Critical Thinking Instruction

The review begins with a brief definition of critical thinking and discusses how it differs from regular or ordinary thought. This discussion is followed by a description of some of the standard instructional strategies used for teaching critical thinking skills. The third section of the review examines research investigating for the effects of critical thinking instruction on the development of students' abstract levels of thought, while the fourth and final section of the review presents a series of conclusions formulated on the basis of the reviewed material.

Critical Thinking: Definition of the Process

Matlin (1994) defines "thinking" as a volitional effort to "figure things out." She states that it is a cognitive process of going beyond the information given. Another way of saying this is that the thinker manipulates information in order to solve a problem, reach a conclusion, or make a decision.

According to Ornstein and Hunkins (1993), critical thinking may b

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average ability students in the DIAL group. Thus, if the cognitive skills and science process skills of the experimental group increased from "average" to "high" levels, this could well appear as an effect of "no difference" between the two groups and not as the gain it, in fact, is. In other words, Germann's (1987) findings of nonsignificance between the experimental and control groups are not compelling. Slattery (1989) examined for the effects of a creative thinking instructional program called "logical language training." The purpose of the study was to examine whether the training increased fourth and fifth grade students ability to understand passages they read. Fourteen hypotheses were tested in the study in order to determine the significance of logical language training. Subjects in the study consisted of seventy-eight students in the experimental group and seventy-six in the control group. Findings were said to reveal positive trends for four reasoning test and four reading comprehension test groups, with significant results for the lower socio-economic fifth grade experimental group reading comprehension test result data. Also, a greater positive trend was observed for the lower socio-economic experimental g
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Approximate Word count = 6151
Approximate Pages = 25 (250 words per page)

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