3

DEFIN ING, T EAC HIN G, AND

ASSESSIN G CRITICAL THI NKING

So far, you have read about the origins of critical think-

ing as a distinct concept and how increasing our ability
to reason well became an important societal goal and
educational priority. You also learned about knowledge,
skills, and dispositions many researchers and educators
have identified as being required to become a critical
thinker.
Since few people would argue against the need for
more critical thinking applied to the world’s problems,
most discussions about the subject among educators, em-
ployers, and policymakers are over how to achieve needed
increases in critical-thinking ability. The previously men-
tioned analysis that says more than three quarters of em-
ployers believe the graduates they hire lack this crucial
ability, one that almost all teachers and professors claim
to be prioritizing, represents a gap to explore as we look at
important issues surrounding the ways critical thinking
can be defined, taught, and assessed.

Can Critical Thinking Be Defined?

When introducing the genealogy of critical thinking, I

mentioned how attempts to define the term have shed
light on a number of important matters, ones that relate
directly to how (or even whether) critical thinking can be
taught and assessed.

Differing Definitions
Lack of a consensus definition does not mean no one has
any idea what you are talking about when you mention
“critical thinking.” Rather, there are many competing defi-
nitions developed at different times that focus on differ-
ent priorities.
You have already encountered some attempts to de-
fine the term, including John Dewey’s 1910 definition of
reflective thinking as “active, persistent, and careful con-
sideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in
the light of the grounds that support it and the further
conclusions to which it tends,” as well as Edward Glaser’s
1941 multifaceted description of critical thinking as “(1)
an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful
way the problems and subjects that come within the range

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of one’s experiences, (2) knowledge of the methods of logi-
cal inquiry and reasoning, and (3) some skill in applying
those methods.”
These definitions are echoed in the 1983 California
requirement that all graduates of state colleges and uni-
versities complete a critical-thinking course that teaches
“an understanding of the relationship of language to logic,
leading to the ability to analyze, criticize and advocate ideas,
reason inductively and deductively, and reach factual or
judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn
from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief.”
The Foundation for Critical Thinking, the afore-
mentioned California-based nonprofit that has worked
on critical-thinking education for decades, has another
definition that incorporates several priorities, including
metacognition (thinking about your own thinking) and
overcoming bias, which they characterize as arising in-
ternally (egocentrism) and externally (sociocentrism). The
foundation defines critical thinking as

that mode of thinking—about any subject, content,

or problem—in which the thinker improves the
quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing,
assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking
is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored,
and self- corrective thinking. It presupposes
assent to rigorous standards of excellence and

DEFINING, TEAC HING, AND ASSESSING CR ITICAL THIN KIN G 103

 mindful command of their use. It entails effective
communication and problem- solving abilities,
as well as a commitment to overcome our native
egocentrism and sociocentrism.1

In a literature review of academic works, Emily Lai, a

researcher for the educational publisher Pearson, identi-
fies over a dozen different definitions for critical thinking
emerging from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and
education.2 These include

“reflective and reasonable thinking that is focused on

deciding what to believe or do”3;

“thinking that is goal directed and purposive, ‘thinking

aimed at forming a judgment,’ where thinking itself
meets standards of adequacy and accuracy”4; and

“the mental processes, strategies, and representations

people use to solve problems, make decisions, and learn
new concepts.”5

Lai, Matthew Ventura, and Kristen DiCerbo from

Pearson, working with the educational nonprofit Partner-
ship for 21st Century Learning, also published a paper
titled “Skills for Today: What We Know about Teach-
ing and Assessing Critical Thinking.”6 This document
proposes a complete framework for how to think about

104 CHAPTER 3
critical thinking, one that emphasizes measurable skills
over harder- to-evaluate dispositions in pursuit of the
practical goal of creating curriculum and assessment for
critical-thinking education programs.
One of the most widely cited definitions of criti-
cal thinking came from a 1990 research study led by
Dr. Peter Facione. Dr. Facione worked with forty-six US
and Canadian critical-thinking educators, half of whom
were associated with philosophy departments and half
from the physical and social sciences, to create a consen-
sus definition for critical thinking and the associated prac-
tices and qualities necessary to become a critical thinker.
This consensus was reached via a structured process for
decision-making and forecasting known as the Delphi
method, which led to the “Delphi Report,”7 in which criti-
cal thinking was defined as

purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results

in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference,
as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual,
methodological, criteriological, or contextual
considerations upon which that judgment is based.

While these definitions vary, and some definitions pri-

oritize certain elements over others, it would be a stretch to
say they are so different from one another that no consen-
sus can be reached regarding what critical thinking is. The

DEFINING, TEAC HING, AND ASSESSING CR ITICAL THIN KIN G 105

three-part nature of critical thinking mentioned in the last
chapter—knowledge, skills, and dispositions— certainly
encompasses most of the definitions listed above.
Some definitions (like Pearson’s) prioritize knowl-
edge and skills over dispositions, while others (like that
of the Foundation for Critical Thinking) stress individual
responsibility for monitoring and improving one’s own
thinking. Such variability of priorities, however, should be
seen as a sign of a healthy debate rather than a crippling
lack of definition. The teaching of traditional subjects like
language and math also vary and evolve, as attested to by
changes in educational standards over the decades, and
the elements that fit into various critical-thinking defini-
tions are considerably fewer in number than those making
up more expansive fields like biology.
What is “in” or “out” regarding critical thinking is the
most substantive aspect of these definitional debates. You
have already read arguments as to why certain subjects
(or subsets of those subjects) like information literacy,
rhetoric, and creativity should be given a home under the
mantle of critical thinking. While some might disagree
with the extent of their inclusion, they do not threaten
the goal of the critical-thinking project: to create autono-
mous individual actors capable of thinking systematically
and independently.
But what about ideas that challenge this goal?

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The goal of the
critical-thinking project
is to create autonomous
individual actors
capable of thinking
systematically and
independently. But what
about ideas that
challenge this goal?
Individual versus Group Thinking
Peter Elbow, professor emeritus of English at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts, teaches writing via a two-step
process. The first consists of “freewriting and fast explor-
atory writing,” which he describes as “the postponing of
vigilance and control during the first stage of writing”
in favor of open-ended inspiration and exploration of
hunches. Only after this unstructured writing process is
complete would a writer take a structured approach to
his or her work, often through interactive group critiqu-
ing sessions modeled on processes associated with group
therapy.8
Rather than separate these two stages into undisci-
plined/creative versus structured/critical, Elbow refers to
them as first-order and second-order thinking, each with
its own benefits and role to play in writing and in the gen-
eral thinking process. In later works, he also developed the
idea that critical thinking, which emphasizes finding flaws
in one’s own thinking or the thinking of others, represents
a “doubting game” that needs to be supplemented by a “be-
lieving game” in which one tries to find strengths even in
seemingly bad reasoning (or writing).9
While Elbow’s ideas have analogs in conventional
critical-thinking practices, such as the role of creativity
and the principle of charity, the benefits of second-stage
thinking taking place in group settings also point to the

108 CHAPTER 3
idea that thinking might be a social act, something that
takes place between people, rather than something occur-
ring entirely in the heads of autonomous individuals. Phi-
losopher Connie Missimer adds that social thinking can
provide “an evolutionary view in which terms like good
and bad, appropriate or reasonable, and critical thinking
are meaningless without historical and social reference
points,”10 highlighting the role social norms might play
even for those trying to think autonomously.
The idea that group-based reasoning and decision-
making processes can equal or even surpass thinking
performed by individuals has precedents—from experi-
ments in democracy over the centuries to the jury system
of today. When performing estimates (like guessing how
many jelly beans are in a jar), for example, averaging many
guesses tends to generate a number closer to the truth
than strategies chosen by individuals to determine the
right count. Cass Sunstein, coauthor of the book Nudge,11
which advocates channeling certain human cognitive bi-
ases toward productive policy goals, also explored group
reasoning in his 2006 book Infotopia: How Many Minds
Produce Knowledge.12 Inspired by the vast expansion of
communication and collaboration capabilities enabled by
the internet, Sunstein tried to determine which group dy-
namics led to superior reasoning and which could cause
destructive “group-think.”

DEFINING, TEAC HING, AND ASSESSING CR ITICAL THIN KIN G 109

 While the mechanisms behind social thinking are less
well understood than the two-thousand- year-old rules of
logic, there is clearly a role for communication and collab-
oration in the critical- thinking process. For definitional
purposes, however, pouring whole new (and complex) cat-
egories of human endeavor into a critical- thinking bucket
runs the risk of overflowing it with elements that might
be only partially relevant to the goal of creating critical
thinkers.

Bigger Picture
An alternative to adding ever more elements to the critical-
thinking construct would be to make critical thinking it-
self a component of something larger.
One of the most well known attempts to create such a
synthesis is the P21 Framework for 21st Century Skills,13
created by the aforementioned Partnership for 21st
Century Learning, which in 2002 organized a coalition
of educators, employers, and government leaders to map
the full range of skills needed by students in the new
millennium. Their complete framework is expansive,
including not just thinking skills but approaches to
content, pedagogy, and assessment. For purposes of
this discussion, however, the P21 framework identifies
critical thinking as one of “Four Cs,” which include critical
thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity
organized as overlapping domains.

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 e P21 framework
identi es critical
thinking as one of
“Four Cs,” which include
critical thinking,
communication,
collaboration, and
creativity.
 Critical Thinking

Creativity Collaboration

Communication

Figure 10

Thinking of these four skills as intersecting versus

subsuming each other provides a practical way to
understand the roles they may or may not play with regard
to one another. For example, an intersection of critical
thinking, collaboration, and communication could define
the skills needed to participate in social reasoning while
leaving room for individual critical- thinking skills outside
this intersection. Similarly, an overlap between critical

112 CHAPTER 3
thinking and creativity could include creative activities
relevant to reflective and scientific thought, such as
conceiving hypotheses and experiments, while still leaving
plenty of nonoverlapping space in the creativity circle for
skills related to purely artistic endeavors.
A different, and more controversial, expanded frame-
work has been developing as critical analysis gets applied
to critical thinking itself. Advocates for this framework
acknowledge the importance of the traditional critical-
thinking practices such as logic and argumentation, which
are associated with what is often called the critical thinking
movement, but also see those practices as just one of several
steps needed to truly function as a reasoning person.
A subsequent step, often referred to as critical peda-
gogy, owes a debt to modern philosophical movements
such as postmodernism and deconstruction that, among
other things, ask questions about what we can really know
given the limitations of the tools at our disposal, especially
language. For example, those associated with the critical
thinking movement and those writing about critical peda-
gogy assign different meanings to the word “critical,” as
Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett note in their introduc-
tion to the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher
Education:

The critical thinking movement theorists had

taken the adjective “critical” to mean “criticism,”

DEFINING, TEAC HING, AND ASSESSING CR ITICAL THIN KIN G 113

 (becoming aware of weaknesses in some claim
or argument). Their aim was putting logic at the
service of clear thinking. The critical pedagogues,
by contrast, took “critical” to mean “critique” (i.e.,
identifying dimensions of meaning that might be
missing or concealed behind some claim or belief
or institution).14

These missing or concealed meanings could include

hidden power structures or assumptions so built into
a culture’s social order that the biases they generate are
unnoticeable. Thus, for the critical pedagogue, the duty
of the critical thinker is to grasp these assumptions and
use that knowledge to expose the hidden structures be-
hind them. Davies and Barnett, in their Palgrave Handbook
introduction, present further steps that could define this
evolving extended pathway, including “critical action,”
which asks those who have been able to pierce the veil cov-
ering aspects of how the world really works to act on that
knowledge to change society for the better.
What kinds of assumptions might be hidden behind
this veil? Picking one relevant to this book, most of the
fields that have inspired critical thinking (classical phi-
losophy, modern science, psychology) and the tools in the
critical thinker’s toolbox (such as logic and argumenta-
tion) originated in Ancient Greece, premodern and mod-
ern Europe while “critical thinking” itself is a concept that

114 CHAPTER 3
evolved originally in the United States. Did the work of
developing conceptions for “critical thinking” unearth
universal truths about human nature, analogous to sci-
entific discoveries about gravity or the atomic nature of
matter, or should they be seen as creations of a particular
(Western) culture? If it is the latter, might there be effec-
tive methods of reasoning from other cultures that should
be considered when teaching thinking skills, or might the
forms of logic we teach represent cultural creations (or
even impositions) rather than universal truths?
In addition to these cultural questions, feminist schol-
ars like Karen J. Warren have written analyses of critical
thinking that, like similar critiques of science, ask whether
the distinctions, hierarchies, and methods of separating
“bad” from “good” evidence and reasoning might repre-
sent binary approaches to knowledge generated by insti-
tutions such as philosophy, science, or the academy itself,
that have been historically dominated by men.15
Those more in agreement with critical thinking move-
ment approaches are not ready to have their pedagogy
reduced to mechanical logics and argumentation method-
ologies, especially given their embrace of nonmechanistic
categories like creativity, personal dispositions, and ethics.
Political agendas chosen by some advocates of critical ped-
agogy and critical action also leave those embracing more
familiar approaches asking whether critical pedagogy and
action represent the natural next steps in the evolution

DEFINING, TEAC HING, AND ASSESSING CR ITICAL THIN KIN G 115

of critical- thinking education or attempts to replace the
teaching of how to think with what to think.
We will leave these interesting topics here, not be-
cause they are politically fraught, but because discussion
of them moves very quickly into complex questions of
epistemology, the branch of philosophy that asks how we
can know anything at all. If you read more about these de-
bates,16 however, notice that, at least for now, proponents
for each side still use the general critical-thinker’s toolbox
(logic, argumentation, persuasive communication) to pre-
sent and argue their views.

Can Critical Thinking Be Taught?

As with questions regarding how critical thinking should

be defined, debates over teaching critical thinking are less
about whether critical- thinking skills can be taught and
more about the best approach for doing so. After all, some
of the most important elements of critical thinking, such
as logic, have been taught for over two thousand years,
far longer than almost any other subject that now makes
up traditional school curricula. So, discussions over the
teaching and learning of critical thinking need to focus on
the when, where, and how rather than whether critical-
thinking skills are teachable at all.

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