What can be done when a weakness in thinking skills
has been identified in a group of students or workers? People who cannot
think as well as we need them to think, whether they be workers, parents,
children, supervisors, teachers, soldiers, elders
impact the
success of our schools, businesses and society. Is this weakness simply
a matter of their skills, or is it a question of their habits of mind,
that is, their dispositional attitude toward using thinking as a preferred
means of problem solving and decision making. Are they approaching important
problems and decisions with attitudes of closed-mindedness, resistance
to reason, disregard for evidence, indifference to vital information,
mistrust of thinking, indifference toward consequences, and little desire
to attend to the complexities or subtleties of the decisions and problems
at hand?
Just as these troubling and dysfunctional thinking dispositions
can be identified, their opposites, that is the beneficial attitudes
and dispositions toward using thinking, can also be identified -- and
both can be measured. Insight Assessment offers the world's leading
tools for measuring critical thinking habits of mind including the California
Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI), California
Measure of Mental Motivation (CM3), Business
Attitude Inventor (BAI),and the Legal
Studies Reasoning Profile Part 1 (LSRP). Each measurement tool focuses
on a similar array of attitudes and values that influence a person's
capacity to learn and to effectively apply critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking disposition and skills go hand in hand: the "'willing
and able" of human reasoning and problem solving.
Everyone must learn to think well to live happy lives
and to be active and productive members of society. Some people fail
to think well because they lack strong mental habits that encourage
the use of thinking and reasoning to solve problems. Some people have
deficient skills. But nurturing the habits of mind enables strengthening
the skills. And successes in using the skills reciprocates by nourishing
and supporting those positive dispositions, such as truth-seeking, open-mindedness,
a desire to learn, cognitive maturity, a tendency to try to anticipate
of consequences, and warranted confidence in reasoning.
Our common goal as professionals, educators and leaders is to support
the development of individuals and communities that are willing and
able to apply critical thinking in their daily work, studies and lives.
For more on thinking dispositions and how they relate to thinking skills,
click for your free copy of "Critical
Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts."
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