This
website includes resources for educators to help develop the critical
thinking skills of their students. The Skill of thinking critically is a
most important skill for the twenty-first century.
 Center of Critical Thinking
Library
This library of articles provides primary and secondary educators with a range of
articles on critical thinking. Articles include information on the basic elements,
traits, and standards of critical thinking.
Collaborative Learning
Enhances Critical Thinking
This article discusses a study that examines the effectiveness of individual
learning versus collaborative learning in enhancing drill-and-practice skills and
critical-thinking skills.
Constructivism: A Path to Critical
Thinking in Early Childhood
The constructivist teacher sees critical thinking as the heart of the teaching and
learning process in contrast to the reductionist and developmentalist points of view.
Critical Thinking
This page presents several ideas on developing critical thinking skills. These ideas
include: Thinking as Asking; But What Are the Questions?; Summary and Definition
Questions; and Analysis, Hypothesis, and Evaluation Questions.
Critical
Thinking and English Language Arts Instruction
In this paper the author argues that the current national focus on critical thinking is
unnecessarily narrow in its scope, and that this mitigates against essential changes being
made in the thinking and reasoning activities students in the nation's schools will have
the opportunity to experience.
Critical
Thinking Resources: An Annotated Bibliography
The listings in this bibliography are organized into the following categories:
Bibliographies and Selection Aids, Professional Books, Methodology Texts,
Activities/Manipulatives, Audio/Visuals, and Computer Software/Multimedia. Within each
group, accessions are arranged alphabetically by author with brief descriptions of the
items. The index alphabetically lists items by title.
Critical
Thinking in an Online World
Using the model of the expert
and apprentice, librarians need to focus on the teaching of critical
thinking skills, over and above the more
mechanistic skills of evaluation of resources and mastery of search tools.
The design of instruction in a situated learning environment, utilizing
constructivist tenets and a self-directed inquiry based approach leads to
higher order cognitive skills and applicable, transferable learning. An
instructional design project for teaching critical
thinking skills in the evaluation of online
resources is described as an example curriculum.
Education
and Learning to Think
This paper addresses the question of what American schools can do to more effectively
teach what have come to be called "higher thinking skills."
Graphic Organizers
This site links you to various graphic organizers, such as: Chain of Events,
Clustering. Compare/Contrast, Continuum, Cycle, Family Tree, Fishbone, Interaction
Outline, Problem/Solution, Spider Map, Storyboard, Venn Diagram, Graphic Organizers,
Semantic Mapping for Concept Formation, KWHL Technique, Anticipation/Reaction Guide, The
Concept Mapping Homepage, and Student Examples of Graphic Organizers.
Helping Students Assess
Their Thinking
This site discusses the two essential dimensions of thinking that students need to master
in order to learn how to upgrade their thinking.
The
Puzzler
This is a collection of 60 puzzlers to challenge your brain...
Socratic Teaching
This article suggests that the use of Socratic teaching is the oldest and most powerful
teaching tactic for fostering critical thinking.
Strategy
List: 35 Dimensions of Critical Thinking
This site lists 35 dimensions of critical thinking. The strategies include the following
categories: Affective Strategies, Cognitive Strategies - Macro-Abilities, and Cognitive
Strategies - Micro-Skills.
Tactical and
Structural Recommendations
This site lists 16 recommendations for developing critical thinking.
Teacher Resources to
Develop Critical Thinking
The Center for Critical Thinking has created a wealth of information including
instructional guides and lesson plans to help educators implement Critical Thinking in
every aspect of their teaching.
Using Intellectual
Standards to Assess Student Reasoning
To assess student reasoning requires that we focus our attention as teachers on two
inter-related dimensions of reasoning. The first dimension consists of the elements of
reasoning; the second dimension consists of the universal intellectual standards by which
we measure student ability to use, in a skillful way, each of those elements of reasoning.
This site deals with 8 basic conditions of the elements of reasoning.
What Is a
Thinking
Curriculum?
This article looks at the characteristics of the thinking curriculum. It also contains
some guidelines to promote thinking throughout the curriculum.
What You Measure Is What
You Get
The title of the article tells it all.
Why Students-and
Teachers-Don't Reason Well
This essay, written by Richard Paul, takes issue with the manner in which people -
including educated people - reason.
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