Helping Your Students Develop Critical Thinking Skills

Teachers strive to help students like Forrest, Ida, and Eric develop stronger thinking skills, and we’ll return to their conversation later in this paper. Better thinking and practical problem solving skills are promised in higher education mission statements, course syllabi, and lists of desired student learning outcomes. There are many ways to talk about thinking skills. Terms such as critical thinking, scientific methods, professional or clinical judgment, problem-based inquiry, decision making, information literacy, strategic planning, and life-long learning represent thinking processes. For almost every profession, scholars and practitioners have put forth models for thinking through problems and offered suggestions for making better professional judgments. Discussions of thinking skills can be found in the education literature, too, including the famous work of Dewey (1933/1963) and Bloom et al. (1956). Unfortunately, while teachers are aware of many of the skills they would like students to exhibit, the steps between typical student performance and desirable performance often remain unarticulated or vague. This limits teachers’ capacities to understand and enhance skill development.