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Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett
a person might exhibit critical thinking, without requiring that a decision so
reached actually be implemented.
To sum up the “skills-and-judgments” view, we can think of cognitive critical
thinking skills as involving
interpretation, analysis, inference, explanation, evalu-
ation
, and some element of
metacognition
or
self-regulation
(Facione, Sanchez,
Facione, and Gainen 1995, 3; Halonen 1995, 92–93). These facets of critical
thinking are all in the Delphi list. This is sometimes collectively known as the
“skills-based” view of critical thinking.
A taxonomy of critical thinking skills
At this point, categorizing these skills would seem to be useful. We shall use
the framework by Wales and Nardi (1984) and borrowed by Halonen (1995).
Cognitive critical thinking skills as such can be seen as falling under four
main categories:
lower-level thinking skills
(which might be called “foundation”
thinking),
thinking skills
(or “higher level” thinking),
complex thinking skills,
and
thinking about thinking
or metacognitive skills. “Identifying an assumption,” for
example, is clearly less difficult—and requires fewer cognitive resources—than
say “analyzing a claim” or “drawing an inference.” There might be debate about
which skill belongs in which category, but there is little doubt that some cogni-
tive skills are demonstrably more sophisticated than others (see table 0.1):
There is considerable degree of unanimity in the literature on many of the
cognitive skills involved in critical thinking, if not the degree of importance
accorded to each. In any event, the view that critical thinking involves both
(1) rigorous argumentation, assessing propositions, analyzing inferences, iden-
tifying flaws in reasoning, and so on and (2) judgment
formation
is pervasive.
However, as noted, despite its importance, when applied to the higher educa-
tion context (as opposed to a philosophical context), there has been a tendency
to define critical thinking far too narrowly.
Table 0.1
Critical thinking skills
Lower-level
thinking skills
(“Foundation”)
Higher-level
thinking skills
Complex
thinking
skills
Thinking
about thinking
Interpreting
Identifying assumptions
Asking questions for
clarification
Analyzing claims
Synthesizing claims
Predicting
Evaluating
arguments
Reasoning
verbally
Inference
making
Problem
solving
Metacognition
Self-regulation
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