Developing a Critical Thinking Mind
Critical thinking is a reflective thought process that focuses on evaluating, synthesizing, analyzing, and interpreting in order to arrive at logical conclusions. Critical thinking is an art that needs to be cultivated and sustained.
As an important tool for generating solutions to challenges, critical thinking involves:
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- Voluntary application of knowledge in order to identify and describe a problem.
- Ability to use appropriate analytical tools to provide relevant evidence and make logical conclusions for specific problems.
Below are helpful tips on how to develop a critical mind:
Cultivate thinking skills as demonstrated below:
- Memorize– establish a concrete knowledge base through reading widely to learn different concepts and facts.
- Comprehend– understand the concepts and facts learned. This is demonstrated through summarizing, interpreting, and explaining among others.
- Apply– demonstrated through discovery, preparation, and modification of concepts and facts in different directions.
- Analyze– it involves breaking ideas through categorizing, comparing, contrasting, etc.
- Synthesize– organize ideas differently.
- Evaluate– form judgment based on logical thinking and experimentation.
Understand that knowledge is a process of building on what you already know through evaluating and examining new information.
Cultivate an open mind to write authoritative critical thinking papers. This means that you can change your viewpoint based on the new information you receive about your topic.
Practice the art of making logical deductions through interpreting what you learn despite the fact that it challenges the status quo.
Be active in debates and discussions.
Cultivate the art of learning new information useful in providing practical solutions to situations.
Be knowledgeable in your field of study, especially on information gaps.
To write critical thinking effectively you must ask relevant questions.
Differentiate between truth, fact, and false.
Establish criteria for testing reasoning processes.
Do not settle for assumptions.
Understand the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning.
Understand your thought processes and how they can hinder you from effectively writing critical thinking papers.