LESSON 1: CRITICAL THINKING

Critical vs. Non-critical Thinking

Learning to develop your ability to think critically will help you succeed academically and professionally.

Non-critical thinking happens when you simple accept the things you are told without examining them.
This also happens when you construct thoughts based on emotions. Moreover, this also leads people to
jump to conclusions without proof or evidence.

Critical thinking involves a series of complex thought processes which allows you to make reasoned
judgments, assess the way you think, and solve problems effectively. As a student, you use critical
thinking when you actively listen to the class discussion and formulate questions, when you write your
reports and explain your ideas, and when you make projects and analyse the processes involved.

To differentiate these more easily, see the following example:

What would a critical thinker say? What would a non-critical thinker say?
Based on the verified sources I found, the The solutions to global warming must not be very
solutions to global warming are important, so important despite what my resources may say,
they should also be included in the discussion. because they were not discussed.

LEVELS OF THINKING

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom, an American educational psychologist, together with a team of educational
psychologists, published Blooms Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, which is a system that classifies
the levels of thinking important for learning. This is created to promote higher levels of thinking, is
composed of six levels which follow a successive pattern. This simply means that to proceed to the next
level, the current one must be mastered first. The six levels are: Knowledge, Comprehension,
Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation.

Later on in 2001, Blooms former student, Lorin Anderson, and a group of cognitive psychologists
published a revision to the original taxonomy to make it more relevant to 21 st-century students and
teachers. They changed the names of the levels and used verbs instead of nouns to denote an active
process of thinking. Knowledge, comprehension, and synthesis were renamed remembering,
understanding, and creating, respectively. Aside from this, Anderson et al. also restructured the levels
because creating is a more complex form of thinking than evaluating; thus the revised taxonomy now
features the levels of thinking in the following order: Remembering, Understanding, Applying,
Analyzing, Evaluating and Creating.

Comparison of the Original and the Revised Taxonomy

evaluation creating

synthesis evaluating

analysis analyzing

application applying

comprehension understanding

knowledge remembering

The Old Version The New Version