Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life
642
Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life
642Paperback(Fourth Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Critical Thinking fosters the development of fair-minded critical thinking and explores essential intellectual standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, logicalness, significance, depth, breadth, and fairness; the importance of skilled and deep questioning; and how to take thinking apart in order to find problems in thinking and then improve thinking.
The fourth edition features
- Think for Yourself activities
- Glossary of critical thinking terms
- New chapter on argumentation
- New chapters on critical thinking in the professions (including critique of disciplines)
- Discussion of the Internet's effects on our lives
- Updated discussions of media bias and political propaganda, as well as egocentric and sociocentric thought as barriers to critical thinking
The Foundation for Critical Thinking continually offers new supplementary resources on its website (www.CriticalThinking.org) and in its online critical thinking community (www.CriticalThinkingCommunity.org).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781538138748 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2022 |
| Edition description: | Fourth Edition |
| Pages: | 642 |
| Sales rank: | 819,228 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.09(w) x 10.06(h) x 0.98(d) |
About the Author
Dr. Linda Elder is an educational psychologist and leading authority on critical thinking who has taught both psychology and critical thinking at the college level. She has been president of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the executive director of the Center for Critical Thinking for more than 25 years. She has a special interest in the relation of thought and emotion, as well as the cognitive and affective. She has developed an original theory of the stages of critical thinking development. Elder is the author of Liberating the Mind, and has coauthored four books on critical thinking, as well as all 23 titles found in the Thinker's Guide Library.
Read an Excerpt
PREFACE:
PREFACE
You are what you think. That's right. Whatever you are doing right now, whatever you feel, whatever you want—all are determined by the quality of your thinking. If your thinking is unrealistic, it will lead you to many disappointments. If your thinking is overly pessimistic, it will deny you due recognition of the many things in which you should properly rejoice.
Test this idea for yourself. Identify some examples of your strongest feelings or emotions. Then identify the thinking that is correlated with those examples. For example, if you feel excited about college, it is because you think that good things will happen to you in college. If you dread going to class, it is probably because you think it will be boring or too difficult.
In a similar way, if the quality of your life is not what you would wish it to be, it is most likely because it is tied to the way you think about your life. If you think about it positively, you will feel positive about it. If you think about it negatively, you will feel negative about it.
For example, suppose you came to college with the view that college was going to be a lot of fun and you were going to form good friendships with fellow students who would respect and like you and, what is more, that your romantic relationships would become interesting and exciting. And let's suppose that hasn't happened. If this were the thrust of your thinking, you now would feel disappointed and maybe even frustrated (depending on how negative your experience has been interpreted by your thinking).
For most people, thinking is subconscious, neverexplicitly put into words. For example, most people who think negatively would not say of themselves, "I have chosen to think about myself and my experience in largely negative terms. I prefer to be as unhappy as I can be."
The problem is that when you are not aware of your thinking, you have no chance of correcting poor thinking. When thinking is subconscious, you are in no position to see any problems in it. And, if you don't see any problems in it, you won't be motivated to change it.
The truth is that since few people realize the powerful role that thinking plays in our lives, few gain significant command of it. Therefore, most people are in many ways victims of their own thinking, that is, harmed rather than helped by it. Most people are their own worst enemy. Their thinking is a continual source of problems, preventing them from recognizing opportunities, keeping them from exerting energy where it will do the most good, poisoning relationships, and leading them down blind alleys.
In this book we are concerned with helping you take charge of what you do, what you learn, and how you feel by taking command of how and what you think. We hope that you will discover the power of your thinking and will choose to develop it in ways that serve your interests, as well as the well-being of others.
The single most significant variable in determining the quality of what you learn in college is your thinking. Certainly your, teachers will play a role in your learning. Some of them will do a better job than others of helping you learn. But even the best teachers can help you very little if you lack the intellectual skills necessary for thinking well through course content.
This book introduces you to the tools of mind you need to reason well through the problems and issues you face, whether in the classroom, in your personal life, or in your professional life. If you take these ideas seriously, you can do something for yourself of lifelong value.
If all goes as we plan it, you gradually will become more and more aware of the thinking that causes you problems. And you will be able to change that thinking so you can experience a more satisfying life. You will find that learning, both inside and outside of class, will become more and more rewarding. You will increasingly be able to take the ideas you are learning in class and apply them to your life in a useful way.
The choice is yours, and the quality of your choice can only be as good as the thinking you use to come to that choice. If you think that taking command of your thinking is not important (perhaps you assume that you already have that command), this book won't help you learn to think any better than you do now. If, however, you sense that you have not yet achieved the personal control over your thinking we are speaking of, and you recognize its potential value, you will read on, and progressively take the steps to create personal control and power.
Table of Contents
Preface Introduction Chapter 1. Become A Fairminded Thinker Chapter 2. The First Four Stages of Development: At What Level of Thinking Would You Place Yourself? Chapter 3. Self-Understanding in a Complex World Chapter 4. The Parts of Thinking Chapter 5. Standards for Thinking Chapter 6. Ask Questions That Lead to Good Thinking Chapter 7. Master the Thinking, Master the Content Chapter 8. Discover How the Best Thinkers Learn Chapter 9. Redefine Grades as Levels of Thinking and Learning Chapter 10. Make Decisions and Solve Problems Chapter 11. Argumentation Theory and Critical Thinking Chapter 12. Deal with Your Irrational Mind Chapter 13. Develop as an Ethical Reasoner Chapter 14. How to Detect Media Bias and Political Propaganda Chapter 15. Fallacies: The Art of Mental Trickery and Manipulation Chapter 16. Learning & Using Information Critically & Ethically, Part One Chapter 17. Learning & Using Information Critically & Ethically, Part Two Chapter 18. Strategic Thinking: Part One Chapter 19. Strategic Thinking: Part Two Chapter 20. Becoming An Advanced Thinker: Our Conclusion Appendices A. A Brief History of The Idea of Critical Thinking B. Sample Analysis of The Logic of. .. Glossary ReferencesPreface
PREFACE
You are what you think. That's right. Whatever you are doing right now, whatever you feel, whatever you want—all are determined by the quality of your thinking. If your thinking is unrealistic, it will lead you to many disappointments. If your thinking is overly pessimistic, it will deny you due recognition of the many things in which you should properly rejoice.
Test this idea for yourself. Identify some examples of your strongest feelings or emotions. Then identify the thinking that is correlated with those examples. For example, if you feel excited about college, it is because you think that good things will happen to you in college. If you dread going to class, it is probably because you think it will be boring or too difficult.
In a similar way, if the quality of your life is not what you would wish it to be, it is most likely because it is tied to the way you think about your life. If you think about it positively, you will feel positive about it. If you think about it negatively, you will feel negative about it.
For example, suppose you came to college with the view that college was going to be a lot of fun and you were going to form good friendships with fellow students who would respect and like you and, what is more, that your romantic relationships would become interesting and exciting. And let's suppose that hasn't happened. If this were the thrust of your thinking, you now would feel disappointed and maybe even frustrated (depending on how negative your experience has been interpreted by your thinking).
For most people, thinking is subconscious,neverexplicitly put into words. For example, most people who think negatively would not say of themselves, "I have chosen to think about myself and my experience in largely negative terms. I prefer to be as unhappy as I can be."
The problem is that when you are not aware of your thinking, you have no chance of correcting poor thinking. When thinking is subconscious, you are in no position to see any problems in it. And, if you don't see any problems in it, you won't be motivated to change it.
The truth is that since few people realize the powerful role that thinking plays in our lives, few gain significant command of it. Therefore, most people are in many ways victims of their own thinking, that is, harmed rather than helped by it. Most people are their own worst enemy. Their thinking is a continual source of problems, preventing them from recognizing opportunities, keeping them from exerting energy where it will do the most good, poisoning relationships, and leading them down blind alleys.
In this book we are concerned with helping you take charge of what you do, what you learn, and how you feel by taking command of how and what you think. We hope that you will discover the power of your thinking and will choose to develop it in ways that serve your interests, as well as the well-being of others.
The single most significant variable in determining the quality of what you learn in college is your thinking. Certainly your, teachers will play a role in your learning. Some of them will do a better job than others of helping you learn. But even the best teachers can help you very little if you lack the intellectual skills necessary for thinking well through course content.
This book introduces you to the tools of mind you need to reason well through the problems and issues you face, whether in the classroom, in your personal life, or in your professional life. If you take these ideas seriously, you can do something for yourself of lifelong value.
If all goes as we plan it, you gradually will become more and more aware of the thinking that causes you problems. And you will be able to change that thinking so you can experience a more satisfying life. You will find that learning, both inside and outside of class, will become more and more rewarding. You will increasingly be able to take the ideas you are learning in class and apply them to your life in a useful way.
The choice is yours, and the quality of your choice can only be as good as the thinking you use to come to that choice. If you think that taking command of your thinking is not important (perhaps you assume that you already have that command), this book won't help you learn to think any better than you do now. If, however, you sense that you have not yet achieved the personal control over your thinking we are speaking of, and you recognize its potential value, you will read on, and progressively take the steps to create personal control and power.