities are in a unique position to teach the leaders of the future to think critically about the values that underlie the decisions they will face and to reflect on their values to be able to make decisions with an awareness of what those values are. The current study is an evaluation of a program at Bowling Green State University that is designed to get students to engage in critical thinking about values during their first semester at college. The past 10 years or so have seen a dramatic rise in the importance of such learning goals or outcomes, as calls for accountability in higher education become increasingly louder and more pointed (Achtemeier & Simpson, 2005; Alexander, 2000; Field, 2008; Leveille, 2005, May). Given the emphasis on data-driven decision making in the university context, empirical assessments are becoming necessary to document the achievement of learning outcomes and progress toward departmental, college, university, state, and national targets (Loacker & Rogers, 2005). To assist universities with the task of measuring student outcomes, this paper provides an example of a program evaluation using an open-ended assessment of critical thinking about values among freshmen psychology students. The assessment contains two sections one focusing on the key components (KC) of critical thinking, and the other on critical thinking about values (CTV), or the application of basic elements of critical thinking to the recognition and articulation of values. Whereas the first assessment measures critical thinking, the latter assessment is a direct measure of the programs learning outcomes, which could loosely be described as values recognition and articulation. The program evaluation aspect of this study capitalizes on a naturally-occurring quasi-experiment in which roughly half of the Universitys incoming freshmen took courses that emphasized critical thinking and values whereas the other half took otherwise comparable courses without such an emphasis. This general methodology can be used by departments or institutions in need of empirical assessment of similar learning outcomes, as well as researchers interested in this somewhat novel approach to the assessment of students recognition and articulation of values. In summary, the current study provides an evaluation of the Bowling Green eXperience (BGeX), a program that aims to teach students critical thinking about values. As part of the evaluation of this program a flexible method of assessment that others may be able to use is also provided.

Abstract

Critical Thinking
One of the main contributions of institutions of higher education is that they develop students to enter the labor force (Toutkoushian, 2005). Even though the knowledge students acquire may soon be forgotten or outdated in the workplace, critical thinking has been described as an enduring skill (Terenzini, Springer, Pascarella, & Nora, 1995), one of higher educations most widely professed goals (Tsui, 2000, p. 421). Further, critical thinking itself is largely generalizable (Siegel, 1992, 1997), and is important across domains of inquiry and careers (Briihl, Stanny, Jarvis, Darcy, & Belter, 2008; Dunn, Halonen, & Smith, 2008b;). As noted by Halonen (1995), there are just about as many definitions of critical thinking as there are people who study it (e.g., Browne & Keeley, 2004; Eggan & Kauchack, 2004; Ennis, 1987; Facione, 2004; Halpern, 1997; Jegede & Noordink, 1993; Lipman, 1988; McPeck, 1981; Paul, 1993; Siegel, 1988; Terenzini et al., 1995;

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES conduct or end-state of existence (p. 5). Schwartz and Bilsky (1987) provide an elaborated definition, writing that values (a) are concepts or beliefs, (b) pertain to desirable end states or behaviors, (c) transcend specific situations, (d) guide selection or evaluation of behavior and events, and (e) are ordered by relative importance (p. 878). Interestingly, this definition (part (d) in particular) implies that values are not just abstractions or sets of principles that one consults when faced with a dilemma. Instead, values are inherently active, driving attention and behavior. In addition, values guide the selection or evaluation of behavior and events (Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987) and help people determine whether a particular situation presents an ethical dilemma (Lefkowitz, 2003). Therefore, it is essential that people not only be able to identify the values assumed by others, but also that they understand their own values clearly, to navigate the complexities of this value-laden world with integrity.

Williams, Oliver, Allin, Winn, & Booher, 2003). Some definitions focus exclusively on the logic and reasoning aspect of critical thinking, as in the ability to properly construct and evaluate arguments (Facione, 1986, p. 222). Others have a broader approach that includes dispositional components, for example: Critical thinking has at least two central components: a reason assessment component, which involves abilities and skills relevant to the proper understanding and assessment of reasons, claims, and arguments; and a critical spirit component, which is understood as a complex of dispositions, attitudes, habits of mind, and character traits (Siegel, 1997, p. 27). Yet other definitions situate critical thinking within a broader framework for identifying, measuring, and developing both the logical and dispositional components of critical thinking: Critical thinking is the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions when the thinker is using skills that are thoughtful and effective for the particular context and type of thinking task (Halpern, 1997, p. 4). Halpern (1998) provides a four-part model of teaching critical thinking skills. The model is a good synthesis of current thinking in the domains of motivation theory, cognitive psychology, and educational psychology, focusing on (a) dispositions, (b) skills, (c) structure training (i.e., contrasting structural versus surface features of an argument), and (d) metacognitive monitoring. There are plenty of excellent examples of teaching and assessing students critical thinking (e.g., Browne & Keeley, 2004; Dunn, Halonen, & Smith, 2008a; Fasko, 2003; Halonen, 1986; Halpern, 1997). Therefore, the novel contribution of this study is the evaluation and assessment of critical thinking with specific application to values.

Critical Thinking about Values

Students need to be taught to think critically and to understand the implicit and explicit values that underlie their decisions and actions. A common way for teachers and scholars of critical thinking to teach students to identify such values is by identifying certain assumptions made in the evaluation of evidence and arguments. These value assumptions can be found by examining the manner in which given reasons actually support the conclusion of an argument (Browne & Keeley, 2004). The process of examining these assumptions can also help to situate ideas in their broader historical and philosophical context (Yanchar & Slife, 2004). The application of critical thinking to the understanding of values ensures that values education does not lead to indoctrination. Reciprocally, a focus on values within critical thinking can help educators guard against the production of merely robotic critical thinkers or walking logical algorithms, instead engendering thoughtful, principled humans. The current study provides an evaluation of a university program designed to teach critical thinking skills as applied to the recognition and description of values. This program, called the Bowling Green eXperience (BGeX), aims to teach students critical thinking about values (Katzner & Nieman, 2006). An assessment of the BGeX student learning outcomes was developed in order to evaluate the programs effectiveness. This study includes a detailed description of this assessment in hopes that parts of it may be applicable in other contexts. For the purposes of the present study, critical thinking about values refers to the application of critical thinking (characterized very generally) to values-focused learning outcomes. Faculty who taught BGeX classes used

Values
Rokeachs (1973) definition of values has served as the foundation for much of the current values research in the social sciences (see Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004; Meglino & Ravlin, 1998): A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 the following basic definition of a value: a principle, standard, or quality considered worthwhile or desirable (Bowling Green State University, 2004a, p. 13). The BGeX program focuses on teaching students to recognize and think about their own and others values, as opposed to teaching students to adopt a particular set of values. The specific learning outcomes assessed are as follows (Bowling Green State University, 2004b); however, other similar learning outcomes or goals could be substituted in future assessments. 1. Recognize and describe values that arise in the methods or content of the subject area. 2. Identify ways in which these sometimes unexamined values shape or relate to academic and/or public discussion of issues relevant to todays citizens. 3. Understand, articulate, and evaluate reasons and justifications that can support their own and others value choices. In the current study, these learning outcomes were assessed at two times. The first assessment (time 1) was at the beginning of the semester and (for BGeX students only) followed a weekend introduction to the BGeX program. The second assessment (time 2) occurred during the last week of the semester, after all students had been exposed to course material and BGeX students had an opportunity to participate in further discussion and activities regarding critical thinking about values in the context of their course. The assessments included two dependent variables: scores on a measure of the key components (KC) of critical thinking, and scores on a more direct measure of the learning outcomes, referred to as critical thinking about values (CTV), both of which are described in more detail in the Measures section. Considering these two time periods (time 1 and time 2) and two dependent variables (KC scores and CTV scores), I advance the following hypotheses: 1a. Students in the BGeX program will have higher KC scores following the introduction weekend time 1 than will students in the comparison group. 1b. Students in the BGeX program will have higher KC scores at the end of the semester time 2 than will students in the comparison group. 2a. Students in the BGeX program will have higher CTV scores following the introduction weekend time 1 than will students in the comparison group. 2b. Students in the BGeX program will have higher CTV scores at the end of the semester time 2 than will students in the comparison group.

21 State University (a medium-sized public comprehensive university in the Midwest). Three of the sections were part of the BGeX program ( BGeX condition n = 85 students) and the other three were equivalent except for the instructors and the fact that they did not contain the BGeX program content (Comparison group n = 80 students). University administrators indicated that the selection of students into one course versus the other was arbitrary neither deliberately systematic nor truly random. Because students did not get randomly assigned to groups, the two groups were examined for significant differences on three sets of variables thought to be unrelated to students involvement in the BGeX program: demographics, admissions criteria, and first-year survey results. These variables and the tests of between-group differences are described in the measures and preliminary results sections, respectively. BGeX Condition BGeX seeks to make critical thinking about values the unifying theme of students experience (Bowling Green State University, 2004b, p. 5). Although BGeX is a University-wide program, three sections of the Introduction to Psychology course served as the BGeX condition. These sections had the same content as non-BGeX sections, but had two important differences. First, the BGeX program itself began with an introduction weekend several days before the start of classes (The BGeX Introduction). Second, the three BGeX-course instructors incorporated examples, class exercises, and homework assignments that highlighted the role of critical thinking and of values inherent in the course content. During the introduction weekend, students in the BGeX program were assembled into groups of no more than 30 each (ns = 28, 28, and 29). Students soon-to-be instructor and a peer facilitator led these groups (peer facilitators are students who have already participated in the program). The introduction gave students an introduction to the university and its focus on critical thinking about values. Faculty, peer facilitators, and students received workbooks that provided, among other things, (a) a description of the history of the program, (b) common language and examples for talking about values, values preferences, and value conflicts, and (c) worksheets to complete during the introductory weekend. In addition, the faculty workshop guide contained materials relevant to both the introduction weekend and their upcoming class. These materials included a description of the BGeX learning outcomes, instructions and case studies regarding approaches to teaching critical thinking about values, sample assignments, and assessment options. The central aim of these materials was to encourage students to think about their own and others values, as well as how their values may relate to or conflict with others values. Below is a

Method
Participants Data were collected from 165 students enrolled in six small introductory psychology sections at Bowling Green

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Comparison Group Three small-enrollment (ns = 26, 27, 27) Introduction to Psychology sections served as the comparison group. All three sections were taught by the same instructor and were identical in content to the BGeX sections, except for the focus on critical thinking and values. Measures Student Records. The universitys Office of Institutional Research provided data on students demographic characteristics, admissions criteria, and first-year survey responses. Demographics included sex, ethnicity, and age. Admissions criteria consisted of high school GPA as well as ACT and/or SAT scores, which were standardized using national norms to be on the same metric and averaged for those students who took both tests (rACT,SAT = .85; p < .001; n = 40). In addition, BGSUs first-year survey contained a section asking students about their reasons for attending college and their general life goals. Although this survey was not central to the current study, six variables were comprised of these items in order to test for possible pre-existing between-group differences unrelated to the BGeX program. A factor analysis with varimax rotation on a previous years administration of the survey yielded three reasons factors (N = 1131) and three goals factors (N = 1070) with interpretable solutions. Coefficient alpha reliabilities were computed using the current sample. The reasons factors were Intellectual Development (5 items, = .61), Extrinsic Interests (2 items, =.31), and Others Advice (2 items, = .38). The latter two reasons factors did not produce sufficiently reliable scale scores. The goals factors were Social Progress (9 items, = .84), Achievement and Power (6 items, = .62), and Humanitarianism (2 items, = .77). Critical Thinking about Values Assessment (CTVA). The CTVA provided here is a two-part essay test of critical thinking skills developed as an assessment of BGeXs learning outcomes (see Appendix A). The CTVA is similar in structure and method to the International Critical Thinking Essay Test (Paul & Elder, 2001), insofar as students are asked to respond to an editorial in essay format. However, the CTVA was designed to map directly onto the BGeX learning outcomes as much as possible to be as sensitive as possible to the effects of the program. The first part of the CTVA is a test of the students ability to analyze an argument (i.e., identify the purpose, conclusion, arguments, and assumptions in a particular writing prompt). These items are identified as Key Components (KC) items 1 through 4. The second part builds on the same writing prompt and tests the students ability to understand the values held by the author of the argument, the authors reasons supporting particular values, and the implications of the authors values on discussion

sample exercise that was used in small group discussions during the introduction weekend. This example dealt with roommate frustrations: Keesha is a first year student without any brothers or sisters and has never had to share a room with anyone prior to her arrival at college. Lately she has had several arguments with her roommate Stacey. A recent disagreement occurred because Keesha likes to keep her side of the room very clean while Stacey usually leaves her clothes and books scattered around the room. When Keesha approached her roommate about this issue, Stacey explained that the room was hers too and she could leave her stuff wherever she wanted. Keesha is frustrated and does not know what to do next. a. What value(s) might Stacey hold that lead(s) her to respond to Keesha the way she did? b. What value(s) that Keesha might hold is/are in conflict with Staceys value? c. What are Keeshas options to resolve this issue with her roommate Stacey? d. What suggestions would you make to the two roommates? What value(s) do you hold that lead(s) you to offer these suggestions? (Bowling Green State University, 2004b, p. 47) The materials given to faculty also included sample in-class assignments that required students to use careful thinking and justification of their own values and the values of others. One sample assignment asked students to identify a media message that they agreed with and another that they disagreed with, and required a careful, written exposition about why they agreed and disagreed. Another included a reflection on The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman, 1999). This exercise posed the following three questions: 1. If you have not already done so, read The Lexus and the Olive Tree, pages 437-440, paying special attention to the chart/matrix on top of page 438. Identify the value conflicts existing between the Separatists and the Integrationists. 2. Using the same chart/matrix, identify the values conflicts between Social-Safety-Netters and LetThem-Eat-Cakers. 3. Now, examine the value conflicts you have identified in questions 1 and 2. Where do you lie with respect to the value conflicts? Write where you would place yourself on the chart/matrix and explain your answer. (Bowling Green State University, 2004b, p. 16)

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 of the issue. These items are identified as Critical Thinking about Values (CTV) items 1 through 3. Again, the CTV portion of the assessment measures the application of basic elements of critical thinking (which does not necessarily have anything to do with values) toward the recognition and articulation of values. The CTVA was administered at two time points: (1) during the first month of the semester, which was about two weeks after students participated in the BGeX introduction weekend; and (2) during the last week of classes before students took their final exams. One hundred thirty-one students participated in both administrations. The CTVA can be used with any writing prompt that provides rich enough information regarding critical thinking and values. Two prompts were used for the current study, The case for self-interest (Perloff, 2004, May 30), and The political brain (Johnson, 2004, August 22). Table 1 presents experimental conditions for the BGeX and comparison sections along with the corresponding CTVA prompts used. The same prompt was administered at time 1 and time 2 for one of the comparison groups (comparison group 3). This repeat administration permitted an assessment of test-retest reliability of the CTVA. It also allowed for potential score inflation at time 2 to the extent that students in comparison group 3 remembered the assignment and thought about it over the course of the semester. However, this was a rather unlikely scenario, given that course content in the comparison groups did not focus on any of the questions asked in the CTVA. Table 1 Experimental Conditions
Groups N Time 1 Time 2

23 blind to which condition the responses were from. A fivepoint rating system permitted scores of 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, or 2 for each item, yielding sum scores with a possible range of 0-8 and 0-6 for the KC and CTV sections, respectively. A series of iterative pilot rating sessions were conducted to develop the actual scoring rubrics, which raters then consulted when they made their actual ratings. In addition, a set of scoring guidelines were provided that accompanied the rubrics to assist the raters collective understanding of the rationale for the ratings.

Results
Preliminary Analyses Pre-existing group differences. There were no statistically-significant differences between the BGeX and comparison conditions on any of the demographic variables or admissions criteria: Sex 2(2) = 3.06, p = .08; Caucasian vs. not 2(1) = 1.34, p = .28 (no specific subgroup comparisons produced significant differences either); Age t(157) = 0.11, p = .92; High School GPA t(154) = 0.69, p = .49; standardized ACT/SAT scores t(157) = 1.66, p = .10. Although the results for ACT/SAT could be interpreted as marginally-significant, students in the comparison group actually had a higher mean score (0.29, SD = 0.62) than those in the BGeX group (0.11, SD = 0.72). One of the reasons factors and one of the goals factors evidenced statistically significant between-group differences, although these differences were in favor of the comparison group: Intellectual Development t(82) = 2.50, p = .02; and Social Progress t(77) = 2.30, p = .02. The remaining factors were non-significant: Extrinsic Interests t(85) = 1.27, p = .21; Others Advice t(85) = 1.17, p = .24; Achievement and Power t(80) = 1.54, p = .13; and Humanitarianism t(80) = -1.57, p = .12. CTVA reliability. The reliability of the CTVA is discussed in terms of (1) rater agreement and reliability at the item level, (2) internal consistency at the scale level, and (3) test-retest reliability at the scale level. To calculate rater agreement/reliability, scores for each item (e.g., KC 1) were obtained using the mean rating of all raters who rated student responses to that item. Because it is the reliability of ratings that is of primary of interest in this study, Shrout and Fleisss (1979) one-way intraclass correlation (ICC[1,k]) is provided as an indication of the reliable variance in raters scores. Unlike measures of pure rater agreement, ICC(1,k) scores are high when raters exhibit both high agreement and high reliability. There was a small amount of missing rating data due to some raters not rating every single item and/or respondents not always answering every single item. However, considering both time 1 and time 2 ratings all together, most KC item responses were rated by three raters (n 260; two-rater n 27; one-rater n 6). Three-rater ICC(1,k)

BGeX groups BGeX 1 BGeX 2 BGeX 3 Comparison groups Comparison 1 Comparison 2 Comparison 3

28 28 29

Self-Interest Self-Interest Political Brain

Political Brain Political Brain Self-Interest

26 27 27

Self-Interest Self-Interest Political Brain

Political Brain Political Brain Political Brain

Scoring the CTVA. A team of six researchers developed the scoring process and provided ratings for the open-ended and essay CTVA responses. A scoring guide, or rubric (the rubrics and a scoring guide are available upon request), was developed that raters used to code responses to the CTVA. KC (Key Components) items 1 4 were scored separately from the CTV (Critical Thinking about Values) items 1 3 to avoid biasing the CTV scores as a function of the KC scores and vice versa. Raters were also

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

values for KC items 1 through 4 were .58, .50, .71, and of BGeX vs. comparison group was statistically significant .49, respectively. Most of the CTV responses were rated (Wilkes = .85 F[2, 128] = 11.24, p < .001; partial 2 = by four raters (n 178) although a sizeable portion had .15), permitting further investigation of mean differences. three raters (n 85; two-rater n 18; one-rater n 11). The between-subjects effect (i.e., BGeX vs. comparison ICC(1,k) values for CTV items 1 through 3 were .70, .64, group) was statistically-significant for CTV (F[1,129] = 17.56, p < .001; partial 2 = .12) but not for KC (F[1,129] and .60, respectively, for four raters. Second, coefficient alpha reliabilities were .67 for = 0.01, p = .98; partial 2 = .00), permitting specific hythe 4-item KC scale, and .81 for the 3-item CTV scale. pothesis tests for CTV but precluding further tests for Although the KC scale reliability is just below the gener- KC and failing to support Hypotheses 1a and 1b. Table 2 ally acceptable .70 guideline for an experimental measure shows that BGeX students scored statistically significantly (Nunnally, 1978; Lance, Butts, & Michels, 2006), the CTV higher (p < .001) than comparison group students on CTV scale demonstrates adequate reliability. Third, comparison (the measure of BGeX learning outcomes) at time 1 and group 3 permitted calculation of test-retest reliability. The time 2, supporting hypotheses 2a and 2b. The sizes of correlation between time 1 and time 2 scores (the lag was these effects were substantial (moderate to strong), with approximately 3 months) was .36 (p = .10; n = 22) for Cohens d values of .53, .63, and .73 for time 1, time 2, the KC scale and .46 (p =. 03; n = 22) for the CTV scale. and overall, respectively. Standardizing CTVA scores across the two writing Discussion prompts. Although the CTVA can be used with any appropriate writing prompt, there is no reason to believe that This study was a quasi-experimental validation of an scores obtained with one prompt are equivalent to scores obtained with another prompt. Therefore, scores needed instructional program designed to teach students critical to be standardized across the two writing forms to adjust thinking about values. I hypothesized that students enrolled for potential differences in difficulty. An additional 51 in the program (BGeX group) would outperform those students volunteered for a separate prompt-standardization not enrolled in the program (comparison group) on (a) a study and were randomly assigned to one of two condi- test of key components of critical thinking (KC), and (b) tions. In the first condition, students received the CTVA a test of critical thinking about values (CTV). The latter with the self-interest prompt, followed by the CTVA with measure was designed as an explicit assessment of the the political brain prompt. In the second, the order was BGeX program learning outcomes. reversed. This design allowed for a within-subjects comparison of the Table 2 relationship and relative difficulty Means and Standard Deviations of CTVA items and Scales by Condition of the CTVAs when using the two (BGX vs. non-BGX) different prompts. Scores from the two prompts in the primary sample BGeX Condition non-BGeX Condition were then standardized using each forms respective mean and stan X X dard deviation from the prompt n SD n SD t-value p Cohens d standardization sample. These standardized scores were then used Time 1 in the following analyses. Hypothesis Tests Descriptive statistics for all major study variables are provided in Table 2. A 2 X 2 mixed Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was conducted first in order to justify the individual hypothesis tests. This analysis tested for group differences (BGeX vs. comparison) on the two related dependent variables (KC scores and CTV scores) across the two time periods. The multivariate test
KC total (H1a) CTV total (H1b) 82 82 0.08 1.00 0.91 1.18 80 80 0.32 1.07 0.30 1.10 -1.46 .146 -0.23 3.41 .001 0.53

Time 2 KC total (H2a) CTV total (H2b) Overall KC total CTV total

64 -0.10 1.02 64 0.25 1.26

68 -0.32 1.15 67 -0.48 1.07

1.18 3.57

.241 .001

0.20 0.63

64 -0.05 1.60 68 0.01 1.66 64 1.26 2.07 67 -0.14 1.76

-0.19 .846 -0.04 4.19 <.001 0.73

Note. Means and SDs are adjusted for the differences across writing prompts used; KC refers to the key component items; CTV refers to critical thinking about values items; Overall is the sum of Time 1 and Time 2 scores.

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 The hypothesis that the BGeX program would positively impact students KC scores was not supported. This is not completely surprising in retrospect, given that the program does not explicitly teach students critical thinking per se. However, students in the program did significantly outperform comparison group students on CTV scores, the more direct measure of the BGeX learning outcomes. Moreover, this difference was substantial, with almost of a standard deviation difference overall between groups (Cohens d = .73, combining time 1 and time 2 scores). Somewhat ironically, the lack of group differences on KC scores helps to increase confidence that the group differences on CTV scores are indeed attributable to the BGeX program. The conclusion of these results is that the BGeX program appears to have improved students critical thinking about values, or at least their ability to recognize and articulate relevant values, as elicited by the BGeX learning outcomes. Some limitations are noteworthy. First, it would be ideal to obtain a true pre-test measure as a baseline. The current study provides tests of two post-intervention effects. This suggests that the effects are robust but it does not permit identification of pre-BGeX to post-BGeX gains within students. It can be challenging to implement a true pre-test prior to the start of the academic year, but we encourage future researchers and administrators to try to work together to make this possible. Second and related, the decline in scores from time 1 to time 2 presents a few ambiguities. For example, it is difficult to clearly identify students motivation for exerting effort on the CTVA measure. It would be quite tragic if freshmen actually become worse critical thinkers during their first semester. Instead, I speculate that the students realized that the assignment would not count toward their grade by the time they completed it the second time and hence did not exert as much effort then. Also, as noted by an anonymous reviewer, the relatively parallel decline in CTV scores from time 1 to time 2 across both conditions begs the question of whether the in-class activities had much benefit over the introduction weekend. Given the considerable time and expense associated with continuing the BGeX program throughout the semester, this is an important question. Third, the lack of true random assignment to groups combined with the lack of a true pre-test leaves open the possibility that the observed difference on CTV scores is a result of students in the BGeX group being better at applying critical thinking to the recognition and articulation of values even before the study began. However, if this were the case, I would expect to see at least some group differences in favor of the BGeX group on KC, high school GPA, ACT/SAT scores, or the reasons or goals factors from the first-year survey. In actuality, the only statistically significant differences were in favor of the comparison

25 group (for the first-year survey factors of Intellectual Development and Social Progress). Thus, the groups are not exactly equal, but their inequality works against the hypothesis (Id like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out). This strengthens the conclusion that higher CTV scores in the BGeX condition are indeed attributable to participation in the BGeX program and not a result of pre-existing differences. Finally, class assignments that are not graded can be unreliable (Napoli & Raymond 2004). Indeed, the intraclass correlation coefficients for the items comprising the two primary dependent variables (KC and CTV) suggest that some error is contained in the scores as they are used. This error variance was averaged out to some extent when items were summed for the CTV scale, which demonstrated acceptable scale reliability. In fact, I re-analyzed the data, correcting the results for criterion unreliability (based on coefficient alphas from the KC and CTV scales), but the disattenuated results showed the same pattern of findings. Therefore, although the results must be interpreted with some caution, the main consequence is likely an underestimate of the true relationships of interest. Future research on programs like BGeX would ideally give greater consideration to long term effects on student learning and behavior. The inclusion of true pre-test scores and/or the assessment of far transfer of learning (Barnett & Ceci, 2002; Hakel & Halpern, 2005) would be welcome contributions to the literature. In addition, programs like BGeX could better facilitate such research by adhering more closely to established models of critical thinking (e.g., Halpern, 1998) and values (e.g., Meglino & Ravlin, 1998; Rokeach, 1973; Schwartz, 1994; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987). There are also several other relevant constructs or domains of inquiry that similar programs could draw from, such as values clarification (Kinnier, 1995; Raths, Harmin, & Simon, 1966; Simon, Howe, & Kirschenbaum, 1972), decision-making (Kahneman & Tversky, 2000), ethics (Lefkowitz, 2003), moral development (Fasko & Willis, 2008), moral reasoning (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987; Gilligan, 1982; Rest, 1984; Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau, & Thoma, 1999), reflective judgment (King & Kitchener, 1994), post-formal reasoning (Labouvie-Vief, 1992), and wisdom (Halpern, 2001; Sternberg, 1990, 2007). Notwithstanding the need for programs with a sound theoretical basis, a university-wide initiative focusing on critical thinking and/or values is an ambitious undertaking. Practical constraints dictate that programs like BGeX need to be coherent enough to ensure that there is a common core across domains and instructors, yet at the same time flexible enough to garner faculty support and participation. For this reason, the assessment of BGeX learning outcomes was designed to be a flexible means of gathering data on student learning.

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Dunn, D. S., Halonen, J. S., & Smith, R. A. (2008b). Engaging minds: Introducing best practices in teaching critical thinking in psychology. In D. S. Dunn, J. S. Halonen, & R. A. Smith (Eds.), Teaching critical thinking in psychology: A handbook of best practices (pp. 1-8). Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Ennis, R. H. (1987). A taxonomy of critical thinking dispositions and abilities. In J. Baron & R. Sternberg (Eds), Teaching thinking skills: Theory and practice. New York: W. H. Freeman. Eggan, P. E. & Kauchak, D. (2004). Educational psychology: windows on classrooms. 6th Ed. Upper Saddle, NJ: Pearson/ Merrill/Prentice Hall. Facione, P. (1986). Testing college-level critical thinking. Liberal Education, 72, 221-231. Facione, P. (2004). Critical thinking: What it is and why it counts. Milbrae, CA: Academic Press. Fasko, D. Jr. (2003). Critical thinking and reasoning: Current research, theory, and practice. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Fasko, D. Jr., & Willis, W. (2008). Contemporary philosophical and psychological perspectives on moral development and education. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Field, K. (2008). Congress shows colleges theyre not off the hook on accountability. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55(2), A32. Friedman, T. L. (1999). The lexus and the olive tree. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and womens development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hakel, M. D., & Halpern, D. (2005) How far can transfer go? Making transfer happen across physical, temporal, and conceptual space. In J. Mestre (Ed.), Transfer of learning from a modern multidisciplinary perspective. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Halonen, J. S. (1986). Teaching critical thinking in psychology. Milwaukee, WI: Alverno Productions. Halonen, J. S. (1995). Demystifying critical thinking. Teaching of Psychology, 22, 75-81. Halpern, D. F. (1997). Critical thinking across the curriculum: A brief edition of thought and knowledge. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Halpern, D. F. (1998). Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains. American Psychologist, 53, 449-455. Halpern, D. F. (2001). Why wisdom? Educational Psychologist, 36, 253-256. Hitlin, S. & Piliavin, J. A. (2004). Theory, research, and measurement of values: Reviving a dormant concept. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 359-394. Jegede, O. J., & Noordink, P. (June, 1993). The role of critical thinking skills in undergraduate study as perceived by university teachers across academic disciplines. Paper presented at the annual conference on Problem Solving across the Curriculum, Geneva, NY. Johnson, S. (2004). The political brain. The New York Times, August 22, Section 6, Column 1. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (2000). Choices, values, and frames. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

In an effort to help guide future research and practice, this paper provides a general description of the BGeX program as well as information about a general evaluation methodology and CTVA measure so that others might adapt it for their own use in assessing similar outcomes. The evaluation and assessment process described here can be made applicable to a wide variety of content areas simply by using different essay prompts as necessary. Similarly, the learning outcomes can also be modified. Of course, either of these changes would necessitate the development of a new scoring rubric. The actual scoring process is admittedly arduous, but some technical advances might help to make the mass scoring of open-ended responses more feasible (e.g., Chapman & Fiore, 2001; Shermis, Koch, Page, Keith, & Harrington, 2002). In sum, this studys results provide some modest evidence that the development, implementation, and evaluation of similar programs and assessments can help to develop scholars, employees and citizens who are able to think critically in accordance with well-understood values. The end goal of teaching college students to apply basic critical thinking skills to the understanding of values is to help develop thoughtful and principled leaders in our communities, universities and organizations.

References
Achtemeier, S. D., & Simpson, R. D. (2005). Practical considerations when using benchmarking for accountability in higher education. Innovative Higher Education, 30(2), 117-128. Alexander, F. K. (2000). The changing face of accountability: Monitoring and assessing institutional performance. The Journal of Higher Education, 71, 411-431. Barnett, S. M., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 612-637. Bowling Green State University. (2004a). BG eXperience faculty/ peer facilitator workbook. Unpublished Manuscript. Bowling Green State University. (2004b). BG eXperience faculty workshop guide. Unpublished Manuscript. Briihl, D. S., Stanny, C. J., Jarvis, K. A., Darcy, M., & Belter, R. W. (2008). In D. S. Dunn, J. S. Halonen, & R. A. Smith (Eds.), Teaching critical thinking in psychology: a handbook of best practices (pp. 225-234). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Browne, M. N., & Keeley, S. M. (2004). Asking the right questions: A guide to critical thinking. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Colby, A., & Kohlberg, L. (Eds.) (1987). The measurement of moral judgment: theoretical foundations and research validation. (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, O. L. & Fiore, M. A. (2001). Calibrated peer review: A writing and critical thinking instructional tool. Retrieved from cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/ Dunn, D. S., Halonen, J. S., & Smith, R. A. (2008a). Teaching critical thinking in psychology: A handbook of best practices. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1

Katzner, L. I., & Nieman, D. G. (2006). Making values education everyones business. About Campus, November/December, 16-23. King, P. M., & K. Kitchener. (1994). Developing reflective judgment: Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kinnier, R. T. (1995). A reconceptualization of values clarification: Values conflict resolution. Journal of Counseling and Development, 74, 18-24. Labouvie-Vief, G. (1992). A neo-Piagetian perspective on adult cognitive development. In R. J. Sternberg & C. A. Berg (Eds.), Intellectual development (pp. 197-228). New York: Cambridge University Press. Lance, C. E., Butts, M. M., Michels, L. C. (2006). The sources of four commonly reported cutoff criteria: What did they really say? Organizational Research Methods, 9, 202-220. Lefkowitz, J. (2003). Ethics and values in industrial-organizational psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Leveille, D. F. (2005). An emerging view on accountability in American higher education. Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.8.05, May 2005. Retrieved from cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=54 Lipman, M. (1988). Teaching critical thinking: What can it be? Analytic Teaching, 8, 5-12. Loacker, G., & Rogers, G. (2005). Assessment at Alverno College: Student, program, institutional. Milwaukee, WI: Alverno College Institute. McPeck, J. (1981). Critical thinking and education. New York: St. Martins. Meglino, B. M., & Ravlin, E. C. (1998). Individual values in organizations: Concepts, controversies, and research. Journal of Management, 24, 351-389. Napoli, A. R., & Raymond, L. A., (2004). How reliable are our assessment data? A comparison of the reliability of data produced in graded and un-graded conditions. Research in Higher Education, 45, 921-929. Nunnally, J. C. (1978). Psychometric theory (2nd Ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Paul, R. (1993). Critical thinking: How to prepare students for a rapidly changing world. First edition, Santa Rosa, CA: The Foundation for Critical Thinking. Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2001). The international critical thinking essay test. Santa Rosa, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking. Perloff, R. (2004). The case for self-interest. Pittsburgh PostGazette, May 30, 2004, B 1-2. Raths, L., Harmin, M., & Simon, S. (1966). Value and teaching: Working with values in the classroom. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill. Rest, J. R., (1984). The major components of morality. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz, (Eds.), Morality, moral behavior, and moral development (pp. 24-38). New York: Wiley. Rest, J., D. Narvaez, M. J., Bebeau, & Thoma, S. J. (1999). Postconventional moral thinking: A neo-Kohlbergian approach. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York: Free Press.

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Schwartz, S. (1994). Are there universal aspects in the structure and contents of human values? Journal of Social Issues, 50(4), 19-45. Schwartz, S., & Bilsky, W. (1987). Toward a theory of the universal content and structure of values: Extensions and cross-cultural replications. Journal of Personality and Social Research, 58, 878-891. Shermis, M. D., Koch, C. M., Page, E. B., Keith, T. Z., & Harrington, S. (2002). Trait ratings for automated essay grading. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 62, 5-18. Shrout, P. E., & Fleiss, J. L. (1979). Intraclass correlations: Uses in assessing rater reliability. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 420-428. Siegel, H. (1992). The generalizability of critical thinking skills, dispositions, and epistemology. In S. P. Norris (Ed.), The generalizability of critical thinking (pp. 97-108). New York: Teachers College Press. Siegel, H. (1988). Educating reason: Rationality, critical thinking and education. New York: Routledge. Siegel, H. (1997). Rationality redeemed? Further dialogues on an educational ideal. New York: Routlege. Simon, S. B., Howe, L. W., & Kirschenbaum, H. (1972). Values clarification: A handbook of practical strategies for teachers and students. New York: Hart Publishing. Sternberg, R. J. (1990). Wisdom: Its nature, origins, and development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, R. J. (2007). Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized. New York: Cambridge University Press. Terenzini, P. T., Springer, L., Pascarella, E. T., & Nora, A. (1995). Influences affecting the development of students critical thinking skills. Research in Higher Education, 36, 23-39. Toutkoushian, R. K. (2005). What can institutional research do to help colleges meet the workforce needs of states and nations? Research in Higher Education, 46, 955-984. Tsui, L. (2000). Effects of campus culture on students critical thinking. The Review of Higher Education, 23, 431-441. Williams, R. L., Oliver, R., Allin, J. L., Winn, B., & Booher, C. S. (2003). Psychological critical thinking as a course predictor and outcome variable. Teaching of Psychology, 30, 220-223. Yanchar, S. C., & Slife, B. (2004). Teaching critical thinking by examining assumptions, Teaching of Psychology, 30, 339-343.

Author Information
Mike Gillespie originally conducted this research as part of a Ph.D. dissertation in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Bowling Green State University. The dissertation was chaired by Milton D. Hakel, and the article has benefited from the helpful comments and contributions by Jessica Blackburn , Daniel Fasko, Jr., Jennifer Gillespie, Dale Klopfer, Lilly Lin, Anna Zarubin, and Michael Zickar. Dr. Gillespies research includes critical thinking, values, organizational culture, and measure development and norming. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to: Michael A. Gillespie, Ph.D., who currently is at

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Sarasota-Manatee.His contact informationthere is College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Florida SarasotaManatee, 8330 Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, FL 34243. Phone: (941) 359-4235.

550 Education Building, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, 43403; Tel (419) 372-3412; Fax (419) 372-8265; e-mail: mgilles@bgsu.edu, but starting in Fall 2011 he will be an Assistant Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of South Florida

Appendix A
Critical Thinking about Values Assessment Part 1: Identify key components Instructions: Read the accompanying article. You may continually refer back to the essay and you may take any notes you wish. Complete the sentences in the template below using whatever elaboration you think is necessary to make your meaning clear. Your answers should demonstrate your ability to recognize important key components in the thinking of the author. 1. The main purpose of this article is 2. The main conclusion(s) in this article is/are 3. The author uses the following information or arguments to reach his/her conclusion: 4. The main assumption(s) underlying the authors thinking is (are) Part 2: Write an essay about the values inherent in the article Instructions: Using the blank pages provided, construct an essay in response to the article you read that discusses the values inherent in the authors argument. Values are abstractions that refer to a persons sense of what is good and right. Some common values include autonomy, justice, individual responsibility, safety, and compassion. In writing your essay, use your answers to the above questions to help you uncover the authors values. Your essay should demonstrate your ability to identify, understand, and evaluate the implications of values. Use the following questions to provide the structure of your essay: 1. What values does the author hold? Write a short paragraph about each value, defining it and explaining why you believe the author holds the value (you may want to include quotations from the article as evidence). 2. What reasons or justifications does the author give to support the values identified? The reasons or justifications may be implicit and you may or may not agree with them. Write this section as a separate paragraph (or paragraphs). 3. How might the authors values affect the way people discuss and create policy with regard to this issue?

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1

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Embracing Critical Thinking as a Model for Professional Development: Creating Critical Thinking Based Faculty Learning Communities On Your Campus
Maria Sanders, Professor of Philosophy, Lone Star College CyFair This essay provides a summary of the steps taken to build a critical thinking based faculty learning community (CTB-FLC) on the Lone Star College CyFair campus across various disciplines. The author shares the motivations driving this project, the challenges and successes of the ten participating members, and the plans for future CTB-FLCs. The primary purpose of this essay is to encourage other colleges to build similar critical thinking based faculty learning communities as professional development opportunities on their campuses. The essay culminates with a set of recommendations which result from the lessons learned during the implementation of a CTB-FLC from 2008 to 2010 at Lone Star College CyFair. Keywords: Faculty Learning Community

Abstract

The primary focus of much of the literature on critical thinking has been on critical thinking techniques and the assessment of critical thinking skills, but little attention has been devoted towards ancillary aspects of critical thinking on college campuses that are essential in creating a sustainable model for education which incorporates critical thinking. This essay will focus upon one such aspect, the professional development of educators. Even though the initial target group for this project was community college faculty, much, if not all, of the information discussed here is equally applicable in universities and primary and secondary schools as well.

Setting the Context

The term professional development may conjure up images of traveling to conferences or attending workshops, but the current economic crisis has caused many colleges to revisit viable options for faculty professional development. The current reality for many institutions of education is drastic budget cuts coupled with soaring enrollment numbers. Most colleges find themselves faced with the challenges of providing a quality education for more students while receiving less funding. Professional development funds rarely survive severe budget cuts totally intact, if they survive at all. This essay is one of a series of seven essays that are the result of a professional development project developed at Lone Star College CyFair (LSC-CYFair). LSCCyFair, located in northwest Houston, serviced 16,086 students during the Fall 2010 semester. This was a fifty-five percent increase in enrollment from Fall 2005 to Fall 2010 (as reported from www.lonestar.edu/about-lsc.

htm). Even while experiencing unprecedented percentages in growth, our campus could not escape the current economic challenges being experienced worldwide. As a result, the budget was severely cut and a chill was placed on hiring vacant positions. This is an all-too-familiar story among colleges today. So where does this leave professional development? It is a well-established principle that educators must continue to learn if they are to continue to effectively teach students to high standards, yet professional development budgets tend to fare poorly in times of economic distress. So a change of perspective may be needed. For example, Guskey (2000) states: Viewing professional development as special events that occur on 3 or 4 days of the school year severely restricts educators opportunities to learn. But if we view professional development as an ongoing, job-embedded process, every day presents a variety of learning opportunities. These opportunities occur every time a lesson is taught, an assessment is administered, a curriculum is reviewed, a professional journal or magazine is read, a classroom activity is observed, or a conversation takes place with another teacher or administrator. The challenge is to take advantage of these opportunities, to make them available, to make them purposeful, and to use them appropriately. (Guskey, 2000, p. 19) College campuses are eclectic collections of experts offering opportunities for learning for all who

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES The intent to include critical thinking as a basic core competency was clear, but the definition of critical thinking, as well as the means for successfully incorporating critical thinking into individual courses in the core, was much less clear. The THECB provided a very general definition for critical thinking, stating: Critical thinking embraces methods for applying both qualitative and quantitative skills analytically and creatively to subject matter in order to evaluate arguments and to construct alternative strategies. Problem solving is one of the applications of critical thinking, used to address an identified task. (THECB, 1999, from www.thecb. state.tx.us/) The definition appears to be intentionally broad to enable diverse disciplines to include critical thinking competencies into their learning outcomes. The THECB recognizes: () in most curricula there are no required courses specifically dedicated to reading or to critical thinking. Thus, if a core curriculum is to prepare students effectively, it is imperative that, insofar as possible, these intellectual competencies be included among the objectives of many individual core courses and reflected in their course content. (THECB, 1999, from www.thecb. state.tx.us/). Unfortunately, the broadness of the definition has led many to view the definition as of little value in creating practical applications. Discipline-specific definitions for critical thinking as well as discipline-specific applications and assessments for critical thinking naturally began to emerge to meet the state mandated requirements set forth by the THECB. This specialization of critical thinking definitions, applications, and assessments is occurring at a time of heightened awareness regarding the importance of collegiate collaboration and bridging the gaps between the ivory towers of traditionally diverse disciplines. As the Undergraduate Education Advisory Committee (UEAC) in Texas continued to work towards revising the core curriculum shared by all Texas public colleges, the Higher Education Policy Institute conducted a General Education Assessment Practices Survey in 2009, and the three 20092010 Accountability Peer Group Meetings focused on how student learning was being assessed in core curriculum courses in Texas public colleges. Particular attention was paid to the assessment of writing and critical thinking skills, and a report entitled Assessing Student Learning in General Education: Practices Used at Texas Public Colleges and Universities documented their findings.

enter them, not only students. Faculty are in an ideal position to reach across disciplinary lines to create collaborative professional development opportunities in order to create a deeper understanding of content areas and teaching methodologies. This is not to suggest that internal professional development should replace external opportunities, but rather to encourage facultydriven professional development opportunities on your campus, especially during these challenging economic times.

Project Motivation
The primary motivation driving this project was a desire to create an interdisciplinary, collaborative and economically feasible model for ongoing professional development that is responsive to the local, state, and national interest in incorporating critical thinking across collegiate curriculums. This motivation stemmed from a growing concern that Texas colleges were being mandated to include critical thinking competencies in their core curriculums but at the same time there was widespread confusion among faculty across the various disciplines about what this implied. Even workforce programs within the medical, legal, and business fields were being required to assess critical thinking skills as part of their exit exams and certification exams, and the workforce facultys understanding of critical thinking appears even more ill-defined than that of the academic faculty. All post-secondary education in the state of Texas is monitored by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), an agency of the Texas state government. In 1997, the 75th Texas Legislature enacted Senate Bill 148 that mandates the THECB adopt rules that include a statement of the content, component areas, and objectives of the core curriculum (Tex. SB. 148,5(S)5.390-5.404). In response to Texas Senate Bill 148 (1997), the THECB articulated basic assumptions regarding core curriculums as well as defining characteristics of core curriculums for institutions of higher education in the state of Texas. One of the assumptions set forth by the THECB stated: The basic intellectual competencies discussed in this document reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking, and computer literacy should inform the components of any core curriculum. () The basic intellectual competencies, including critical thinking, are essential to the learning process in any discipline and thus should inform any core curriculum. (THECB, 1999, from www.thecb.state. tx.us/).

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 At the end of the day, the challenge of assessing critical thinking lies most clearly in the challenge of defining what critical thinking really means. Some institutions, in fact, noted that there is not agreement on their campuses about a definition of critical thinking. (University of Maryland University College Office of Outcomes Assessment, 2010, p. 11 from www.thecb.state. tx.us/reports/docfetch.cfm?DocID=2019 ) The need for a crucial conversation on critical thinking spanning the various disciplines was obviously warranted. Jane S. Halonen (1995) describes the state of critical thinking scholarship as being in a mystified state. No single definition of critical thinking is widely accepted, but stakeholders in higher education often enter conversation about critical thinking with the premise that their individual definitions are uniformly shared. With an increasing emphasis on academic accountability, we need to work toward a better understanding of the varying ways the terms critical thinking is used and explore the implications of the variation for effective pedagogy. (Halonen, 1995, p. 75) Recognizing the need for an in-depth, interdisciplinary discussion on critical thinking, I began to reflect upon a model for enabling such a discussion to occur. The delivery format for such a model would be a topic-based faculty learning community which incorporated a scholarly process while being flexible enough to accommodate individual experiences and topical preferences. The term learning community in higher education typically refers to the linking or clustering of classes during a single academic term that enrolls a common cohort of students and teaches lessons around a common interdisciplinary theme. The beneficial impact of learning communities for both students and faculty have long been promoted and documented by the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education located at Evergreen State College (www.evergree. edu/washcenter/lcfaq.htm). Having personally taught several learning communities for LSC-CyFair, I have witnessed many of these benefits first-hand including improved student retention and completion in certain majors, increased time students spent on course materials, and ultimately increased student learning of those course materials. Moreover, there exists an overwhelming consensus among our faculty currently teaching learning communities, as well as those who have taught learning com-

31 munities in the past, regarding the benefits experienced by faculty members involved in those learning communities. Teaching learning communities promoted deeper faculty engagement with one another and encouraged more widespread interaction between junior and senior faculty. Faculty readily found themselves redeveloping their curriculum to incorporate a broader pedagogical repertoire than they were accustomed to delivering on their own. It was the undeniable faculty benefits being consistently reported by faculty themselves that led me to adopt a faculty learning community format for this critical thinking project. As director of this project, my intent was to build a professional development opportunity for ten faculty members, which could serve as a model for future faculty-driven, in-house professional development opportunities for faculty and staff. This project was focused upon the topic of critical thinking, but the specific focus topic will change with future projects, while maintaining the basic framework of a faculty learning community. The underlying philosophy was that to understand critical thinking, we must do critical thinking. It may seem redundant to label this project as a critical thinking based faculty learning community, since learning communities naturally seem to incorporate critical thinking skills, but there is a reason for the inclusion of the phrase critical thinking based. Since all too often stakeholders in higher education presume their definition for critical thinking is clear and uniformly accepted, when a review of the literature quickly reveals that no such consensus exists, it then is extremely important for the faculty learning community to begin with a discussion designed towards formulating a working definition of what critical thinking means for that learning community. Once a working definition for critical thinking is adopted, the methods for achieving critical thinking under that definition will naturally follow. The focal topic for the critical thinking based faculty learning community (CTB-FLC) discussed in this essay was critical thinking, but even as the focal topic of the CTB-FLC shifts to something other than critical thinking, the process of doing critical thinking must continue to occupy a very visible place in the learning community.

Funding the CTB-FLC Does Not Have to Cost a Fortune

The Lone Star College System along with the Lone Star College Foundation annually awards a select number of mini-grants to assist Lone Star College employees at each of the colleges and the System Office in the development and implementation of exemplary projects. The Mini-Grant program seeks to finance projects not normally funded through the regular budgetary process.

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES a short essay explaining their interest in participating in a CTB-FLC on critical thinking, and participants were selected three weeks later. As project director, I selected participants based upon the merits of their essays including their desire to explore current research on critical thinking, their desire to apply critical thinking in their classrooms, and a willingness to participate in discussions on variant and possibly contradictory viewpoints regarding critical thinking. Moreover, I desired to maximize the diversity of disciplines represented. The selected group included representation in the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, biology, chemistry, sociology, government, business, and library science. The first group meeting was held in February 2008 and included introductions, a general overview of expectations, time commitments, and exchanging of schedules, as well as an initial conversation on each participants motivation for joining the CTB-FLC and individual challenges involving teaching and assessing critical thinking. The premise underlying future discussion meetings was that understanding critical thinking required doing critical thinking, so facilitation duties and the role of leading the discussion rotated among the participants during subsequent meetings. Approximately one month was allotted to read and hold at least one group discussion on each book. Each book discussion lasted one to two hours and was facilitated by two of the participating members. This enabled the entire group to go deeper into the readings within a very limited time frame. In addition, an online class was created for the faculty learning community participants using our campus distance learning platform. This enabled us to continue the momentum of the discussions and exchanges of ideas during the time between face-to-face group meetings. The webpage included a section for posting current articles on critical thinking, a section for posting upcoming conferences and workshops on critical thinking, and a discussion board to continue group discussions. By Fall 2008, one participant had to withdraw from the CTB-FLC due to overwhelming outside commitments. Since the books were purchased by a grant, the withdrawn members books were donated to the campus library. The remaining faculty learning community participants had completed reading and discussing the five grant-purchased texts and were beginning to explore individual topic areas on critical thinking in order to research and contribute to a collaborative end product. The group met in September 2008 to discuss the most appropriate collaborative end product for meeting the needs and interests of each faculty member in the CTB-FLC. Initially the group was interested in writing a two-part book where the first section would include a series of essays on critical thinking followed by a second section including practical exercises for teaching critical thinking.

A primary focus of the Mini-Grant Program is to provide seed money for innovative projects that may later develop into full initiatives funded within the normal budget of the college. I applied to the 2007-2008 Mini Grant Program and was awarded $2,500 to fund a Faculty Learning Community on the topic: Applying Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum in Higher Education. The project sought to create a learning community comprised of ten Lone Star College CyFair faculty participants who would: 1. Read pre-selected literature on critical thinking and apply such thinking across the curriculum in higher education; and 2. Attend group sessions to discuss the assigned readings, and share personal challenges and successes in applying critical thinking across the curriculum; and 3. Research a specific area of interest in critical thinking; 4. Apply critical thinking exercises in their classes; and 5. Co-author a publication on Applying Critical Thinking Skills Across the Curriculum in Higher Education. The overall goal of the project was to increase the knowledge base of the learning community participants on the topic of applying critical thinking across the curriculum and to create a valuable resource for community college faculty seeking to apply critical thinking in their respective classes.

Creating the Faculty Based Learning Community

Lone Star College System, along with its five campuses, offers a range of rich and rather diverse faculty professional development opportunities, and it has a history of supporting faculty-driven initiatives. It was this positive environment that encouraged me to ponder the development of a faculty-driven professional development opportunity for faculty addressing the growing concerns regarding critical thinking and its assessment, and to approach the Lone Star College System to request initial funding for such a project. In January 2008 we received notification of the Lone Star College Systems Mini Grant award to fund the building of a faculty learning community focused on Applying Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum. The grant primarily funded the purchasing of five texts for each of the ten participants: (1) Cranton (1998), (2) Bean (1996), (3) Kurfiss (1998), (4) Brookfield (1987), and (5) Tynjala, Valima, and Boulton-Lewis, (2006). The texts served as the basis for the initial discussion meetings. A call for participants was sent out in early January of 2008 which required interested applicants to write

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 It quickly became apparent that such an undertaking was too ambitious to complete within one year, so the group ultimately decided to limit its collaborative end product to a series of essays written either individually or with a partner. The finished set of essays would be submitted as a unit for publication. During Spring 2009, the participants researched and began writing essays. The project suffered potential derailment in May 2009, when I, who had been serving as the project director, accepted an administrative position for one year, but eight of the nine participants expressed interest in continuing when I re-approached them in August 2010. One member did withdraw from the final collaborative writing project due to a shift in research interest. The remaining eight participants continued writing during Fall 2010, and the seven completed essays were submitted for consideration for publication during Spring 2011.

33 1. Defining Critical Thinking: How Far Have We Come? by Jason Moulenbelt (Philosophy) and Maria Sanders (Philosophy) 2. The Academic College Course is an Argument by Frank Codispoti (Government) 3. Critical Thinking and Social Interaction in the Online Environment by Idolina Hernandez (Sociology) The remaining three essays that will appear in the next issue of INQUIRY: 4. Faculty as Critical Thinkers: Challenging Assumptions by Claire Phillips (Business) and Susan Green (Library) 5. Correlates of Critical Thinking by Lori Richter (Psychology) 6. Transforming a Content-driven Chemistry Course to One Focused on Critical Thinking Skills (Without Sacrificing Any Content) by Ann Van Heerden (Chemistry) Even though all of the participants were initially attracted to the CTB-FLC on critical thinking by their shared interest in critical thinking, the particular areas on which each participant focused were greatly varied. This is evidenced by the participants broad selection of essay topics.

The Collaborations Final Products

One of the goals of the CTB-FLC project on critical thinking was to co-author a publication on critical thinking across various disciplines. The specific type of publication was intentionally left open to enable the participants as much freedom and flexibility as possible while exploring the topic of critical thinking. As project director, I constantly strove to offer just enough guidance to maintain a sense of coherence among the group while allowing maximum flexibility for the group to develop the topic in the direction they chose. Although it was firmly established that the project would terminate with a co-authored writing product, the particularities of that product shifted as the group worked through the research materials. Initially the group was leaning towards writing a two-part book where the first part of the book would be a compilation of original essays and the second part would incorporate practical exercises in critical thinking. As the learning community progressed, the group decided to focus on writing a set of essays and save the compilation of practical exercises for a future undertaking. At the culmination of our CTB-FLC on critical thinking, the remaining eight faculty participants decided to write a set of seven essays on a diverse selection of topics derived from research and experiences involving the teaching, assessment, and understanding of critical thinking as it applies to higher education. The essays are intended most directly for faculty in higher education, but they will also be useful for directors of professional development, education administrators, high school and middle school educators, college students, and anyone interested in understanding and improving critical thinking skills. In addition to this essay, the other three appearing in this issue of INQUIRY are:

Lessons Learned
During the course of this CTB-FLC on critical thinking, many lessons were learned. The lessons learned fall rather naturally into two categories: (1) methodological lessons, and (2) content-based lessons. Methodological lessons Reflecting upon the methodology of this project, several lessons emerge. First, utilizing a critical thinking based faculty learning community was an effective platform for exploring the concept of critical thinking. The initial assumption that a deep understanding of critical thinking would result from doing critical thinking was confirmed. There is still much to learn, but participants did express a deeper understanding of critical thinking as a result of their participation in the CTBFLC on critical thinking, an understanding manifested by their subsequent discussions and individual research projects. A second very valuable lesson learned involved the duration of the learning community. Much of the literature on faculty learning communities recommends duration of one year. The original intent of this CTB-FLC involved a one year implementation, but it quickly became apparent that one year would not be long enough given

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Content-based lessons It is not my desire to summarize all of the content-based lessons learned as many of the individual lessons learned will more appropriately be shared directly by their authors in their individual essays, but there were several content-based lessons learned by the group as a whole worthy of note. One important realization concerned how broadly the term critical thinking is used in higher education today. Given the extensive diversity of disciplines represented in the CTB-FLC, it readily became apparent that different disciplines defined critical thinking in vastly different ways. Initially, we were all using the same term, critical thinking, but talking past each other. It was only after this realization occurred that the group was able to begin developing working definitions for critical thinking in order to explore deeper topics involving critical thinking such as teaching critical thinking skills, assessing critical thinking, and practical tips for embedding critical thinking into various classroom settings. Two of our working definitions were (1) critical thinking as problem solving, and (2) critical thinking as incorporating the top levels of Blooms Taxonomy analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. (Bloom, 1956, p. 201-207). Critical thinking is a vast and rich topic, so the CTBFLC can serve as a springboard for future faculty-driven projects on critical thinking. Our CTB-FLC included not only academic faculty, but also workforce faculty and a librarian, so the prospect of future critical thinking collaborations to expand this conversation more broadly across our campus is exciting indeed. Eight Steps Toward Creating a CTB-FLC on Your Campus Several steps to consider in facilitating the creation of a CTB-FLC on your campus include (1) initiating the idea on your campus, (2) securing funding, (3) recruiting and selecting participants, (4) organizing meetings and topics, (5) facilitating discussions, (6) selecting a collaborative end product, (7) facilitating collaboration towards realizing that end product, and (8) sharing your findings. The following is a closer examination of each of these topics. 1. Initiating a CTB-FLC on your campus An important initial step in developing a critical thinking based faculty learning community on your campus is to write a formal proposal outlining the mission, method, budget, funding options, recruitment and facilitation, collaborative activities, and assessments. Even if you never show the proposal to anyone, it will serve as a useful tool for organizing your thoughts. Remain flexible, however, as most of what you initially outline may change prior to the implementation of your CTB-FLC.

the busy schedules of the participants and the enormity of the topic tackled. A decision was made early on that it would be preferable to move slower but with greater depth, than to move too quickly through a topic as important and educationally relevant as critical thinking. Unfortunately, there were several unforeseen delays which extended the CTB-FLC to three years, but three years is a long time to maintain the necessary momentum for a successful faculty learning community. For future CTB-FLCs, I recommend a two-year time frame divided into four well-defined phases for participants, each corresponding to a full academic semester. Phase 1: Participants read selected texts and participate in group discussions. Phase 2: Participants recommend additional readings for the group. The participants also select a collaborative final product, and begin initial research towards actualizing the final product. There are many possible final products including writing a monograph, contributing chapters to a book, submitting journal articles, presenting at conferences, developing web pages or smart phone applications, or any other final product the group deems worthwhile. It is very important to have a clear plan for completing the final product, along with corresponding deadlines. Phase 3: Participants develop the final product. The activities undertaken during phase 3 will vary in accordance with the collaborative final product selected by the participants. In our case, this is the phase where each participant was to have finished the first draft of their essays. Phase 4: Participants peer review other learning community members drafts leading to final revisions. A public display of the final product should also occur during this phase, whether that involves submission for publication or a public presentation. The CTB-FLC culminates with the collection of constructive feedback from the participants. Ideally, the constructive feedback should involve both group and individual feedback. Group feedback can be obtained by holding a group discussion facilitated by an objective party who did not participate in the learning community. Individual feedback can be obtained using surveys or having participants submit a personal reflective paper on their experiences in the learning community. Writing a final report documenting the successes and challenges experienced can also serve a useful function for improving future faculty learning communities.

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 Selecting a topic for the CTB-FLC is of the utmost importance. First, decide whether it is more desirable for you to select a topic and then recruit people interested in that topic, or whether it would be more beneficial to send out a call for topics to ensure the topic selected is one of interest to multiple people. When selecting a topic for your CTB-FLC, consider your colleges mission and strategic priorities. This will place an appropriate focus upon your topic and will be a great asset should you need to request internal funding from your college. If one of the goals of the CTB-FLC is to recruit participation from varying disciplines, then the topic selected must be one that is of interest to parties in those varying disciplines. Establish a clear time period for the CTB-FLC. Cox (2004) recommends a duration of one year, but a longer period of time may be necessary depending upon the climate of your college environment. In our case, a two year CTB-FLC was a more feasible option. Be realistic when establishing the duration. 2. Securing funding Even though it is possible to implement CTBFLCs on your campus with minimal funding, it will be necessary to have some funding available for research supplies, refreshments, meeting locations, travel, and possibly compensation for participants. The needed funding will directly correlate to the needs of the CTB-FLC and may vary according to the topic adopted. Consider carefully the pros and cons of offering monetary compensation to faculty for participation in the CTB-FLC. Compensating faculty for participating in the CTB-FLC may grant an opportunity for otherwise very busy faculty members to participate in the CTB-FLC, especially if the compensation is in the form of released time from the faculty members teaching load or other institutional commitments. Compensation may, however, attract faculty who would not otherwise be passionate about the topic at hand. 3. Recruiting and selecting participants The selection process for attracting participants for the CTB-FLC must be open and fair. Whether recruitment will occur within one discipline or across disciplines, strive to achieve balance in your group between diversity of expertise and complimentary working styles. CTB-FLCs tend to thrive on diversity, so maximize the diversity of cultures, perspectives, attitudes, and discipline expertise in the CTB-FLC. The method used for recruitment may unintentionally exclude certain parties, so consider utilizing several venues to share information about the upcoming CTB-FLC and put forth a call for participation.

35 An equally important consideration when selecting participants is the time commitment involved in the CTB-FLC. Ensure selected faculty can fully commit to participating in the entire CTB-FLC for the entire duration of that project. Losing members midstream threatens the momentum of the project and can negatively impact the attitudes of the remaining participants. 4. Organizing meetings and discussions Most educators juggle very busy teaching schedules with other institutional commitments, so scheduling group meetings and face-to-face group discussions can be quite challenging, but such meetings are essential for facilitating a successful CTBFLC. The value of face-to-face interactions should not be underestimated. It may be possible to hold some meetings virtually so long as a reliable technology platform is consistently available and all participants are skilled in utilizing that technology. The focus should remain on the CTB-FLC topic rather than the delivery technology. If the technology platform is not reliable, CTB-FLC participants may feel disconnected and the CTB-FLC runs the risk of losing its initial momentum. When developing a schedule for the CTB-FLC, include time for reading pre-assigned works, conducting additional research, group discussions, individual reflections, and writing. Depending upon the CTB-FLC topic, it may also be useful to include field trips or inviting experts onto your campus. Do not try to pack too much into a single meeting or activity. Time for reflection is essential. Scheduling multiple one to two hour meetings is typically preferable over an eight hour marathon day. 5. Facilitating discussions The primary goal with discussions is to create a context within which participants can learn from each other. As Adler and Elmhorst (1999) observe, a synergetic effect can occur through the usage of discussions. That is, the result of the discussion is greater than the number of individuals involved in the discussion. The synergetic effect is amplified when participants share a common knowledge base. Selecting common readings is one way to establish a common knowledge base among an otherwise rather diverse group of faculty. As Terehoff (2002) notes, previous knowledge and expertise, internal motivation, self-direction, and problem solving should be integral to any adult study group. There are many philosophies on effective methods for facilitating group discussions and long term projects, but a few guiding principles seem to apply to all situations involving facilitation. First,

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES 7. Facilitating the realization of that end product Considering the multitude of time-consuming responsibilities faculty members tend to have between teaching loads and other institutional commitments, checking in regularly on the progress of the collaborative end product is essential. It is prudent to plan for unexpected events such as family emergencies, illnesses affecting participants, administrative changes at your college, etc. Ideally, the end product should be completed within one academic semester, but this will ultimately depend upon the product itself as well as the time commitments of the contributors. In any case, a clear plan for completion must be established and agreed upon by all participants. Every effort should be made to stick to the established plan. 8. Sharing your findings Once the final product is complete, it is extremely important to share your findings. This can be accomplished in several ways, including campus presentations, conference presentations, local press releases, and informal discussions with colleagues. It is also important to embed the lessons learned into your courses wherever applicable. This extends the lessons learned to the students. It is also highly advisable to submit a final report to your key administrators, including all key administrators in your supervisory line as well as other interested key individuals. Keeping key administrators well-informed on your CTB-FLC will be very valuable in working towards practical implementations of your CTB-FLCs findings on your campus as well as encouraging support for future CTB-FLCs.

it is extremely important to establish a safe environment for all members to freely participate. Facilitation involves empowering others to share their knowledge, expertise, and concerns in order to enable the members of the group to learn from each other. It is essential for the facilitator to create a respectful environment within which all participants are at ease to share their unique and valuable ideas. It is possible, and even desirable, for the project director of the CTB-FLC to also be an active participant in the CTB-FLC, but in doing so the role of facilitator over discussions must not be compromised. By rotating the role of facilitator over individual discussions, the delicate balance between directing the overall project and remaining actively involved in the substantive discussions can be maintained. In our CTB-FLC, the project director facilitated the first two discussions, but subsequent meetings were facilitated by other CTB-FLC participants. Since our group had ten participants and five pre-assigned books, each member selected a partner and a particular book to co-facilitate one of the discussion meetings. Finally, it is extremely important to respect the time of the participants and keep the discussions productive. Most educators have participated in professional development activities that were poorly planned and poorly executed. The result was often frustration, but this can be avoided through advanced planning. Discussions should remain on topic and all participants should be encouraged to actively participate. 6. Selecting a collaborative end product A collaborative end product provides direction for the participants as they work through the focal topic and creates a sense of closure for the CTB-FLC. Setting the expectation for a culminating group project bonds the group and enables deeper interaction between the participating faculty members. It may even motivate participants to create their own future collaborations expanding upon lessons learned during the CTB-FLC. Since the end product is intended to be collaborative, ideally all participants should be included in the decision-making process when selecting a final product. Several possible end products include coauthoring a book or monograph, submitting a series of essays for publication, co-presenting at a local, state, national, or international conference, co-presenting on your campus, or implementing a new process on your campus. This is by no means an exhaustive list. The end product should reflect the interests of the participants while complementing the mission of the CTB-FLC.

Summary
In summary, the CTB-FLC served as a vehicle for the participants to heighten their awareness of critical thinking and the challenges still facing attempts to teach and assess critical thinking in higher education today. Although deep learning appeared to result from the CTBFLC, the author is optimistic that this project will serve as a catalyst for future projects and discussions on critical thinking. The initial hypothesis that understanding critical thinking requires doing critical thinking was confirmed in our CTB-FLC, and we look forward to developing and participating in future critical thinking based faculty learning communities.

References
Adler, R. B., & Elmforst, J. M. (1999). Effective meetings. Communicating at work: Principles and practices for business and professions. (6th Ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill, 260-284.

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Bean, J. C. (1996). Engaging ideas: The professors guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Bloom, B. S., Jr. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook I. The cognitive domain. New York: McKay. Brookfield, S. D. (1987). Developing critical thinkers: Challenging adults to explore alternative ways of thinking and acting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Cox, M. D. (2004) Introduction to faculty learning communities. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 97, 5-23. Cranton, P. (1998). No one way: Teaching and learning in higher education. Dayton, OH: Wall & Emerson, Inc. Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston: D. C. Heath. FIPSE Project on Faculty Learning Communities at Miami University. (2009). What is a faculty and professional learning community? Retrieved December 13, 2010, from www.units.muohio.edu/flc/whatis.php Guskey, T. R. (2000). Evaluating professional development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc. Halonen, J. S. (1995). Demystifying critical thinking. Teaching of Psychology, 22(1), 75-81. Kurfiss, J. G. (1998). Critical thinking: Theory, research, practice, and possibilities. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 2, 1988. Washington: Association for the Study of Higher Education. Lone Star College System. (2010). About LSCS. Retrieved December 27, 2010, from www.lonestar.edu/about-lsc.htm MacGregor, J., & Smith, B. L., (2003). Frequently cited goals of learning communities. Retrieved December 9, 2010 from www.evergreen.edu/washcenter/lcfaq.htm Meiklejohn, A. (1932). The experimental college. New York: HarperCollins. Terehoff, I. I. (2002). Elements of adult learning in teacher professional development. NASSP Bulletin, 86(632), 65-77. Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. (1999). Core curriculum: Assumptions and defining characteristics. Retrieved September 12, 2010 from www.thecb.state.tx.us/ Texas State Legislature. (1997). Tex. SB 148,5(S)5.390-5.404. Tynjala, P., Valimaa, J., & Boulton-Lewis, G. (2006). Higher education and working life: Collaborations, confrontations, and challenges. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier. University of Maryland University Colleges Office of Outcomes Assessment. (2010). Assessing student learning in general education: Practices used at Texas public colleges and universities. Based on the 2009-2010 Accountability Peer Group meetings and the 2009 General Education Assessment Practices survey. Retrieved April 10, 2011 from www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/docfetch. cfm?DocID=2019. Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education. (1987, reaffirmed 2009). Learning Communities National Resource Center. Retrieved December 13, 2010 from www.evergree.edu/washcenter/lcfaq.htm

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Author information
Maria Sanders is a professor of philosophy and Faculty Excellence Award winner at Lone Star College CyFair. She is a co-author of Broaching Fragmented Learning: Principles for Reflective Learning in the Cyber-age published by the 2011 International Technology and Education Development Conference held in Valenica, Spain, and she has most recently co-presented at the 6th Annual On Course Conference held in Long Beach, California on Reflection Simulations: Cyber-Learning in the CyberAge. She teaches logic, social and political philosophy, and applied ethics courses, and she received her M.A. in Philosophy from Southern Illinois UniversityEdwardsville and her J.D. from Saint Louis University. Her contact information is Lone Star College CyFair, 9191 Barker Cypress Road, Cypress, TX 77433-1383. Phone: (281) 290-3232, Email Maria.a.sanders@lonestar.edu

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Defining Critical Thinking: How Far Have We Come?

Maria Sanders and Jason Moulenbelt, Lone Star College CyFair While there is no shortage of scholarship on the topic, there appears to be no widely accepted definition of critical thinking. This is coupled with the troublesome fact that those in higher education often believe their definitions are the norm. In this article, we demonstrate a lack of uniformity through a representative sample of historically influential definitions for critical thinking. These definitions are then classified into two distinct categories: context specific and cross-disciplinary definitions. From this lack of uniformity we argue that at least two problems in higher education arise: lack of proper critical thinking assessment and difficulty in interdisciplinary collaboration on the topic of critical thinking. Given the current focus on critical thinking assessment alongside a movement toward greater interdisciplinary collaboration within higher education, we conclude with a call for a uniform definition of critical thinking. Keywords: defining critical thinking In Spring 2008, ten faculty members from Lone Star College CyFair representing eight different disciplines embarked on a scholarly exploration of the concept, application, and assessment of critical thinking in higher education. This essay is one of seven essays resulting from the faculty learning community. As philosophers, the authors were immediately struck by the varying definitions for critical thinking given by the participants in the faculty learning community. The offered definitions were as diverse as the disciplines and teaching styles from which they originated. Jane S. Halonen (1995) claimed if you ask 12 psychology faculty members to define the term critical thinking, you may receive 12 overlapping but distinct definitions. (Halonen, 1995, p. 75). Our faculty learning community not only confirmed Halonens claim, but even amplified the distinctiveness of the definitions mirroring the distinctiveness of the disciplines represented. This motivated the authors to explore the scholarly research defining critical thinking. ing activities with hopes of attaining benefits by association with the prestigious concept of critical thinking. As attractive as the concept of critical thinking may be, serious problems arise from the lack of consensus as to the definition of critical thinking. This essay explores two of these problematic areas, assessment in higher education and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Assessing Critical Thinking In 1983, President Ronald Reagans National Commission on Excellence in Education published a report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Education Reform, that generated a wave of educational reform efforts at both the state and federal levels. The report warned that Americas educational system was failing its students, and called for reform: Our concern, however, goes well beyond matters such as industry and commerce. It also includes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people which knit together the very fabric of our society. () For our country to function, citizens must be able to reach some common understandings on complex issues, often on short notice and on the basis of conflicting or incomplete evidence. (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 10). The call for reform was heard again in 1989 when President Bush and state governors designed Goals 2000 to urge institutions of higher education to: () take critical thinking objectives more seriously by improving the abilities of college students to be more effective critical thinkers, communicators, and problem solvers. (Edgerton, 1991, p. 8).

Abstract

A Summary of the Problem

There is certainly no shortage of scholarship on critical thinking, but a single, widely-accepted, cross-disciplinary definition for critical thinking still does not exist. Stakeholders in higher education presume they know the definition of critical thinking and enter into discussions on critical thinking as if their personal or disciplinespecific definitions are consistently shared by all. (Halonen, 1995) The root of this willingness to assume clarity where considerable ambiguity exists may stem from critical thinking being viewed as a positive concept. No educator opposes critical thinking. According to Wales and Nardi (1984), faculty may unintentionally contribute to the problem by over-asserting claims to critical think-

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 By 1997, the educational reform movement focused on critical thinking skill development and assessment had firmly made its way to many states, including Texas. The 75th Texas Legislature mandated the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, an agency of the Texas state government responsible for overseeing all post-secondary education in the state of Texas, to adopt rules that include a statement of the content, component areas, and objectives of the core curriculum (Tex. SB 148, 5S,5.390-5.404). In response, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board set forth basic intellectual competencies to be included in core curriculums at all Texas colleges and universities. (THECB, 1999, from www.thecb.state.tx.us/). These intellectual competencies included, among other things, critical thinking. Teaching and assessing critical thinking was now clearly on the political agenda at both the federal and state levels. The practicability of teaching and assessing critical thinking is undermined by the apparent lack of awareness among many stakeholders in higher education that no uniformly accepted definition of critical thinking currently exists. Morgan (1995) recognized this problem, stating: Perhaps the greatest threat to implementing critical thinking instruction has been the passage of the term into the common vernacular of educators, legislators, businesspeople, and the public. What was not too long ago a very restrictive notion of thinking based first on formal logic and then on informal logic has become so broad a notion that it has become nearly meaningless. The plethora of definitions may have lead to a conviction that conceptualizing critical thinking is relativistic, with any definition or conceptualization as good as any other. (Morgan, 1995, 339). If the term critical thinking is to be a more meaningful concept, achieving some consensus as to its definition is imperative. Collaborating Across Disciplines In addition to concerns about the effect of a lack of uniform definition for critical thinking has upon assessment, the authors are also interested in the impact such a lack of consensus has upon collaboration among educators from varying disciplines. The traditional landscape of higher education in the United States has been one focusing on rather isolated fields of specialization earning many disciplines the title of ivory towers, but the environment at many colleges is shifting to a more collaborativefriendly environment where academics are encouraged to create bridges between the ivory towers. As team-taught

39 learning communities, combining two or three different discipline subjects into one mega-course addressing a common cohort of students, are increasing in popularity, educators readily become aware of the overlapping critical thinking goals in their various disciplines but nonetheless struggle to find a uniform definition for what is meant by critical thinking. The challenge faced by educators from varying disciplines searching for a common definition for critical thinking is further complicated by the fact that an individual discipline may lack consensus on a definition for critical thinking. The Videbeck study (1997, as report by Gordon, 2000) evidences the lack of a common definition for critical thinking among nursing programs. It points out that: () 55 nursing programs used 10 different definitions of critical thinking and assessed critical thinking using a variety of measurement tools, including standardized tests and locally developed instruments. (Videbeck, 1997, as discussed by Gordon, 2000, p. 340). The need for consensus is evident if collaboration across disciplines is to involve the development of critical thinking skills.

Chronological Literature Review of Critical Thinking Definitions

A review of the literature easily reveals a plethora of definitions for critical thinking. The following is not intended to be a comprehensive literature review, but rather a chronological mapping of the more influential definitions for critical thinking. Definitions are included from John Dewey, Edward Glaser and the Watson-Glaser Test of Critical Thinking, Benjamin Bloom and the influences of cognitive psychology, Robert Ennis, John McPeck, Richard Paul, The American Philosophical Association, Stephen Brookfield, Joanne Kurfiss, and Diane Halpern. John Dewey John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer during the early 1900s. Dewey (1910) articulated reflective thought as: Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that supports it, and the further conclusions which it tends. (Dewey, 1910, p. 6). The process identified by Dewey as reflective thought possesses the same characteristics currently identified by

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES 3. some skill in applying those methods. (Glaser, 1941, p. 5-6) Glaser argued that American Education is freely criticized today because the ability to think critically is not well developed among secondary pupils and even among college graduates (Glaser, 1941, p. 8). In order to address this shortfall, Glaser developed an instructional program that consisted of eight lessons or topic related to critical thinking, including definition, evidence, inference, scientific method and attitude, prejudice, propaganda, and values and logic (Kurfiss, 1988, p. 8). In order to test that these skills were indeed being taught Glaser developed the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. The multiple choice exam tests skills of arguments, specifically drawing inferences, recognizing assumptions, evaluating conclusions, and assessing the strength of reasons offered in supporting a claim (Kurfiss, 1988, p. 8). The Watson-Glaser exam incorporated the later work of Dressel and Mayhew, who identified further skills and abilities of critical thinkers, and it has been modified throughout the years to increase clarity and remove gender and racial biases. (Morgan, 1995, Watson and Glaser, 1980) The work of Glaser and well as the Watson-Glaser exam still heavily influence thought on critical thinking and are used widely by high schools and colleges as a means of testing the ability of students to think critically. Benjamin Bloom Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist whose career spanned several decades in the 20th century, and who is best known for developing a taxonomy of cognitive thought. Bloom (1956, p. 18, 201-207)) defined the cognitive domain as having three aspects: knowledge, intellectual abilities, and skills that have a hierarchy of six levels: 1. Knowledge: the recall of previously learned material from specific facts to complete theories. 2. Comprehension: the ability to grasp and understand the meaning of the material presented in the forms of translation, interpretation, or the estimation of future trends. 3. Application: the ability to use learned material and apply this material in new specific situations. 4. Analysis: the ability to break down information into parts and examine the relationship among the parts so that organization can be understood. 5. Synthesis: the ability to organize many elements or parts to form a new whole. 6. Evaluation: making judgments or ideas or methods using evidence and based on definite internal (organizational) or external (relevant to purpose) criteria.

many as critical thinking. Morgan (1995) summarizes this process of reflective thought as: A self-directed type of thought which analyzes a belief to see upon what it is based and to determine as well as possible what consequences will follow from that belief. Dewey felt that thought reflective thought was the only preventive measure to keep a person from acting merely on the basis of impulse or habit. (Dewey, 1910 as discussed by Morgan, 1995, p. 337). Critical thinking originates in the doubt of the thinker (a perplexed situation) that prompted hypotheses (suggestions), while observation and reason allowed the thinker to refine his hypotheses. These mental processes do proceed in a linear fashion but are recursive and mutually influential (Dewey, 1910 as discussed by Kurfiss, 1988, p. 7). Learning should be active and education should center on judgments, not merely knowledge. Judgment, for Dewey, is reflective thinking that consisted of three features: 1. a controversy, consisting of opposite claims regarding the same objective situation; 2. a process of defining and elaborating these claims and of sifting the facts adduced to support them; 3. a final decision, or sentence, closing the particular matter in dispute and also serving as a rule or principle for deciding future cases. (Dewey, 1910 pp. 101-102). Judgment allows the critical thinker to analyze all of the facts, determining whether they are facts or not, relevant or not, and synthesize the appropriate factual information into a whole. To fully exercise judgment, it is necessary to maintain an open mind along with a healthy skepticism. Out of Deweys ideas came the movement called progressive education that was designed to make changes to education and improve the critical thinking ability at the elementary school level. These changes, however, had little impact in secondary schools (Morgan, 1995). Edward Glaser and the Watson-Glaser Test of Critical Thinking. In a pioneer study on critical thinking and education, Edward Glaser (1941) proposed three key components of critical thinking: 1. an attitude of being disposed in a thoughtful way to the problems and subjects that come within the range of ones experiences; 2. knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning; and

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 Blooms hierarchy is excellent for explaining what goes on in the classroom from both the teachers and students perspectives. Unfortunately, it lacks the specificity necessary for assessment of critical thinking. (Ennis, 1993) For the task at hand, it is important to note that Blooms hierarchy viewed the evaluation of judgments as having a purpose or contextually specific component. Robert Ennis Robert Ennis is currently Professor Emeritus at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1962, Ennis defined critical thinking as the correct assessing of statements and distinguished three dimensions of critical thinkinglogical (judging the alleged relationships between the meanings of words and statements), criteria (covers the knowledge of the criteria for judging), [and] pragmatic (impression of the background purpose on the judgment) and identified twelve aspects of critical thinking. (Ennis, 1962, 83-85) The twelve aspects are summed as: 1. Grasping the meaning of a statement. 2. Judging whether there is ambiguity in a line of reasoning 3. whether certain statements contradict each other. 4. a conclusion follows necessarily. 5. a statement is specific enough. 6 a statement is actually the application of a certain principle. 7. an observation statement is reliable. 8. an inductive conclusion is warranted. 9 the problem has been identified. 10. Something is an assumption. 11. A definition is adequate. 12. a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable. (Ennis, 1962, p. 84 as summarized by Curry, 1999, p. 4). Ennis realized that his definition suffered from the same problem that Blooms taxonomy suffered from, namely, an inability to properly assess critical thinking. As a result, Ennis revised his definition to allow for correct assessing. This revised definition, however, suffered from excluding creative aspects of critical thinking, so the more streamlined definition of critical thinking that Ennis believes will allow for greater communication among proponents of critical thinking (Ennis, 1993, p. 180) is as follows: Critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding on what to believe or do. (Ennis, 1993, p. 180) This definition too, Ennis feels, suffers from being too vague, so Ennis adds elaborations (of which the list below is an abridgment) by listing abilities and dispositions (Ennis, 1993, p. 180) of the critical thinker that allows for some guidance in assessment. These abilities and dispositions are:

41 1. Judge the credibility of sources. 2. Identify conclusions, reasons, and assumptions. 3. Judge the quality of an argument, including the acceptability of its reasons, assumptions, and evidence. 4. Develop and defend a position on an issue. 5. Ask appropriate clarifying questions. 6. Plan experiments and judge experimental designs. 7. Be open minded. 8. Try to be well informed. 9. Draw conclusions when warranted, but with caution. (Ennis, 1993, p. 180). Ennis considers this definition a working definition and went on to co-author the extensively used Cornell Critical Thinking Tests and lead the Illinois Critical Thinking Project at the University of Illinois until his recent retirement. (Thayer-Bacon, 2000). For Ennis latest thoughts on critical thinking, see his article entitled, Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part I in this issue of INQUIRY. John McPeck In an attempt to clarify and critique work previously done on critical thinking, John McPeck (1981) argued that critical thinking was not a skill that could stand alone; it must always be about something. According to McPeck (1981): In isolation from a particular subject, the phrase critical thinking neither refers to nor denotes any particular skill. It follows from this that it makes no sense to talk about critical thinking as a distinct subject and that it therefore cannot be profitably be taught as such. (McPeck, 1981, p. 5). McPeck goes on to argue, from this premise, that critical thinking is only properly understood when seen as subject-specific. Critical thinking always manifests itself in connection with some identifiable activity or subject area and never in isolation. (McPeck, 1981, p. 5). McPeck (1981) emphasizes that critical thinking does include: ()the judicious use of skepticism, tempered by experience[where] the criterion for regarding skepticism as judicious, as opposed to incorrect or frivolous, must be determined by the norms and standards of the subject area in question. (McPeck, 1981, p. 7) It is not sufficient to simply ask questions or to criticize thoughts as they come, but rather, to develop the ability to ask the right questions. This leads McPeck to develop an informal definition of critical thinking:

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES The core meaning of critical thinking is the propensity and skill to engage in an activity with reflective skepticism. (McPeck, 1981, p. 8). Richard Paul distinguishes between two forms of critical thinking, the weak and the strong forms. Because a student comes to the post secondary education setting with: () a highly developed belief system buttressed by a deep-seated, uncritical, egocentric and socio-centric habits of thought by which he interprets and processes his or her experience the practical result is that most students find it easy to question just, and only, those beliefs, assumptions, and inferences that [they] have already rejected and very difficult, in some cases to traumatic, to question those in which they have a personal, egocentric investment. (Paul 1981, p. 2). Paul concludes that those that learn to think critically in order to merely employ these skills to ward away challenges to what they already believe become more sophistic rather than less so. Paul classifies the engagement in this type of critical thinking as atomistic or the weak sense of critical thinking. However, in the strong sense of critical thinking one abandons critical thinking skills as a set of atomic arguments and seeks to focus on argument networks (world views), seeks to take a more dialectical/dialogical approach to argumentation where arguments are appraised in relation to counter arguments, and realizes that atomic arguments (such as informal fallacies) are rarely employed in the real world but that argument exchanges are means by which contesting points of view are brought into rational conflict (Paul, 1981, p. 2). Harvey Siegel (1998) sums the strong sense of critical thinking as appearing to be more a matter of dialogue between opposing perspectives than a series of atomic criticisms and deflections. (Siegel, 1998, p. 13). This allows for the following definition: Critical thinking is disciplined, self directed thinking which exemplifies the perfections of thinking appropriate to a particular mode or domain of thought. It comes in two forms. If disciplined to serve the interests of a particular individual or group, to the exclusion of other relevant persons and groups, it is sophistic or weak sense critical thinking. If disciplined to take into account the interests of diverse persons or groups, it is fair-minded or strong sense critical thinking. (Paul, 1990, p. 51). It must be noted here that Pauls definition of critical thinking does not exclude other definitions of critical thinking. In fact, Paul argues that there are many limita-

McPeck acknowledges his informal definition leaves room for ambiguities. McPeck offers further explanation of his ideas concerning skills and reflective skepticism: [The skills] necessary for engaging in an activity, critical thinking cannot be divorced from the skills that make the activity what it is. [Reflective skepticism] like healthskepticism, refers to both the purpose and the quality of the thinking in question. (McPeck, 1981, p. 9). McPecks definition of critical thinking requires knowledge of the subject at hand, as well as the desire to resolve problems that arise. McPecks informal definition, along with the accompanying clarifications, lead to McPecks formal definition of critical thinking: Let X stand for a problem or activity requiring some mental effort. Let E stand for the available evidence from the pertinent field or problem area. Let P stand for some proposition or action within X. Then we can say of a given student (S) that he is a critical thinker in area X if S has the disposition and skill to do X in such a way that E, or some subset of E, is suspended as being sufficient to establish the truth or viability of P. (McPeck, 1981, p. 9). It is noteworthy that McPeck emphasizes two central components of his concept of critical thinking. Siegel articulates the two components as: There is first, the ability to assess reasons properly the reason assessment component. There is, second, the willingness, desire, and disposition to base ones actions and beliefs on reasons; that is to do reason assessment and be guided by the results of such assessment. (Siegel, 1998, p. 23). Richard Paul Richard Paul established, and served as director of, the Center for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique at Sonoma State University. He currently organizes the Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and serves as Director of Research and Professional Development for the Center and Foundation for Critical Thinking. Prior to setting forth a definition for critical thinking,

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 tions in the process of defining critical thinking itself, and goes so far as to argue that it is more desirable to have a variety of definitions for two reasons: (1) in order to maintain insight into the various dimensions of critical thinking that alternative definitions highlight, and 2) to help oneself escape the limitations of any given definition. (Paul, 1987, as quoted in Thayer-Bacon, 2000, p. 61). The American Philosophical Association Expert Consensus Definition In 1988, a panel of experts on critical thinking employed a Delphi process and worked for two years to produce a definition of consensus allowing for uniformity within the field as well as guide assessment. The definition reads: We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self regulatory judgments which results in interpretation, analysis evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which judgment is based The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit (). (Facione, 1990, p. 3). In addition to providing a general definition for critical thinking, the panel also provided a list of cognitive skills and sub-skills, as well as a list of affective dispositions of critical thinking. The skills include: () interpretation (categorization, decoding significance, clarifying meaning), analysis (examining ideas, identifying arguments, analyzing arguments), evaluation (assessing claims, assessing arguments), inference (querying evidence, conjecturing alternatives), explanation (stating results, justifying procedures, presenting arguments), and self-regulation (selfexamination, self correction). (Facione, 1990, p. 12).

43 The affective dispositions a critical thinker should develop are set in two categories. The first category is approaches to life and living in general. This includes things such as, inquisitiveness in many issues, flexibility in considering alternatives, understanding other opinions, honesty in facing ones biases, and a willingness to revise ones ideas when warranted. The second category includes approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. This includes things such as, clarity in stating questions, diligence in seeking relevant information, persistence, and precision to the degree allowed. (Facione, 1990). The broad definition and lists of skills and dispositions commonly referred to as the Delphi definition is perhaps the most often cited study on critical thinking in the modern literature on the subject. Stephen Brookfield Stephen Brookfield (1987), a distinguished university professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul, focuses on the development of critical thinkers in our society. Consequently, his definition focuses on the activities, traits, and abilities necessary for identification and cultivation of critical thinking in not only education, but also society as a whole. Brookfield believes that critical thinking involves three concepts: (1) emancipatory learning, (2) dialectical thinking, and (3) reflective learning. Emancipatory learning occurs when a learner becomes aware of the forces that have brought them to their current situations and take action to change some aspect of these situations (Brookfield, 1987, p. 12). Dialectical thinking focuses on understanding contradictions and arriving at suitable resolutions. Reflective learning involves a process of internal examination brought on by some experience that allows the critical thinker to understand and appreciate a new understanding. (Brookfield, 1987, p. 14). Brookfield also outlines four components of critical thinking: identifying and challenging assumptions, challenging the importance of context, imagining and exploring alternatives, and reflective skepticism. Critical thinking is a positive activity that should be properly viewed as a process, rather than an outcome. Brookfield (1987) recognizes that practices, structures and actions are never context-free (Brookfield, 1987, p. 5). Both positive and negative events within the context of the thinking process can impact the critical thinking process itself. Consequently, the critical thinking process can be emotive as well as rational (Brookfield, 1987, p. 7). Joanne Kurfiss Joanne Kurfiss, director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Santa Clara University, argues that critical thinking is a rational response to questions that cannot be answered definitively and for which all the relevant

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES differs from critical thinking in business to the extent the subject matters themselves differ. McPecks (1981) definition strongly falls into the context-specific category, but other context-specific definitions include the definitions set forth by Brookfield (1987) and Kurfiss (1988). With increased attention on assessment, contextspecific definitions can be quite useful. When critical thinking skills are well-defined in unambiguous terms, they are much easier to assess. By limiting the assessment to a context-specific domain, the results can be more accurate and far more useful for the specific focal discipline. This is evidenced by the creation of the Texas Assessment of Critical Thinking Skills (TACTS), which was developed by an interdisciplinary team in response to the accrediting association for collegiate schools of business (AACSB) decision to include assessment of analytic and reflective thinking in its accreditation standards. (Fair, Miller, Muehsam, & Elliott, 2010, 37). The TACTS team stated: () for the sake of assessing how our College of Business is doing in meeting the AACSB standards, it is desirable to use a special purpose instrument that has several items built into it that tap quantitative skills especially relevant to business majors. (Fair, Miller, Muehsam, & Elliott, 2010, 41). It is important to note this only applies to assessments designed to incorporate a specific context familiar to the assessed. If critical thinking skills cannot be isolated from the context within which they occur, then attempting to assess critical thinking skills alone appears futile. Further challenges arise when context-specific definitions are used blindly in collaborative situations. Context-specific definitions do not lend themselves to inter-disciplinary collaborations involving substantially different disciplines, unless the context is clearly articulated and agreed upon by the participants. The faculty learning community on critical thinking which spurred the writing of this essay is a good example. Of the ten participating members, most joined the group with context-specific definitions for critical thinking, but were unaware that other disciplines may define critical thinking from an entirely different context. It was essential for the group to openly discuss the varying definitions along with their corresponding contexts to work towards a deeper understanding of critical thinking. Cross-Disciplinary Definitions Cross-disciplinary definitions clarify critical thinking in very broad terms, enabling critical thinking skills to be taught independent of a specific context. This is not to claim that critical thinking skills occur without

information may not be available (Kurfiss, 1988, p. 2). The critical thinking process, as outlined by Kurfiss, usually begins with an argument and has two outcomes: a hypothesis or conclusion and the justification for this conclusion. Kurfiss defines critical thinking as: () an investigation whose purpose is to explore a situation, phenomenon, question, or problem to arrive at a hypothesis or conclusion about it that integrates all available information and that can therefore be convincingly justified. (Kurfiss, 1988, p. 2). Diane Halpern Diane Halpern, former president of the American Psychological Association, is heavily quoted in modern literature on critical thinking for her conception of critical thinking components in education. Her definition, although very broad, seeks to capture the main elements of the various definitions of critical thinking found in current psychological literature: Critical thinking is the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed[it is not] merely thinking about your own thinking it is using skills that will make desirable outcomes more likely. Decisions as to which outcomes should be desirable are embedded in a system of values. (Halpern, 2003, p. 6-7).

Classifications for Critical Thinking Definitions

A review of the literature confirms the lack of consensus regarding a uniform definition for critical thinking, but there does appear to be some common ground among many of the influential definitions. In fact, it appears all of the definitions discussed in this essay can be clustered into one of two classifications: context-specific definitions and cross-disciplinary definitions. Context-Specific Definitions Context-specific definitions assume critical thinking cannot occur without a specific context. In other words, the development of critical thinking skills is interdependent with the context within which the critical thinking activity occurs. Under this philosophy, critical thinking should not be taught as a stand-alone course, since the critical thinking skills cannot be isolated from the corresponding subject matter. Critical thinking in chemistry

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 a context, but rather that the critical thinking skills are not dependent upon a particular context. In this way, the skills needed to critically think in chemistry are similar to the skills needed to critically think in business. Dewey (1910) offered a cross-disciplinary definition for critical thinking by identifying its key components as analyzing the facts, determining whether facts are relevant, and then synthesizing the appropriate factual information into a whole. Bloom (1956) also provided a cross-disciplinary definition for critical thinking as involving analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Other cross-disciplinary definitions for critical thinking include those by Ennis (1962, 1993), American Philosophical Association Expert Consensus (1990), Paul (1981, 1992), Halpern (2003), and Glaser (1941). Cross-disciplinary definitions, by their very nature work well for interdisciplinary collaboration, but using them to guide assessment can be challenging. Even though the feasibility of assessing critical thinking skills is readily acknowledged, cross-disciplinary definitions tend to be rather vague and ambiguous. The broadness of the definitions can lead to confusion, and may cause some to challenge the reliability as well as practicability of the assessment results.

45 enough to enable accurate and useable assessment, but cross-disciplinarily enough to encourage effective collaboration across diverse fields and disciplines.

References
Bailey, C. (2008). The tools of womens studies and philosophy: Critical thinking in writing courses. Feminist Teacher, 18(2), 91-100. Bassham, F., Irwin, W., Nardone, H., & Wallace, J. M. (2005). Critical thinking: A students introduction. Boston: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Bloom, B. S., Jr. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: handbook I. The cognitive domain. New York: McKay. Borg, J. R., & Borg, M. O. (2001). Teaching critical thinking in interdisciplinary economics. College Teaching, 49(1), 20-25. Brookfield, S. D. (1987). Developing critical thinkers: Challenging adults to explore alternative ways of thinking and acting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Cody, D. (2006). Critical thoughts on critical thinking. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(4), 403-407. Curry, M. J. (1999). Critical thinking: Origins, applications, and limitation for postsecondary students of English as a second language. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of American Education Research Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Daly, W. M. (1998). Critical thinking as an outcome of nursing education. What is it? Why is it important to nursing practice? Journal of Advanced Nursing, 28(2), 323-331. Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston: D. C. Heath and Company Publishers. Dike, S. E., Kochan, F. K., Reed, C., & Ross, M. (2006). Exploring conceptions of critical thinking held by military educators in higher education settings. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 9(1), 45-60. Edgerton, R. (1991). National standards are coming! National standards are coming! AAHE Bulletin, December, 1991, 8-12. Ennis, R. H. (1962). A concept of critical thinking. Harvard Educational Review, 32(1), 81-111. Ennis, R. H. (1993). Critical thinking assessment. Theory Into Practice, 32(3), 179-186. Ennis, R. H. (2011). Critical thinking reflection and perspective Part I. INQUIRY: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, 26(1). Facione, P. A. (1990). Critical thinking: A statement of expert consensus for purposes of education assessment and instruction. Research findings and recommendations prepared for the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association. American Philosophical Association. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 315-423). Fair, F., Miller, J., Muehsam, V., & Elliott, W. (Summer, 2010). TACTS: Developing a new critical thinking assessment instrument. INQUIRY: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, 25(2), 37-41.

Conclusion
In summary, the current definitions for critical thinking can be classified into two categories: content-specific definitions and cross-disciplinary definitions. Contentspecific definitions tend to work well for assessment within particular disciplines, but challenges arise for cross-disciplinary assessment and for collaborative situations involving varying disciplines. Cross-disciplinary definitions appear on the surface to work well for crossdisciplinary collaborations and general critical thinking assessments, but when actually applied, cross-disciplinary definitions tend to be very broad and often vague, creating very real challenges for both collaboration and general assessment. Kennedy, Fisher, and Ennis (1991) claimed agreement on a definition of and a vocabulary for critical thinking is needed in order to get a better idea of what should be assessed by a critical thinking evaluation instrument. (Kennedy, Fisher, and Ennis, 1991, 29). Twenty years later, the need for such agreement still exists. Perhaps the greatest lesson can be learned from the ongoing practices of Ennis and Paul. Both researchers continue to analyze and revise their existing definitions for critical thinking. If understanding critical thinking requires doing critical thinking, then Ennis and Paul have provided us with the perfect models for continuing to improve our understanding of critical thinking. Stakeholders in higher education must continue to work towards a definition for critical thinking that is context-specific

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

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Glaser, E. M. (1941). An experiment in the development of critical thinking. New York: Teachers College of Columbia University, Bureau of Publications. Gordon, J. M. (2000). Congruency in defining critical thinking by nurse educators and non-nurse scholars. Journal of Nursing Education, 39(8), 340-351. Halonen, J. S. (1995). Demystifying critical thinking. Teaching of Psychology, February 1995, 75-81. Halpern, D. F. (1997). Critical thinking across the curriculum: A brief edition of thought and knowledge. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Halpern, D. F. (2003). Thought and knowledge: an introduction to critical thinking (4th Ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Heffner, S., & Rudy, S. (2008). Critical thinking. Critical Care Nursing Quarterly, 31(1), 73-78. Kelly, S. E. (2001). Thinking well: An introduction to critical thinking. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Kennedy, M, Fisher, M. B. & Ennis, R. H. (1991) Critical thinking: Literature review and needed research. In L. Idol and B. F. Jones (Eds.), Educational values and cognitive instruction: Implications for reform. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 11-40. Kogut, L. S. (1996). Critical thinking in general chemistry. Journal of Chemical Education, 73(3), 218-221. Kurfiss, J. G. (1998). Critical thinking: Theory, research, practice, and possibilities. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 2, 1988. Washington: Association for the Study of Higher Education. Lauer, T. (2005). Teaching critical-thinking skills using course content material: A reversal of roles. Journal of College Science Teaching, 34-37. Lipman, M. (1991). Thinking in education. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mazer, J. P., Hunt, S. K., & Kuznekoff, J. H. (2007). Revising general education: Assessing a critical thinking instructional model in the basic communication course. Journal of General Education, 56(3-4), 173-199. McPeck, J. E. (1981). Critical thinking and education. New York: St. Martins Press. Moore, B. N., & Parker, R. (2001). Critical thinking. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Morgan, W. R., Jr. (1995). Critical thinking What does that mean? Journal for College Science Teaching, 336-340. Olsen, J., & Statham, A. (2005). Critical thinking in political science: Evidence from the introductory comparative politics course. Journal of Political Science Education, 1, 323-344. Paul, R. W. (1981).Teaching critical thinking in the strong sense: A focus on self deception, world views, and a dialectical mode of analysis. Informal Logic, 4(2), 2-7. Paul, R. W. (1990). Critical thinking: What every person needs to survive in a rapidly changing world. Rhonert Park, CA: Sonoma State University Center for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique. Ruminski, H. J., & Hanks, W. E. (1995). Critical thinking lacks definition and uniform evaluation criteria. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 4-11.

Author information
Maria Sanders is a professor of philosophy and Faculty Excellence Award winner at Lone Star College CyFair. She is a co-author of Broaching Fragmented Learning: Principles for Reflective Learning in the Cyber-age published by the 2011 International Technology and Education Development Conference held in Valenica, Spain, and she has most recently co-presented at the 6th Annual On Course Conference held in Long Beach, California on Reflection Simulations: Cyber-Learning in the Cyber-Age. She teaches logic, social and political philosophy, and applied ethics courses and received her M. A. in Philosophy from Southern Illinois UniversityEdwardsville and her J.D. from Saint Louis University. Her contact information is Lone Star College CyFair, 9191 Barker Cypress Road, Cypress, TX 77433-1383. Phone: (281) 290-3232, Email Maria.a.sanders@lonestar.edu Jason Moulenbelt received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Philosophy from Western Michigan University. He is Professor of Philosophy at Lone Star College-CyFair, and his teaching specializations include Practical and Applied Ethics, Race and Gender Issues, Business Ethics. He received the Dr. Christal Albrecht Learning Innovation Award in May 2008. His contact information is Lone Star College CyFair, 9191 Barker Cypress Road, Cypress, TX 77433-1383. Phone: (281) 290-3912, Email: Jason.l.moulenbelt@lonestar.edu.

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1

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The Academic College Course is An Argument

Frank Codispoti Lone Star College-CyFair A college academic course is an argument constructed by the professor who teaches the course. Richard Pauls elements of thinking are used to clarify this contention. It is the responsibility of the professor to choose reading materials, construct lectures, and develop other activities and assignments that can best aid her students to understand the argument. Reading texts and listening to lectures effectively to grasp the argument requires critical thinking skills that can be learned by students. Students fail when those responsible for their education either assume they already possess such skills or that they cannot learn them. Keywords: lectures, critical reading A college academic course is an argument. An argument in this context is a conclusion supported by reasons and evidence (Weston, 2008, p. xi). A well-constructed college course begins with a central proposition or propositions upon which the course elaborates. The fundamental task of a college professor is to create the arguments for those propositions. This task requires creating arguments that can be followed, understood, and applied by students through the time of the course and beyond. College courses, particularly those at the undergraduate level, are often conceived of by those who do not teach them as consisting of a standard body of information that, because it is standard, does not vary from professor to professor. Therefore, they reason, if two professors each teach an introductory American government course, the body of information conveyed will be essentially the same in each course. But while it is likely that there will be a great deal of overlap between two such courses and while the central elements of the courses often will be the same, yet each professor brings to the course a point of view on the subject matter that has been developed during the process of acquiring an advanced education on the subject. This education is never exactly the same as the one received by others. One reason is that each professor has a major area of concentration in one or more subfields of her discipline, and this concentration shapes what she considers to be important and worth attending to. As a graduate student she was introduced to and learned to apply theories, concepts, and explanations that differed from those acquired and employed by others. Furthermore, as a professor conducts research, reads, and teaches, she shapes an individual complex understanding of her subject matter that will differ from that of other professors. This means that a professor whose main area of concentration is International Relations, for example, is likely to give a greater emphasis to the role of the president in foreign policy when discussing the institution of the presidency and will emphasize the role of foreign policy and international relations as areas of public policy more than would a professor trained in American national institutions. A professor trained in Political Philosophy is likely to have a very different point of view on the entire subject of American government beginning with a different definition of politics from those trained as empirical political scientists. The questions that flow from a different definition of politics, that the course will seek to explore and answer, will be different and will lead to a different body of knowledge being acquired by students. It is the ability of a professor to bring her well-developed perspective to the subject that makes her a college professor instead of a simple conveyor or information. While this discussion has used examples from Political Science, there is nothing unique about the particular discipline in this regard. The same phenomenon would be observed in any other scholarly field. Being exposed to a variety of professors with a variety of points of view about a subject is central to a college education. It is what makes a college education a different learning experience from other forms of education. The student is exposed to different ways of examining, understanding, explaining, and evaluating the world. In the process of gaining insights from a variety of points of view a student can develop a more sophisticated and mature understanding of the very idea of knowledge. This process moves the student from, in the words of Mary Burgan, a world view based on absolutes-right/wrong, good/bad... (to one in which) they can accept the reality of multiple viewpoints, then see that judgments can be made among them, and, finally, to make commitments in the light of relative uncertainties. (Burgan, 2006) Of course, a student is also exposed to different ways of understanding the world as he or she moves from subject to subject. However, the point here is that even as students take courses within a single subject from different professors they begin to develop a new perspective on knowledge and on their world that is the product of synthesizing the different

Abstract

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES they develop a more or less distinctive way of organizing and understanding the subject that is a synthesis of the perspectives they each bring to the subject. It is necessary to develop a common perspective in order to agree on degree requirements and specific courses that must be taken by all students in the discipline. Perhaps an example of the differences that can occur will help to clarify the point. Two important subjects of study within the discipline of political science are the organizations of interest groups and political parties. Both may be covered as part of an undergraduate curriculum and both are invariably important topics in introductory courses on American government. There are two ways these organizations can be presented. One way, perhaps the more common, is to treat them as separate subjects with each given its own focus in the course; for instance, they are often discussed in separate chapters in American government textbooks. In contrast, however, one may also stress the similarities between the two types of organization. Both are ways in which citizens in democracies organize to influence political outcomes. Both are nonprofit, voluntary organizations whose internal dynamics share many characteristics. Presenting these two types of organizations in this way leads to a different set of questions to be asked, a different set of problems to be solved, and places the facts concerning them in a different context. It is up to the particular professor to decide how to handle these topics in her own course and it is up to the faculty of a particular institution to decide how to develop them within their curriculum. The second element is the problem to be solved or question to be answered. As with the goal or purpose of the course, there usually is one central problem to be solved or question to be answered in creating a course, though numerous other problems or questions are generated in the attempt to solve the central problem or answer the central question, and these must be identified and analyzed. The process of identifying those questions takes place as the professor develops the argument of the course. As with the purpose, the questions or problems are already part of the professors knowledge. An example of a problem to be solved in a course is the decline in political participation in the United States. Beginning in the 1960s political participation in the United States, particularly voting in elections, began to decline. Many political scientists consider this decline substantial enough to require study and to raise questions as to how it might affect the performance of the American political system. The decline in participation in politics was particularly pronounced among younger citizens. Over time scholars within the discipline developed positions concerning the importance of these trends for American politics. There are differences on this question, but one can observe the production of introductory

perspectives she encounters or of choosing to emphasize one presented by a professor whose perspective she finds particularly attractive.

What Is an Argument: Richard Paul, Linda Elder, and the Elements of Reasoning
To understand the concept of a course as an argument it is necessary to elaborate on the meaning of an argument. A common definition of an argument like the one given above is that it is a conclusion supported by reasons and evidence. To understand what is involved in creating an entire course as an argument requires, however, a more highly developed notion of reasoning. One such developed scheme of the elements of reasoning is provided by Richard Paul and Linda Elder (Paul & Elder, 2006 pp. 11-42). They are interested in what they call the fundamental structures of thought (Paul & Elder 13), but the elements they define can also be understood as relevant to the construction of an argument. The eight elements are: (1) a purpose, goal, or end in view; (2) a question at issue or problem to be solved; (3) a point of view or frame of reference; (4) the evidence data, facts, experiences; (5) the conceptual or theory dimension of reasoning; (6) the assumptions one makes; (7) the inferences or conclusions one develops from the reasoning process; and (8) the implications or consequences one draws from the argument that is developed. Applying Paul and Elders scheme leads to identifying the purpose is a crucial first step in creating the argument that is the course. One might be tempted to simply identify the purpose of a course as teaching a particular subject to a class of students, but the greater the specificity with which the professor identifies the purpose or goal of a course the more clearly she can articulate the goals for her students. Many course syllabi include a list of course goals that are to be achieved, often identified as tasks students will be able to perform if they successfully complete the course. These tasks are generated from the overall purpose of the course, and the purpose is derived from the larger subject matter discipline of which the course is a part. A scholar has learned to see each course as part of a larger whole and to see each lecture in the course as part of the larger whole that is the course. The particular subject of the course gains its purpose from the place it takes in the larger body of knowledge of which the discipline consists. When one examines the curriculum of any particular discipline at a college or university one can follow the way the subject matter of the discipline is organized by scholars in the discipline. By comparing the specific courses taught at different institutions one can infer the differences in points of view among different faculties. A department faculty is not just a group of individuals who teach the same discipline. Over time

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 American government texts in recent years in which the main problem to be solved seems to be that of convincing students that politics has an important impact on their lives. These texts emphasize the ways in which citizens influence political outcomes and include the message that a wise citizen will participate in the process. The third of Pauls elements, point of view or frame of reference, is primarily generated from the discipline one is teaching, though a more refined point of view is based on the perspective that a professor has developed through her education and research. This is illustrated when the same topic is taught in courses in two different disciplines. The representatives of the disciplines will pose different problems, make use of different evidence, reason to different inferences, identify different implications and consequences, and make use of what is learned to move in different directions in the next part of the course. The writing, adoption, and content of the United States Constitution are examined in both courses on American History as part of a history curriculum and in introductory courses on American government taught as part of a Political Science curriculum. There is a great deal of overlap in the development of the material in the two courses. Yet it is easy to see that there will also be significant differences, since every academic subject has its own set of purposes and goals, questions and problems, assumptions, concepts, central facts, and has at any time its own set of important implications and consequences drawn from arguments made in its discipline. All of these are part of the body of knowledge which constitutes the discipline. The professor brings all of these to the formation of a course. The fourth element concerns the facts, data, and evidence that are treated in the course. Facts in any course range from the most basic, those that are central to the study of the subject, to those that are trivial and useful only as examples or in creating full descriptions of relevant broader conditions. The particular objects that make up the empirical dimension of a subject may range from the very specific to the very broad. There are 435 members of the United States House of Representatives. This is a very specific and very important fact in the study of American national politics. The fifth element is the set of concepts and theories that have been developed in the course of the research and writing on the subject. The development of the argument which is the course will use these concepts. The concepts will require definition and perhaps analysis within the course and will have to be understood by students as part of completing the course. The theories and ideas will also be a major part of the content that requires describing and explaining and which will be used in the process of arguing in the course. One concept used a great deal in Political Science is the concept of attitude. One definition of

49 an attitude is a predisposition to react in a certain way to a political object. To have students appreciate this concept the definition should be analyzed. A predisposition means that the individual does not develop the reaction in the presence of the object. but will automatically respond because he or she already has certain feelings, beliefs, or feelings about objects of such a nature. The term object is used because a wide variety of stimuli, from people, to political parties, to nations, are subjects of attitudes. Having this general concept in mind allows a student to analyze a wide variety of human behavior. Sixth, every argument requires assumptions. It is impossible to construct an argument in which everything is proven. Assumptions are also the most difficult part of any argument to identify. Many of the most important assumptions made in an argument become so entrenched in the subject matter over time that they are no longer discussed, justified, or even acknowledged. The assumptions have become a subconscious part of how the professor thinks about the subject. The assumptions make up part of the basic thought processes of everyone in the discipline. Yet they form part of the fundamental structure of the argument and if they can be identified and discussed explicitly, it will help those who are learning the subject to understand it more fully. One of the most fundamental assumptions made by political scientists is that humans do not act with free will but behave in response to stimuli. The stimuli may be sociological in nature, psychological in nature, or rational, self-interested responses. This is such a basic assumption of political science as a discipline that it is rarely articulated or discussed. This is one of those assumptions that become so basic to those trained as political scientists that they forget that it is an assumption and simply apply it. It would be valuable for their students to have this assumption articulated for them. This would help them to be more critical in their analysis of political phenomenon. Seventh, all reasoning creates inferences. An inference is a step of the mind, an intellectual act by which one concludes that something is true in the light of something elses being true, or seeming to be true. (Paul & Elder, 2006, p. 31) A fully developed course will draw many inferences and will use earlier inferences as part of the reasoning to later ones. The application of assumptions, concepts, and theories to the subject of the discipline in systematic reasoning is what leads to the inferences of the subject and which need to form the center of the course. For example, we have previously noted that participation in politics among the American population showed a significant decline between the 1960s and 1980s. Applying the basic political science theory that changes in human behavior can be explained by changes in attitudes, a term which the political scientist will carefully define, we can use the data we have on attitudes to-

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES atic, logical, and well-developed thought process about the subject matter of the course. This goal is not easy to achieve. There is a very large gap between the way in which the professor thinks about her subject and how her students think about it. Reducing that gap requires a great deal of effort on the part of both the professor and the student. It is the professor who must be aware of this difference and who is in a position to help students strengthen their ways of thinking.

wards politics to draw the inference that the reduction in participation is explained by a change in attitudes towards the honesty, accountability, and motivation of behavior by government officials. This is a basic inference that political scientists have drawn and will teach students. However, the goal is not to have students memorize this inference, but to teach them to use the theories, concepts and data of Political Science to answer important questions and draw important inferences. This is the difference between learning to critically think about politics and simply memorizing what is taught as a series of facts. The final element of Pauls elements includes the implications and consequences that follow from the argument. It is the implications and consequences that fulfill the purpose of the reasoning and answer the questions or solve the problems posed by the thinker as the argument is first developed. An implication of the argument that citizen participation has gone down as a result of changes in their attitudes towards government is that those attitudes must be changed if participation is to rise. A consequence of this has been the attempt by political science professors to convince their students that politics matters in their lives so it worth their time and effort to participate. Paul and Elders scheme of elements of reasoning has been used to present the basic idea of the course as an argument because it clarifies the set of decisions that must be made and the structure that must be developed in creating and teaching a college course. It is not being argued that college professors consciously recognize that the development of a college course is the construction of an argument. However, in the process of obtaining an advanced college degree and in studying and conducting research in their discipline, college professors develop the process of creating arguments as their normal way of thinking, particularly within their subject matter. They come to understand, explain, critique, and create such arguments as the dominant activity in graduate school and in their professional lives. When the time comes to develop their own college courses, constructing a course as an argument is one way they complete the task. One assumption that underlies the argument of this paper has not been revealed until now. It is assumed that one cannot think about a subject without reasoning about it. All thinking involves reasoning. The individual may be more or less conscious of the reasoning process going on in her, she may be more or less systematic in her reasoning, her reasoning may be more or less logical and her arguments may be more or less well developed, but in all cases, reasoning is going on. There is also a major implication that follows from the position that has been presented here. A central, if not the central, task of a professor in a college course is to guide her students towards a more conscious, system-

Critical Thinking Skills Associated with the Course as an Argument

Recognizing that a course is an argument clarifies a set of critical thinking skills college students must possess in order to succeed in their courses. Students need to be able (1) to grasp the underlying purpose of the course, (2) to identify the specific questions or problems the course addresses, (3) to articulate the point of view which gives rise to the questions, (4) to assess the evidence related to possible answers, (5) to understand the main concepts, (6) to recognize important background assumptions, (7) to make sound inferences, and (8) to attend to implications and consequences of those inferences. Sadly, it is a set of skills they often lack when they enter college, but these skills are crucial for the use of two of the ways in which the argument of a course is presented to students, through reading and attending lectures. The latter is particularly important in larger, introductory courses, the very courses students take when the first enter college and often before they have developed the skills to get the most benefit out of them. Mortimer J. Adler argued that in both reading and attending to a lecture the learner acts on something communicated to him. He performs operations on discourse, written or oral. (Adler, 1972, p. 13) Two points need to be emphasized about Adlers observation. First, Adler argues that the critical thinking skills necessary to develop understanding from reading and from a lecture are essentially the same. It is common for analysts to argue against the use of lectures in college classes but exceedingly rare for anyone to argue for eliminating, or even reducing, reading requirements. Perhaps this is because the similarities are not obvious until one examines the two activities in detail. Second, Adler emphasizes that although the teacher may help his students in many ways, it is the student himself who must do the learning (Adler, 1972, p. 13). While they may understand some need to be minimally active in reading, students often perceive their role at lectures to be completely passive. Perhaps the classic statement of how such students think of their role in lectures came from a student who commented on a course evaluation that he wished the professor had lectured less because he does not like being lectured at.

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 In either reading or attending to lectures students often underestimate the degree to which they must be actively engaged with the material. In both cases students often believe that the primary intellectual process they must use is memorization. Reading the notes that students take in lectures reveals that they often only write down what is written on a board or included in a PowerPoint slide. These students fail to perceive the argument being presented and, therefore, often miss the relationships being presented and developed. Their notes become a list of individual fragments of the argument with the result that they end up using their notes to memorize the individual points they have listed instead of understanding the argument of the lecture. The same tendency can be found if one quizzes students on their strategies for studying texts. When asked what they do students will often state they attempt to identify the important points in the text and to memorize them. When asked how they determine which are the important points in a chapter of the text, students will reveal that they highlight what seem to be important facts and definitions and perhaps the topic sentences of paragraphs. Again an inspection of their notes often reveals a fragmentary list that is based on clues in the text and guidance provided by the publishers, such as highlighted terms and definitions. Moreover, the students approach toward the reading and lecture material presented to them suggests strongly that they believe their task is to identify and remember the important pieces of information embedded in the material so it can be recalled on exams. When they question their professors as to what they must know for an upcoming exam, what they are often asking is to have the professor separate the information that they must memorize from the information that they need not recall. Another form of this request is the plea that the professor provide a study guide for the exam. Again the request is usually for a list of the items that are to be remembered for the exam. It seems plausible that this tendency to focus on discrete bits of information is strongly reinforced by the pervasive use of machinescored, multiple-choice examinations. These students have not been taught that they are reading or listening to an argument. They do not grasp the need to go through the material critically to bring out the structure of the argument so they can develop an understanding of the material, yet understanding is the goal of the learning process. And there are other factors that reinforce their misconception about the process of learning. The contemporary college textbook is often a very poorly developed argument. Such texts are written and published with the intention that they be adopted by the largest possible number of professors. As a result, authors usually try to accommodate as many approaches to the subject matter as possible. This requires adopting no single point of view from which an argument can be

51 developed, but presenting a weakly developed argument that is a composite of many, sometimes even contradictory points of view. Sometimes this presentation is accompanied by a description of various ways in which a particular topic can be understood. However, such presentations are invariably fragmentary, do not develop the various ways of understanding the subject in any depth, and fail to explore the implications of accepting each of the points of view that have been named. More frequently the text simply creates a contradictory, vague description of the subject matter without acknowledging that there is more than one way of understanding it. Such texts are usually packed with an overwhelming amount of descriptive material that obfuscates any analysis that is taking place. This structure reinforces the tendency of students to see the subject as a compilation of facts that should be memorized. Even theories, concept, and assumptions are presented as if they are individual facts with little development of their role in an argument. A particularly common feature of such texts that is intended to aid students in learning, but one which may hinder them instead, is the tendency to highlight terms and their definitions. This may be done by simply highlighting the term and its definition in the body of the text or reproducing it in the margin of the text, or even including a list of terms and their definitions in another place in the book. While this feature is intended to help students, it reinforces the belief that terms are isolated pieces of information whose definition should be memorized. Students need to realize that terms play a role in an argument and that the way in which a term is defined has consequences for how the subject is understood. They need to realize that many of the most important terms can have more than one definition and that the particular definition was a choice made by the authors of the text to fit their understanding of the subject. Further, students need to realize how using the term in its context contributes to understanding the subject. Understanding all of this is actually harder when the term and its definition are isolated from the context in which they are used.

The Course as an Argument and the Necessity and Desirability of Lectures

The idea that a college course is an argument tends to suggest that the professor will the one to present the argument and that in turn suggests the need for the professor to give lectures as the vehicles for presenting the argument. However, while the need for college students to be able to read more critically is never disputed, lectures have come under attack in recent years from those who argue that they are a poor method of education. The most common criticism of lectures is that they turn students into a passive audience whose members simply

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES lack of concentration that students manifest is a consequence of being passive observers of an activity they do not understand and the fact they have not learned the skill of concentrating. Students must also be taught explicitly that their texts and lectures are arguments that they can come to understand and that will give them a more sophisticated and systematic understanding of the subject of the course. They can be taught that this is the goal of an academic course. They can learn that taking a college course is not a matter of sorting through a bewildering mass of material and memorizing as much of it as possible, but that it is a more manageable task of identifying and learning the structure and content of what is considered to be knowledge in a particular subject. Such students are more able to focus their studies, learn much more efficiently, and do far more with the content of the course than repeat it on examinations. The implication of this is that far too little time is spent training students in these skills. While a great deal of effort is expended in asking how the critical thinking skills of students can be developed, much improvement of student performance in college could be achieved if the way students perform in lectures was not so often taken as a given that cannot be changed and that requires the abandonment of lectures as a teaching technique. Lectures are central to the contribution made by professors to the learning of their students. Lectures, like reading materials, require students to stretch their minds, to grasp concepts, ideas, and ways of thinking that they do not possess when they enter the classroom. It is a difficult process that requires a great deal of effort, is often frustrating, and inevitably includes mistakes and failures in the process of improving. But the level and amount of content that can be transmitted through lectures and through reading cannot be included in a course in any other way. To eliminate one of these teaching strategies or to fail to prepare students to make the maximum use of them is to drastically limit what can be taught and learned.

take down information from the professor so it can be memorized and restated on an exam. John C. Bean argues that Lecture courses, by nature, place students in a passive role and imply a transmission theory of knowledge in which students receive the ideas and information sent by the instructor. (Bean, 2001, p. 169) This description of the lecture process treats the mind of the student as if it is simply a recording device which takes down the sounds within earshot. But of course the brain is no such thing, and the actual relationship between the lecturer and the student is much more complex. At least Bean adds ideas to what the professor is transmitting. Many descriptions of lectures state simply that they are used to transmit information. But the term information hides much more than it reveals about the content of lectures. In everyday language information is taken to refer to individual facts, terms, etc. The idea that the professor is revealing an entire structure of thought about important phenomena is not even hinted at by the word information. As for the student, he is interpreting, comparing, analyzing, considering the significance of various points, relating what is being said to his own previous knowledge and experience, engaging in a process that will transform what was said by the professor into the argument he believes she is trying to help students understand. This characterization of the students activities is a brief, incomplete description of what should be happening. For this to be the case the student must be aware of the course as an extended argument and, consequently, of what she must do to attend to a lecture to maximize her understanding. If a student is unaware of these things, if she thinks a lecture is an activity in which she is only an observer whose task is to identify the important points, perhaps write them down, and then later memorize them, she will be the passive receptor portrayed by the critics of lectures. The student will be bored, her mind will wander aimlessly during much of the class period, or she will be texting during much of the class period. Active, engaged interaction with a lecturer, just as with a written text, involves a set of intellectual skills that must be developed. The beginning of such learning requires awareness of ones thought processes. Most of us do not regularly pay conscious attention to our own thought processes. We take such activities as natural and do not attempt to control them. However, when we are engaged in thinking critically while interacting with written or oral material, we need to have the habit of consciously engaging the material in order to reveal the structure of the argument that is being presented to us. First, this means that we must pay attention. Critics of lectures often argue that students lack the ability to pay attention to an oral presentation for more than a few minutes. Yet, the same students attend long movies, read novels, and otherwise engage in activities that require long periods of concentration. The

The Professors Responsibility for Improving Students Critical Thinking Skills

The more extreme critics of lecturing as a teaching method often refer to the professor as the sage on the stage. It is a clever epithet. It reminds one of labeling the estate tax the death tax. These terms conjure up negative images that can be used to condemn something without the need for actually analyzing what is being condemned. The idea that a lecturer is the sage on the stage reminds one of the professor who enters a large lecture hall, steps to the podium and launches into a lecture that may be intelligent, informed, and well delivered, but is

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 beyond the comprehension of the students who listen, or fail to listen, while the self-satisfied professor drones on without a thought as to whether he is getting anything across to the students. When he finishes the lecture, the professor strides from the lecture hall and returns to his office where he can return to the more important activity of working on his latest research project, having fulfilled his teaching obligations. Certainly such professors exist and they should be criticized. The more typical professor, however, is interested in having her students learn the subject to which she has dedicated her career. However, good intentions are not enough. Just as students are often unaware of the task that is before them, professors often underestimate the gap between their understanding of the subject and that of their students. Certainly they understand that students need to be educated, but the task of creating lectures that both do justice to the subject and can be followed and understood by students is a much more difficult task than is often realized. Lectures must stretch the students mind yet be within his grasp. The process of obtaining and using a graduate education creates within the professor ways of thinking about the subject that become second nature. It may be very difficult for the professor to envision the real gap between herself and her students. As a consequence she underestimates her responsibilities and the size and complexity of her task. This may be particularly true for the young professor who is less likely to aware of the gap between herself and her students. Good lectures, and good lecturing, are created by a process of development, discovery, and evolution. Every method of feedback available to the professor must be used to determine whether her lecture is clear, accurate, and can be understood by the attentive, interested student. Thus the professor with the yellowed lecture notes who gives the same lectures semester after semester is another example of the professor who should not be in a classroom. Conscientious professors are constantly reading and thinking about their subject to deepen and broaden their own understanding. Another distortion that comes from the view that lectures are just a way of conveying information is the implication that the professor only need know a very limited set of information that she is to convey to her students, just what the course description covers, and no more. However, the deeper and broader the professors knowledge and understanding of her subject the more she will have from which to draw in creating strong lectures that aid students in learning the subject. It is necessary to think in terms of incorporating strategies, assignments, exercises, and any other techniques that can be used to improve students ability to read critically and to attend lectures critically. It would require another paper to do justice to the many techniques that have been developed, tested, and used over the years in fur-

53 therance of these goals. Colleges and universities should be encouraged to build into their curriculums a goal of developing these skills in their students, rather than assuming that students enter college with these skills either fully developed or without the ability to learn them.

The Importance of Other Teaching Strategies

If this paper stopped at this point, readers would be justified in concluding that the author believes that all college courses should be lecture courses and that professors should only lecture. This would be a complete misunderstanding of the authors position. We began with the point that a course is an argument and that each subunit of the course is an argument that is part of the larger argument that is the course. In developing each section of the course, a professor should take full advantage of the full array of written assignments, discussions, class exercises, and every form of activity that is often discussed as engaging the students. The professor should ask herself the nature of the concepts, ideas, questions, phenomena, conclusions, consequences, and so forth she will be bringing into the course at any point. Then she should ask which types of assignments can best enhance and deepen students understanding of those points and how she can further their understanding of the course material. The idea of engaging students in activities to help them learn is not new. Plato wrote dialogues because he believed that if students acted out the dialogues or read them they would learn better. In a number of disciplines laboratory sections are included in a course to further student learning through active engagement. Note that the laboratory does not replace the rest of the course; it enhances it. This author wishes his courses included such explicit additional time to allow both lecturing and activities to further the learning. At some major universities introductory courses are often a combination of lectures by the professor and discussion sections to explore the ideas presented more deeply. The point is that such activities do not replace the lecture or the assigned readings; they enhance them and strengthen the course. This is the proper relationship among various elements of a course.

Conclusions
A college course is an argument. It is the task of a college professor to construct that argument and to develop a set of teaching materials, including lectures and readings, that maximize her students ability to understand the argument that is the course, and thus to help them become more systematic thinkers about that subject. To accomplish this goal, the professor must be aware of the gap between her ability to think critically about

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Politics. He spent 9 years on the Political Science Faculty at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne. Dr. Codispoti is the author of articles on political ambition, the Lieutenant Governorship of Texas, and environmental interest groups. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Contact Information: Frank Codispoti, Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Lone Star College-CyFair, 9191 Barker Cypress Road, Cypress, TX 77433-1383. Phone (281) 290-3923 and email Frank.codispoti@lonestar.edu.

the subject and her students ability to do so. She should make a concerted effort to include assignments and discussions designed to increase her students critical reading and listening skills, and she must include assignments that aid them in understanding her and making use of her argument in thinking about the subject. No professor, however, can make much progress on her own in enhancing her students critical reading and listening skills. Colleges and universities must quit treating students as if they come to college understanding already how to read critically and how to listen critically, or, alternatively, that they are incapable of learning these skills. Instead colleges must train their students in the skills they need to succeed in college. The students deserve no less. Finally, one can wish that college faculty would refuse, en masse, to write or to adopt college textbooks that are crutches for students who have not learned to read critically and which make it more difficult for them to learn these skills. If a faculty member wishes to write a textbook, let her write one that is a coherent argument on the subject of the course. Let her refuse to have the pages littered with teaching aids that are really no such thing. Let professors adopt such texts. One need not fully agree with the argument that is presented, but it is much easier to teach the subject by working through an argument with ones students and offering alternatives or having them think about alternatives than it is for them to learn by using what currently passes for a college text book in many disciplines.

References
Adler, M. J., & Van Doren, C. (1972). How to read a book. Revised and updated edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. Bean, J. C. (2001). Engaging ideas: The professors guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Burgan, M. (2006). In defense of lecturing. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38(6), 30-34. Retrieved from ERIC (Accession No. EJ772134) Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2006) Critical thinking: Learning the tools the best thinkers use. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice Hall. Weston, A. (2008). A rulebook for arguments. 4th Ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, Inc.

Author Information
Frank Codispoti is Professor of Political Science at Lone Star College-CyFair. For 17 years prior to joining the faculty at CyFair he was a member of the Political Science Faculty at Stephen F. Austin State University where he taught Political Theory and American and Texas

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55

Critical Thinking and Social Interaction in the Online Environment

Idolina Hernandez, Lone Star College CyFair

Critical thinking is often assumed to be an integral part of learning in higher education. This learning increasingly takes place in the online environment, where students and faculty are challenged to engage in a collaborative project of critical thinking. This paper seeks to explore the process of critical thinking that is currently taking place online and proposes that social interaction and the social construction of knowledge are integral parts of this process. Discussion boards from economics, history, and sociology are discussed as examples of how critical thinking is developed in the online environment. Keywords: Critical Thinking, Social Interaction, Social Construction Critical thinking is something that is often aspired to in teaching, but it varies widely in definition. For the purpose of this analysis, critical thinking is defined as the evaluation of ideas, sources and information that is purposeful. It is a process that allows for individuals to deliberate, question, and assess information or situations that are experienced or presented (Brookfield, 1987; Halpern, 1998). The emphasis on the process does not offer a comprehensive definition as defined by an emphasis on argumentation (Ennis, 1962), but other conceptions of critical thinking take into account important aspects that include prior skill sets, ability, attitudes, social environment, and social contexts (Abrami, et al., 2008; Makoe, Richardson, & Price, 2008; Nieto & Saiz, 2010). All of these factors contribute to processes involved in critical thinking engagement. An important question that this inquiry addresses is whether online learning can promote elements important in critical thinking development. The literature available on the topic indicates that key elements to critical thinking in a face to face classroom are the same ones necessary for the development of successful instruction in the online environment. ter, but that have a significant online component (Allen & Seaman, 2010). While distance learning courses are asynchronous, their delivery historically has varied dramatically through correspondence, radio, and televised courses (Larreamendy-Joerns, Leindhardt, 2006). The importance of the online delivery method today is due to the rapid growth of the internet as well as an accessibility that has allowed for this method of instruction to be widely used by nonprofit and for profit institutions of higher learning. In the online environment, dispositions, attitudes, academic background, access to resources, and prior knowledge of the use of technology all affect how critical thinking is exercised in the online classroom (Edge & Loegering, 2000; Farber, 1998). Dispositions in the critical thinking context refer to the preparation and past experiences that students bring to the critical thinking process. Institutionalization of online learning has provided a window of access to previously excluded populations; however, there are questions about the types of students who sign up for these courses and whether or not they have the dispositions that will help them to succeed (Larreamendy-Joerns & Leindhardt, 2006; Edge & Loegering, 2000). I contend that aspects of critical thinking that are often associated with the face to face environment can be fostered through interactive processes in an online class. An assessment of what Ennis (1989) called the infusion of critical thinking into an online course environment will give evidence that social processes of interaction and knowledge construction are important in understanding how the critical thinking process can be conducted and evaluated.

Abstract

What is online learning?

Online learning is a particular type of distance learning that can be defined as learning that occurs exclusively through and mediated on the internet (Tallent-Runnels et al., 2006; Allen & Seaman, 2010). The components discussed here are applicable to web based education as well as online learning. Web based education refers to education where work and activities for a class are provided through the internet as a supplement to face to face instruction. Hybrid courses are those in which interactions vary depending on the structure of the course and which can be identified as courses that meet face to face several times during the course of a semes-

Critical Thinking and Social Interaction

Two important perspectives are explored here. The first is based on theoretical assumptions embedded in so-

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES the direct result of being a part of a group and society. Social control is exercised through the behavior control that is the result of self criticism. We are who we are, not because we are socially controlled, but because we are a part of society and acquiesce to the expectations inherent in social interactions. Online communication offers students the opportunity to apply critical thinking by interacting with information provided by the group. Students who engage in the critical thinking process will be deliberate about the way in which they assess the informations usefulness and then apply it. Effective instructional strategies will challenge the student to assess information provided by others in the online course. While the students responses may be asynchronous, the tone and expectations generated by faculty and fellow students will affect the way in which a student responds to the information, and the student will tend to express conclusions based on his/ her sense of what the social expectations of the online group are believed to be. The other important component in this process is that of the self, where the experiences that students bring to the classroom will shape how they engage in the critical thinking process. For example, knowledge of the material being discussed, access to resources, and writing skills are integral to engagement in critical thinking. These elements of self, however, often are managed carefully in generating responses that will be read by others. Critical thinking in the online environment is not just the result of an individuals consciousness; it is a process that is dependent on social interaction and most often mediated through language in the form or writing in the online environment.

cial interaction theory, and the second is based on the social constructionist approach. Both of these theories are linked in the way in which they address the importance of society in creating meaning. Interactions are a part of and embedded within the critical thinking process. The theories emphasize important elements that apply to the online learning environment, elements which include the role of the individual, the role of groups, characteristic social interactions, and the production of knowledge that occurs through these interactions. The online environment provides a unique opportunity for students to derive and construct meaning from their interactions in a way that accomplishes the same goals expected of face to face classrooms. Asynchronous interactions engage the process of critical thinking through knowledge production. This collaborative process allows students to evaluate information presented by their peers and instructors. Students are also able to assess the validity and truths (Ennis, 1989; McPeck, 1984) of evidence presented to support claims and are challenged to develop their own conclusions in the context of online learning. The social interaction perspective is derived from the important theoretical foundation established by George Herbert Mead (Mead, 1967). Mead provided a framework for studying the individual and the creation of consciousness as directly connected to society. The self is generated from the process of social interaction. Language, which is learned through socialization, is the means by which meaning is understood in social interaction and is therefore essential to an understanding of the social world. Through the use of language, the self is developed by creating a consciousness that is both individual and the result of society. This sense of self creates the necessity for individuals to understand themselves in the context of social interaction. They develop a deeper understanding by molding their actions according to perceived expectations from the group. This is what Mead refers to as taking the role of the other. Role taking then generates a controlled response from the individual that takes into account not only the individual, but also the expectations of conduct within the group. This process generates a cooperative environment through expected patterns in communication. An important component of taking the role of the other is that of social control. Social interactions often establish a set of rules and expectations generated by the group; therefore, individuals temper their own responses in interactions based on these expectations. While this could be construed as a constraint, Mead (Mead, 1967) asserts that this is an element essential to an understanding of whom the individual is. The individuals sense of self is the result of social interactions, so rather than lessening individuality, this process of social interaction is what creates individuality. Self consciousness thus is

Social Construction and Knowledge Production

The social construction approach provides a theoretical framework that helps us to understand how this online environment encourages critical thinking skills. It focuses on the process of how meaning is created based on social context, language, and social norms in developing an understanding of society (Berger & Luckmann 1966; Burr 1995). Social construction in the online environment takes many forms as a result of the different tools that are used to generate interaction. From the individual perspective student experiences, social context, and dispositions affect the way in which the students interact with the tools available in an online class. These characteristics then influence the different ways in which students apply the critical thinking process in their interactions. Unlike a face to face class, students in the online environment have the opportunity to think about the ways in which they apply language and meaning in writ-

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 ing responses, such as responses to postings on to things such as discussion boards. The social interactions generated in the online environment allow students to develop these important skills by building an understanding that is based on constructed knowledge. Berger and Luckmann (1966) propose that conceptions and understanding are developed through social interactions. Meaning is constructed to maintain or challenge the social consensus. These social meanings are the result of both interactions and social context. The social processes developed through these interactions and context will in turn affect participants perceptions of reality and their understanding. The key components in this process are language and knowledge that is both constituted by and constrained by the individuals who produce it. Social reality and knowledge production are a social construction in this interactive process. Therefore, the critical thinking process that promotes evaluation of information, development of understanding and critical application of knowledge can be viewed as a process of social construction. Participants reflect on their own social position in the context of time and space, generated through asynchronous interaction, and generated in multiple locations. These interactions allow for the creation of shared meaning and generation of new ideas. Students then are able to engage in critical thinking with other students in the course as well as the instructor. The end result of critical thinking in the online environment is the creation of knowledge that results from the social interactions as well as the attributes that the individual uses to generate this knowledge. Based on these theoretical perspectives, online learning provides a unique opportunity to extend the traditional experience of writing into a deliberate tool for promoting critical thinking through an interactive process. When directed activities are embedded within the online learning environment, students can engage in critical thinking through a collaborative rather than individual process. The importance of the use of language through writing provides a framework through which students can enter this reflexive process (Cohen & Spencer, 1993). The elements mentioned in this analysis by no means constitute a comprehensive conception of critical thinking. This analysis is meant to capture what McPeck (1984) called the complexity of everyday problems (p. 35), which can be used to acknowledge the importance of the complexity of the critical thinking process itself through social interaction and social construction. As the online environment continues to be seen as a means to ameliorate pressures that colleges and universities are undergoing, it is important to understand the impact that these instructional methodologies have on how critical thinking is understood as well as its ap-

57 plication in the online classroom. Online programs are available at public, nonprofit and for profit institutions of higher education. Advantages cited about these programs include increased access and cost savings. In the last couple of years, online enrollments have grown exponentially, accounting for over twenty-five percent of all enrollments in some higher education institutions (Allen & Seaman 2010). Despite the tremendous growth in these courses, research on their effectiveness and quality is still needed. Administrators at institutions of higher education are increasingly optimistic about these courses. A survey by the Babson Survey Group for the Sloan Consortium (Allen & Seaman, 2010) found that sixty-six percent of chief academic officers perceived online courses to be as good as or better than face to face courses. However, the effectiveness of these courses and how they are connected to learning outcomes and success is still controversial. A recent study comparing online learning and face to face classes found that certain groups fare worse in online courses than face to face classes (Figlio, Rush & Yin, 2010). These studies show that there is significant work to be done to truly assess the quality and effectiveness of online teaching if it is to serve the purpose of creating a more educated and prepared student population. Because critical thinking often is cited as an important part of the aims of education and because online courses are taught at the community college, university, and graduate level, it is important to begin to understand the different ways in which faculty and students are creating vibrant and relevant critical thinking discourse in the online environment. The process of knowledge production that is available in this delivery method can help both faculty and students to enter into a reflexive dialectical process that enriches not only the interaction online, but can extend to the classroom through web enhanced assignments (Valima & Hoffman, 2008).

Analyzing critical thinking exercises from a multidisciplinary perspective

Several articles analyze the different ways in which researchers assess online courses and the learning that takes place in them. These reviews demonstrate that the understanding of what online research is varies widely. There are also significant differences as they related to technology, access, technical support for faculty and the population of students who take these courses as well (Tallent-Runnels et al., 2006). However, the tools available to incorporate this process provide an important means in which to re-imagine the ways by which critical thinking is developed and how knowledge is created in the online classroom.

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES thinking still happening? In constructing a post students access their personal experiences and knowledge. However, if the purpose of an online discussion board is to develop interactions that result in critical thinking, then interaction beyond an initial response to the question posted needs to be achieved. Another important aspect of discussion boards is the mediation provided by the instructor. Mediated discussion boards are those in which faculty actively participate in mediating posts. Mediation allows for increased accountability, reflection, and purposeful discussion for students (Greenlaw & DeLoach, 2003). In promoting critical thinking that focuses on the evaluation and understanding of material to generate their own views, unmediated discussion boards could have the unintended effect of allowing students to promote claims that are unsubstantiated and diminish the overall critical thinking that may be produced in a discussion post. Mediation is therefore the preferred mode used by faculty in the discussion boards. However, this intervention strategy needs to be balanced with an understanding of the instructor as guide rather than as the source for answers. Too much intervention by a faculty member in the online environment can stifle the collaborative critical thinking process generated by students. Too little intervention can result in posts that do not extend or challenge students thinking. Students critical thinking is enhanced by having students respond to one another, thereby generating the type of discussion that is often encouraged in the face to face environment. The following discussion board examples provide instances of how to evaluate the critical thinking process in the online environment. This multidisciplinary sampling provides insights into strategies that are necessary to engage students in the critical thinking process in the online environment. Each of the different disciplines applies elements that are connected to their learning outcomes. They also share important elements that create an online environment where students socially construct meaning through social interaction. Economics An analysis of the discussion boards of a web enhanced course by Greenlaw & DeLoach (2003) was based on a taxonomy that focused on different levels of critical thinking in an economics course. They categorized the levels in a rubric that focused on specific demonstrated skills in discussion boards. These included categories that assessed posts as having simple facts, posts that developed an argument, and posts that drew specific conclusions. These definitions are in line with a traditional understanding of critical thinking that emphasizes logic and argumentation; however, their taxonomy and evaluation of postings aligned with McPecks

Online instruction offers opportunities for critical thinking development, but its implementation has to be deliberate and supported through course outcomes and classroom management. The literature shows a direct relationship between the types of tools used and how they are connected to course requirements (Abrami et al., 2008). In addition, students often report favorable impressions about courses that use technology as part of their instruction (Koeber, 2005). An important element of successful implementation of critical thinking in online courses is the incorporation of explicit critical thinking objectives. (Abrami et al., 2008). These critical thinking learning objectives serve to set the tone for the courses and are a simple step that faculty can take to ensure that critical thinking is part of students expectations in a particular course. The reinforcement of these learning objectives through the use of tools such as discussion boards develops a dynamic interaction where students challenge and collaborate with one another as they learn the course material. The challenge that faculty face as they transition to this modality is to develop the way that they explicitly incorporate critical thinking in the online classroom. The tools provided by the online mediated environment vary depending on the system that a particular school may be using; however, research shows that the role of faculty as creators and mediators is key in managing these online tools.

Discussion Boards
While there are many other tools that can demonstrate critical thinking, such as videos, audio files, presentations, etc., access to these tools is based on the types of technology and support provided at each institution of higher learning. However, discussion boards are very commonly found in online courses, and therefore they can provide a way to assess the role of social interaction and social construction in the critical thinking process in online courses. Because discussion boards are asynchronous they allow for students to reflect in a purposeful way on information. They provide a means for students to think reflectively about the way in which they deliver and present information, and also they enable students to respond to a variety of viewpoints (Greenlaw & Deloach, 2003). While these can be viewed as a traditional writing assignments, they differ in that students are expected to evaluate and assess many viewpoints and respond to them in turn. Discussion boards often are constructed so that the student is to respond to a particular question or analyze a particular issue. This encourages students to make initial postings. If the process stops at that point, is critical

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (1984) argument for the need to address both truth and complexity in critical thinking development. The way in which students interacted in the discussion environment showed that there were important ways in which the interactions allowed for students to engage in collaborative construction of these arguments. The emphasis on complexity in posts demonstrated that students were engaged in a process of evaluating information and then developing conclusions that were based on their own thinking, as well as on what others were generating. Overall, their study found that students demonstrated critical thinking skills through the interactions provided in the discussion boards. History Lyons (2004) examination of the role of discussion boards in his history class, was based on setting clear parameters about what the expectations were for each of the required posts. Specific guidelines provided deadlines, expected length of discussions, as well as criteria for replies to other students posts. The discussion boards were based on the use of original historical documentation that students had to discuss. They were expected to reflect on the material and on the different ways in which other students posted about it in the online environment. This generated increased social interaction between participants and allowed for them to engage in critical thinking skills through this a collaborative process. Lyons (2004) claims that the use of discussion boards created a safe forum for students to participate more actively in the online environment than they would have in a face to face class. The emphasis on clear expectations about how to engage in the process of discussion provided an opportunity for students to deliberate and assess information in an environment that promoted the use of critical analysis rather than just stating opinions. Sociology Sociology often deals with controversial topics that require students to engage in the critical thinking processes and develop what is called the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination becomes evident in the connections that students make between their own experiences and what they observe in society. Persell (2004) developed a study that sought to assess different aspects of the collaborative critical thinking process. Students were asked to participate by posting discussions both before and after class meetings, and students were encouraged to evaluate postings by other students in a reflective way. A three point scale was used to assess complexity in the writing by students. The scale measured how sociological the writing was as well as the complexity of thought. Compared to previous classes,

59 Persell found that students were much more engaged in the critical thinking process through the online discussion boards. Directing them to post before class encouraged students to organize the ways in which they thought about the different issues being addressed in class. The requirement to post after class allowed for students to reassess their initial assumptions and to evaluate what other students had written. The frequency of these expected interactions created an environment where students had to actively participate and engage other students. The analysis also showed that students that who were silent in the face to face class actively participated in the online environment. Their interactions allowed for them to socially construct meaning from two different perspectives, posts before class and posts after class. This type of discussion board promoted the evaluation and assessment of information as well as increased participation by students who may not have been as comfortable in voicing their understanding of material in the face to face class. As the findings from these different studies show, this tool allows for a reflexive exchange of ideas in the evaluation of information and critical application of knowledge. This construction of meaning through social interaction fostered by emphasis on complexity, clear guidelines, and promoting increased participation can make discussion boards an effective means to encourage critical thinking in the online environment.

Conclusions
Discussion boards are just one device being used in the online environment that shows promise in promoting critical thinking. This tool is effective because it is based on social interaction both amongst students and through the creation of information that is posted. Following best practices for discussion boards allows students to apply the critical thinking process to information presented and gives the instructor a sense of how material is being understood in a class. Discussion boards that provide for a reflexive exchange of information among students give them flexibility and an ability to question and justify their own understanding of concepts by allowing students to become experts as they evaluate ideas from other classmates. This interactive process leads to social construction and knowledge production resulting from a critical thinking process that is purposeful, has set parameters, and is mediated by the instructor. These interactions are similar to those that one would expect to find in the face to face classroom. The growth of online learning gives faculty and students a means to engage in the critical thinking process in a new ways. By focusing on the importance of social interactions in critical thinking development, we can

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INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Brookfield, S. D. (1987). Developing critical thinkers: Challenging adults to explore alternative ways of thinking and acting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishing. Burr, V. (1995). An introduction to social constructionism. London: Routledge. Greenlaw, S. A., & DeLoach, S. B. (2003). Teaching critical thinking with electronic discussion. The Journal of Economic Education, 34(1), 36-52. Edge, W. D., & Loegering, J. P. (2000). Distance education: Expanding learning opportunities. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 28(3), 522-533. Ennis, R. H. (1962). A concept of critical thinking. Harvard Educational Review, 32, 81-111. Ennis, R. H. (1989). Critical thinking and subject specificity: Clarification and needed research. American Educational Research Association, 18(3), 4-10. Farber, J. (1998). The third circle: On education and distance learning. Sociological Perspectives, 41(4), 797-814. Figlio, D. N., Rush, M., & Yin, Lu. (2010). Is it live or is it internet? Experimental estimates of the effects of online instruction on student learning. (NBER Working Paper 16089). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from www.nber.org/papers/w16089 Halpern, D. F. (2003) Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains. American Psychologist, 53(4), 449-455. Koeber, C. (2005). Introducing multimedia presentations and a course website to an introductory sociology course: How technology affects student perceptions of teaching effectiveness. Teaching Sociology, 33(3), 285-300. Larreamendy-Joerns, J., & Leinhardt, G. (2006). Going the distance with online education. Review of Educational Research, 76(4), 567-605. Lea, S. J., & Callaghan, L. (2008). Lecturers on teaching with the supercomplexity of higher education. Higher Education, 56(5), 171-187. Lyons, J. F. (2004). Teaching U.S. history online: Problems and prospects. The History Teacher, 37(4), 447-456. Makoe, M., Richardson, J. T. E., & Price, L. (2008). Conceptions of learning in adult students embarking on distance education. Higher Education, 55(3), 303-320. McPeck, J. E. (1984). Stalking beasts, but swatting flies: The teaching of critical thinking. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de leducation, 9(1), 28-44. Mead, G. H (1967, original 1934). Works of George Herbert Mead Volume 1: Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Charles Morris (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nieto, A. M., & Saiz, C. (2010). Critical thinking: A question of aptitude and attitude? Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, 25(2), 19-25. Persell, C. H. (2004). Using focus web-based discussions to enhance student engagement and deep understanding. Teaching Sociology, 32(1), 61-68. Powell, R., & Keen, C. (2006). The axiomatic trap: Stultifying myths in distance education. Higher Education, 52(2), 283-201.

begin to see how the reflexive nature of online posting allows for collaboration amongst faculty and students. While elements of critical thinking may differ in scope for certain disciplines, it is interesting to see that even though the tools, such as discussion boards, are being used by different disciplines, there are observable similarities in the ways in which students socially construct an understanding of the information provided. As technology improves and the tools for online learning continue to be refined, the opportunities for further study of how critical thinking can be infused in courses will continue. While the benefits of online learning are considerable, there are some limitations to what can be done in the online environment. Student dispositions, prior skills, set and prior knowledge definitely can affect their engagement in the critical thinking process. The multiple social contexts in an online environment, as well as their real environment also affect a students understanding of the process of learning and critical thinking (Makoe et al., 2008). Quality of instruction should remain an important issue in evaluation of these classes as online learning expands access to students. Positive perceptions of online classes will continue to increase if instruction successfully integrates critical thinking processes. However, faculty development processes and reevaluation of traditional learning axioms used in the face to face classroom need to be re-imagined to be used effectively in the online environment (Powell & Keen, 2006; Lea & Callaghan, 2008). Through an understanding of how social interaction and social construction are a part of critical thinking, the tools provided in online learning can be used effectively to engage students in this process.

References
Abrami, P. C., Bernard, R. M., Boroskhovski E., Wade, A., Surkes, M. A., Tamim, R., & Zhang, D. (2008). Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: A stage 1 meta-analysis. American Educational Research Association, 78(4), 1102-1134. Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2010). Class differences: Online education in the United States. Retrieved from sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/pdf/class_differences.pdf Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Bernard, R. M., Abrami, P. C., Lou, Y., Borokhovski, E., Wade, A., Wozney, L., Wallet, P. A., Fiset, M., & Huang, B. (2004). How does distance education compare with classroom instruction? Review of Educational Research, 74(3), 379-339.

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Tallent-Runnels, M. K., Thomas, J., William, Y. L., Cooper, S., Terrence, C. A., Shaw, S. M., & Xiaoming, L. (2006). Teaching courses online: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 93-135. Valimaa, J., & Hoffman, D. (2008). Knowledge society discourse and higher education. Review of Educational Research, 74(3), 256-285.

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Author Information
Idolina Hernandez received her Master of Arts degree from Boston College. She is a professor of Sociology and Lead Faculty in the Sociology Department at Lone Star College-Cy Fair where she teaches Sociology courses, both face to face and online. She can be contacted at Idolina.hernandez@lonestar.edu.

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Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psychology

by David Levy Waveland Press, 2009, Second Edition, 298 pages
Reviewed by Heather M. Mong and Benjamin A. Clegg David Levys Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psychology offers readers a broad array of pitfalls in critical thinking as well as antidotes to enhance rational thought. This is a quick and well-written read that includes insights from social and cognitive psychology, and also clinical practice. The presentation is interesting, and the style engaging. The book is aimed at current and future practitioners and scientists within psychology, and also contains many important and useful elements for those outside the field. Potential flaws in critical thinking are addressed through a review of 30 errors, fallacies, effects, biases, and heuristics, and Levy then offers some steps you can take to try to detect or avoid those problems. Essentially problems are identified as occurring within two major groups: (1) scientific or logical errors and (2) errors arising from the general nature of human cognition. Scientific or logical errors occur when there is either a misunderstanding of the workings of the natural world or a faulty conclusion is drawn from improper reasoning. These are mistakes that should typically be discussed in experimental methods or introductory psychology courses. An error from this group is equating correlation with causation. It is easy, although frequently wrong, to find a relationship between factors and assume that one is leading to the other. Levy uses the example that, although depression tends to be correlated with low self-esteem, it is impossible to say if low self-esteem causes depression, or if having depression leads to having a lower self-esteem, or if there is some other cause possibly leading to both low self-esteem and depression. However, as is often the case throughout the book, Levys explanation of the error is fairly narrow and somewhat shallow, and for this particular topic that means there is surprisingly limited exploration of the tricky concept of causation (Taylor, 1967). Levy offers a little discussion of the basis for this type of thought error in the context of his examples, and he also highlights its relation to the formation of superstitions. The thought process, or antidote, that Levy recommends to counter this type of thinking is to be mindful of whether the relationship between events had a definite causal nature or was just a correlation, and in the case of a correlation, to be sure to consider alternate explanations. Another logical error covered is the nominal fallacy, which occurs when simply giving a name or label to something is thought to explain it, and the associated tendency to apply tautological reasoning. The texts examples in this category are largely psychological disorders, like insomnia Why does she have difficulty falling or staying asleep? Because she has insomnia. The prescribed antidote is to remember that having a name for a thing is not the same as having an explanation for that thing. To give some sense of the brevity of Levys treatment, this whole topic is covered in the book with two pages of text, some quotations, an exercise, and a glossary of terms which stretch the chapter across a total of five pages. You can quickly pick up the chapter, read it, and move on, but the exploration is not deep, nor are you directed to sources where you could find greater detail (one place to start for a greater discussion of such fallacies would be Hansen & Pinto, 1995). In discussing reification errors, in which abstract concepts or constructs are treated as concrete things, Levy classifies theories as either being event theories or construct theories. Event theories are directly measurable while construct theories can only be indirectly measured. Further, Levy defines event theories as being provable with construct theories as being unprovable as a consequence of their indirect, abstract nature. The reification of theories occurs when construct theories are treated as event theories, which can lead to outdated and empirically unsupported theories that have long overstayed their welcome (12). Not surprisingly, the antidote for the reification theory is to not treat abstract concepts as real objects. A closer examination of Levys classification of theories raises a few questions. An event theory is only a theory so long as it is not verified or proven; the moment the theory does get verified or proven it becomes a fact. Many event theories seem then better described as possible answers to unanswered questions (i.e., Who is responsible for committing these serial murders?, 11) rather than scientific theory. Is there truly a need to define a path to a fact as a distinct type of theory? Levys examples of what he considers construct theories were in the form of what the theories try to account for, and included some from physics, like magnetism and electricity, as well as some from psychology, like cognition and personality. While the examples from physics and psychology are both impossible to directly observe through the senses, Levys physics examples, like electricity, are often far more understood at a fundamental

SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1 level than psychological constructs like personality. To say that these are equally intangible seems to be oversimplifying, and perhaps even misrepresenting, the nature of the two fields and the range of phenomena being theorized about in both disciplines. Ultimately Levy suggests that construct theories be evaluated in terms of their utility, which raises the question of the utility of Levys own theory about theories. At the very least there has to be some question about what clarity is gained from the presence of this complex issue within the context of this book. Reinventing theories seems to demand a much fuller discussion of the philosophy of science classification of theories and laws (Carnap, 1974; Popper, 1959). The second broad group of errors Levy discusses are those related to general thought processes. These are the logical short-cuts, or heuristics, that the human mind employs to deal with the complexity of the world in a quick and efficient manner (e.g., Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Many psychology students will encounter these in greater detail in a cognitive psychology class. An example from this group is the hindsight bias, in which, after having knowledge of the actual outcome of an event, persons feel they previously had accurately predicted that outcome (Fischhoff & Beyth, 1975). The antidote for this bias is the empirically based (Slovic & Fischhoff, 1977) advice of generating alternative outcomes for the event. Importantly, as discussed by Slovic and Fischhoff, this antidote served only to reduce the hindsight bias, not do away with it altogether. More recent evidence suggests that there is a metacognitive component linked to how surprising the outcome of the event is. The relationship between surprise and the extent of the bias is that bias is reduced for unsurprising outcomes (Nestler & Egloff, 2009; Pezzo, 2003). Consequently, people would need to be more wary of the hindsight bias for outcomes which surprise them than for those event outcomes that do not. To us these findings suggest depth and nuances for this potential antidote that are simply not present in Levys discussion. Although Levy carefully picks his words, it seems like a more direct statement on the limitations of the antidote being offered could have left the reader more informed. This book is well-written and very accessible, and is liberally sprinkled with humor. The examples are straightforward and offer just enough detail to get a general idea of each concept. This book seems especially valuable to someone learning about these errors for the first time, with approachable explanations that are clear and concise. Levy clearly has a gift for explaining complex concepts in ways that those outside the field can readily grasp. The structure also allows readers to dip into essentially stand-alone chapters, to learn about concepts or review them without needing to read earlier or later sections.

63 This book is particularly valuable in terms of its content and approach. There are a number of very good books highlighting problems and flaws within our thinking (e.g., Ariely & Jones, 2008; Chabris & Simons, 2010; Gladwell, 2005), others focused on applying metacognitive research as a whole into education (e.g., Fogarty, 1994; Hacker, Dunlosky, & Graesser, 1998; Waters, Schneider, & Borkowski, 2009), as well as books that try to teach readers to apply metacognitive findings to general life (e.g., Perfect & Schwartz, 2002). Levys book serves an almost unique role in focusing on practical insights for improving critical thinking specifically as it relates to psychology and daily life. Further, the separate audiences Levy tries to reach with this book are varied in their critical thinking training, and this text does seem relevant to some degree for all of them. The antidotes to the errors, while clearly necessary in a book designed to provide tools to enhance critical thinking, are rarely empirically supported, either in describing the antidote itself, or in documenting the effectiveness of the antidote in preventing the error-prone thought pattern. Of course, this generally points to gaps in the field of psychology. The need to examine the effectiveness of training in overcoming confirmation bias has been suggested (Nickerson, 1998), but it has thus far only been considered and examined in specific contexts (e.g., Arnott, 2006; Larrick, 2004). These studies go beyond the type of approach exemplified in this book, by including a training period in which people are provided with specific feedback based on how biased their choice was. Where the data do exist, there is often then reason to employ at least some of the skepticism and critical thinking that this book so valuably promotes to consider whether mere exposure to the suggested antidotes produces significant improvements in thinking. Improving critical thinking needs to be based on what does and does not work, and merely offering a suggestion that is simply the opposite of the error may not be effective. Levy intends that this book is for psychology (and other fields as well) students and instructors, psychotherapists, and psychological researchers. Given the large variety of thought errors identified and the brevity with which each is covered, the book does seem targeted towards being used as an introductory supplement for those who will be getting more depth later in their educational career or those with interest but no formal background. But developing critical thinking in individuals without content knowledge of an area is problematic (Willingham, 2007). It is not always clear how much value will be obtained for those students who will go on to content classes in the discipline of psychology. Many of these elements appear in one guise or another within standard textbooks in research methods, abnormal psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and a variety

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Baker, J., & Dunlosky, J. (2006). Does momentary accessibility influence metacomprehension judgments? The influence of study-judgment lags on accessibility effects. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 60-65. Bjork, R. A. (1999). Assessing our own competence: Heuristics and illusions. In D. Gopher, & A. Koriat (Eds.), Attention and performance XVII: Cognitive regulation of performance: Interaction of theory and application (pp. 435-459). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Carnap, R. (1974). An introduction to the philosophy of science. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. Chabris, C. & Simons, D. (2010). The invisible gorilla: And other ways our intuitions deceive us. London: HarperCollins. Dunlosky, J., & Lipko, A. (2007). Metacomprehension: A brief history and how to improve its accuracy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 228-232. Fischhoff, B., & Beyth, R. (1975). I knew it would happen: Remembered probabilities of once-future things. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13, 1-16. Flavel, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911. Fogarty, R. J. (1994). How to teach metacognitive reflection (Mindful School). Glenview, IL: Corwin Press. Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press. Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Hacker, D., Dunlosky, J., & Graesser, A. (Eds.) (1998). Metacognition in educational theory and practice. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hansen, H. V., & Pinto, R. C. (1995). Fallacies: Classical and contemporary readings. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Larrick, R. P. (2004). Debiasing. In D. Koehler, & N. Harvey (Eds.) Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Marking (pp. 316-357). Oxford: Blackwell. Nelson, T. O. (1996). Consciousness and metacognition. American Psychologist, 51, 102-116. Nestler, S., & Egloff, B. (2009). Increased or reversed? The effect of surprise on hindsight bias depends on the hindsight component. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 1539-1544. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2, 175-220. Schwartz, B. L. & Perfect, T. J. (2002). Toward an applied metacognition. In T. J. Perfect, & B. L. Schwartz (Eds.) Applied metacognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pezzo, M. V. (2003). Surprise, defence, or making sense: What removes hindsight bias? Memory, 11, 421-441. Popper, K. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. New York: Routledge Classics. Slovic, P., & Fischhoff, B. (1977). On the psychology of experimental surprises. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3, 544-551.

of philosophy courses. In an academic psychology context this book might best serve as a single source for course instructors, highlighting and illustrating a number of essential ideas that should be getting additional coverage. While the book would undoubtedly be beneficial for this audience, there are features that detract from the potential impact, including the lack of depth in places when exploring concepts, and the absence of data or concrete examples to demonstrate whether problems identified are central and common ones. We both also soon abandoned doing the large number of fairly trivial exercises. If this book is to be used to teach critical thinking, then it would need to be one part of a larger curriculum designed around this goal. An improvement in scholastic ability from metacognitive training requires integration of the thinking about thinking (Flavel, 1979) at almost every level in the course (White & Frederiksen, 1998). It is quite likely that the same integrative approach would be necessary in promoting critical thinking in students. Indeed one puzzling omission from a book about metathoughts is the absence of discussion of work on metacognition. Metacognition is a burgeoning branch of experimental psychology which is concerned with how people think about their own thoughts (Flavel, 1979). People frequently misjudge their competence at a task (e.g., Bjork, 1999) or misjudge their thoughts in general (Nelson, 1996). The book might benefit from integrating a fuller discussion of relevant findings from metacognitive research (e.g., Baker & Dunlosky, 2006; Dunlosky & Lipko, 2007), especially to give a sense that reflecting on our own thinking is not straightforward and is subject to errors itself. In closing, Tools for Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psychology by David A. Levy provides the reader with 30 common thinking errors and suggests ways to avoid them to enhance critical thinking in psychology. This is a quick, clear, and overall mechanically wellwritten book. The recommended methods for avoiding the thought errors are frequently just instructions not to commit the error, and the ultimate effectiveness of such an approach to avoiding many of these errors is questionable. This book could serve as supplemental material to an introductory level course or as a brief refresher for more advanced students and practitioners.

References
Ariely, D., & Jones, S. (2008). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions. New York: Harper. Arnott, D. (2006). Cognitive biases and decision support systems development: A design science approach. Information Systems Journal, 16, 55-78.

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Taylor, R. (1967). Causation. In P. Edwards (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (pp. 56-66). New York: Macmillan. Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1973). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Oxford: Cambridge University Press. Waters, H. S., Schneider, W., & Borkowski, J. G. (Eds.), (2009). Metacognition, strategy use, and instruction. New York: The Guilford Press. White, B. Y., & Frederiksen, J. R. (1998). Inquiry, modeling, and metacognition: Making science accessible to all students. Cognition and Instruction, 16, 3-118. Willingham, D. T. (2007). Critical thinking: Why is it so hard to teach? American Educator, Summer, 8-19.

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Author Information
Heather Mong is a cognitive psychology graduate student working with Ben Clegg at Colorado State University. Her research has focused on the nature of the knowledge gained from implicit learning, or learning information without conscious awareness of what is being learned. Ben Clegg is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Colorado State University. He teaches courses that include Cognitive Psychology and Applied Research Methods. His research looks at both basic and applied aspects of cognition and human performance. Correspondence should be addressed to: Ben Clegg, Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, 1876 Campus Delivery, Fort Collins, CO 805231876. Email: Benjamin.clegg@colostate.edu.

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From Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), p. x: The modern world is a noxious environment for those of us bothered by logical error. People may have become no worse at reasoning, but now they have so many more opportunities to show off how bad they are. ( ) Why are we protesters so lonely? Why dont the other consumers of all this defective thinking complain to their supplier, and to whoever else will listen, as they would if their washing machines leaked or their cars wouldnt start? The simple answer is that most people dont notice the problem.

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