Critical Thinking: An Argumentative Analysis

Imagine a college professor providing his students with a broad, abstract question and leaving the students to develop a solution based on the provided question. Those students may find it difficult to develop an appropriate solution as they only view the general aspects of the abstract question. In order to develop a sound solution, these students must employ a different kind of thinking; the kind of thinking that requires a different set of eyes, not in a literal sense, and a different frame of mind. This kind of thinking is known as critical thinking. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze a given situation and to make sound judgments and conclusions based on the given evidence and personal experiences.
Critical thinking is considered …show more content…
While schools promote the idea of critical thinking through the supplement of teaching critical thinking skills, Xiaoli Wang and Huibin Zheng draw a distinction between actual critical thinking versus the teaching of critical thinking skills in their journal article “Critical Thinking: Is It Born or Made”. Wang and Zheng define thinking and skills in a general sense as a “cognitive construction to understand matters, make judgments and problem solve” and “a special ability to do something or something that is teachable”, respectively (1324). Wang and Zheng are attempting to explain that thinking is often used in conjunction with skills, showing that they are equally related. However, this relationship between thinking and skills heavily implies that critical thinking is a set of skills. Daniel Willingham also takes a similar approach to the problem of relating teaching critical thinking as a skill in his article “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach”. He recognizes that “critical thinking is not a set of skills that can be deployed at any time, in any context” (8). These experts are conveying the idea that a student can be taught critical thinking skills such as analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating, but just mastering these skills alone does not make a student a critical thinker. This barrier shows that students can be taught critical thinking skills, but the actual …show more content…
Since the majority of a student’s critical thinking is developed during a student’s education, much of a student’s critical thinking development revolves around the ability of the teacher to effectively implement critical thinking into the curriculum and teach the students about critical thinking. Mohammad Aliakbari and Akram Sadeghdaghighi discuss how teachers and college professors impede critical thinking development in their article “Teachers ' perception of the barriers to critical