How can I teach critical thinking?

Look under Critical Thinking Resources on our website.  We provide a selection of resources for those engaged in teaching for and about thinking. You'll find discussions of what critical thinking is, lists of research about critical thinking, and practical strategies that have proven valuable for training excellence in reasoning and judgment that can be applied across disciplines and settings, in teaching and training people of all ages, in all nations around the world.

A critical thinking skills test engages you with questions that require you to apply your skills.  Typically a critical thinking test will present some information or a scenario of some kind and then ask questions about it, but the questions will invite you to analyze or interpret the information presented, or to draw a reasonable conclusion based on that information.  A critical thinking dispositions measure typically invites the person to agree or disagree with a series of statements.  You can search and find sample skills test questions and sample disposition items on this website. 

To  build your critical thinking skills and positive habits of mind, work through a critical thinking text book. We highly recommend THINK Critically by Dr. Peter Facione, one of our test authors.  You can purchase that book or one of the many other good critical thinking text books on the market from one of many other online book outlets such as Amazon.com. 

To gain an overview of critical thinking and how the skills and habits of mind go together in problem solving and decision making, we suggest the essay “Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts,” which you can download from our website. Remember, a good critical thinking test is not going to be a test of factual knowledge about critical thinking. Memorizing information and definitions is not the key. A good critical thinking test will engage you in using your critical thinking because critical thinking is a process.  Achieving greater success with critical thinking requires practice. Regularly exercising your critical thinking skills builds strength.