Every course taken in Higher education should help you improve critical thinking. Critical thinking involves a special outlook and a combination of very involved skills. One of the objectives in my course is to offer reading and writing assignments that will develop this outlook and emphasize the importance of these skills. An important grade component will derive from your use of critical thinking in your written assignments throughout this course.

College life as well as real life is not a multiple choice test. Just remembering a bunch of facts doesn't really make you an intellectual person or prepare you for life. If you live your live on a multiple choice basis, you are living on the basis of the limited choices that others have set for you. Their choices may purposely avoid possibilities and arguments that they don't recognize or that they just don't want you to recognize. Limiting yourself to the thought process of another restricts you from discovering new and different ways of doing things.

Never be reluctant to reflect, (brainstorm) any concept, even if some of your thoughts are pretty bizarre. Don't hesitate to dig deeper, to research, to prove something is either right or wrong. Never automatically accept someone else's thoughts as truth. An educated person develops a thought process that immediately weighs the strengths and weaknesses of everything he/she reads or hears (Is it logical? What evidence is there to support the idea? Is it practical?) Each writing project that you submit will be partially graded on the following criteria:

Does your paper have a clear thesis statement?
Have you considered (identified, compared) two or more relevant perspectives on the topic?
Did you evaluate the right kinds of evidence that was relevant to the issues?

Each paper that you write should exhibit an improvement in these specific areas. As you prepare each writing assignment you should constantly be asking yourself the following questions:

What is really going on here?
Is there anything wrong with this idea?
Is there another perspective that can better explain this situation?
What kinds of evidence is necessary to test my hypothesis?
Should I believe what I am hearing?
Exactly why (how) did this happen?

As you develop these many skills, you will automatically begin to identify relevant issues for investigation, explore different perspectives on those issues, employ appropriate methods of inquiry, examine the relevant evidence, and discriminate good arguments from weak ones.

Take a position!
What do you think?
Why do you think that way?
Why is your position better that the alternatives?
Why is your position different from others?
               
It doesn't matter how you feel.
What do you think and why?

Nine Considerations for Critical Thought

1.    Clarity - Give examples. Make illustrations.
2.    Accuracy - Can your facts be checked?
3.    Precision - Be specific. Give details. 
4.    Relevance - Does your response relate to the question and help others understand the issue?
5.    Depth - What makes this question difficult? What complexities must be dealt with?
6.    Breadth - What other perspectives can be used to view the problem?
7.    Logic - Does you response make sense and follow the evidence?
8.    Significance - Does you response focus on the most important part of the question?
9.    Fairness - Do you have a vested interest in the issue? Do you represent all points of view?

1.    Purpose - What is the purpose of the article? Is it clearly stated, implied, justified?
2.    Topic - Are the issues well stated, clear and unbiased? Do the questions do justice to the complexity of the issues? Are the question and purpose relevant to each other?
3.    Information - Does the cite relevant evidence, experiences, information essential to the issues?
4.    Concepts - Are the concepts used justifiable?
5.    Assumptions - Are the writer's assumptions questionable? Are there problems inherent in those assumptions?
6.    Inferences - Does the writer develop a line of reasoning that explains how they arrived at their conclusions?
7.    Point of View - Does the writer mention other points of view? Do they respond to obvious objections framed from other points of view?
8.    Implications -  Does the writer exhibit a sensitivity to the implications of their position?