Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Student Success

by Louis Newman

Overview

Finally, a college prep book that actually prepares students for college!

Almost all first-year college students discover that college courses are more academically challenging than they expected, and certainly harder than classes in high school. Professors expect students not just to absorb material, but to analyze and synthesize it, consider multiple perspectives, evaluate conflicting evidence, and then apply what they’ve learned in new contexts.

Thinking Critically in College explains how to do all this and more.

Louis E. Newman draws on decades of experience as a professor at Carleton College and Dean of Academic Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford, offering the guidance you need to succeed both in college and in life post-graduation. Unique among college prep books, Thinking Critically in College builds on the latest research in learning, spells out the key critical thinking skills you need, shows you how to tackle actual college assignments, and provides exercises throughout to reinforce the lessons.

Written in a personal, engaging style, Thinking Critically in College explains how to do the work your professors will require—exactly the preparation you need, no matter what your academic background. Practical, accessible, comprehensive, and interactive, Thinking Critically in College is the definitive guide, not only for those in college or headed there, but for everyone who needs a refresher on thinking clearly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635767957
Publisher:	Radius Book Group
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	261,940
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Louis E. Newman is the former Dean of Academic Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. During his six years at Stanford, he grew the advising program, promoted a holistic approach to academic advising, and advocated for liberal education.

He is also the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus, at Carleton College, where he taught for thirty-three years. During his tenure at Carleton, he also served as Associate Dean of the College and as Director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching. In this role he functioned as the informal mentor to the faculty at Carleton, which is consistently rated by US News & World Report as #1 for undergraduate teaching.

Throughout his career, hundreds of students and colleagues have attested to the profound impact he had on their learning and their lives—as a gifted teacher and as a trusted advisor and mentor.

Louis Newman lives with his wife, Rabbi Amy Eilberg, in Los Altos, California.

For more information, visit ThinkingCritically.us

Read an Excerpt

The Structure of the Book
 
This book is structured to guide you through the main skills and habits of mind that you’ll need to succeed in college. Part I will introduce you to the basic skills you need to think in the ways your professors expect you to, to make sense of new subjects, and to tackle your assignments productively.
Chapter 1 focuses on what psychologists call “metacognition,” that is, thinking about how we think. When you reflect on your learning process, you notice how your own learning happens, and you can think about how to become a more efficient, powerful learner.
Chapter 2 introduces the basic elements of critical thinking: exploring context, considering alternatives, weighing evidence, and identifying implications and new applications. These are the intellectual moves that college work routinely asks you to make, and having a good command of these skills will prepare you to understand everything more deeply and thoroughly.
Chapter 3 introduces you to academic disciplines. It explains how to orient yourself to a new subject so you can focus on what matters—the questions that scholars in this field ask, the methods they employ, the kind of evidence they appeal to, and the issues they still argue about.
Chapter 4 provides examples of actual college assignments and decodes them, making sure that you really understand what the professor is asking you to do. As you’ll discover, the critical-thinking skills covered in chapter 2 are often embedded in the words of assignments, but not always in ways that are immediately obvious. You’ll also discover that even though the assignments you get in history will look quite different from those in biology, the same basic critical-thinking skills are utilized across disciplines.
After covering these basics, part II of the book applies these critical-thinking skills to the work of reading (chapter 5), writing (chapter 6), and quantitative reasoning (chapter 7). It might seem odd to review such basic skills, but in college you will need to hone and apply these skills in more demanding contexts—to read and analyze more challenging material, to use writing as a means of fostering your critical thinking and then learning to convey your conclusions effectively, and to reason about data, especially in relation to experimental results and statistical analyses.
Chapter 8, finally, explains how to conduct research. At some point in your college career, you will need not only to understand the knowledge that others have created but to create new knowledge yourself. Conducting your own research will require that you practice the skills you have learned throughout the book—choosing a question to investigate, gathering the evidence you need to answer it, considering alternative ways of understanding that evidence, and spelling out the implications for others interested in your topic. Engaging in your own research can be among the most rewarding experiences you have in college.
Interspersed between the chapters are “Advice for the Road Ahead” mini-essays that highlight the key habits of mind you should cultivate throughout college. They are based on my own experience working with students for forty years. Getting the most from your college adventure depends not only on sharpening your intellectual skills but also on approaching your journey with an attitude of openness and curiosity.
In the conclusion, I invite you to consider the ways in which learning to think like a college student is a lifelong pursuit and to reflect on all the reasons why it is worth the effort. Apart from preparing you for a career, college will also give you the tools you need throughout your life to think about complex issues and work to resolve them.
While the structure of the book moves intentionally from introducing basic skills to their application, it is not necessary to read the chapters sequentially. The outlines at the beginning of each chapter enable you to quickly locate the specific skills you want to focus on. Feel free to allow your individual needs and interests to guide you to the parts of the book that are most relevant. Also, because many of the key ideas come up multiple times and are developed differently in different sections of the book, I have indicated when a particular skill mentioned in one place is discussed in greater detail elsewhere. At the end of the book, you’ll find a list of additional resources for deeper dives into particular skills.
 
Here’s the bottom line: learning to think like a college student is all about learning how to learn even more effectively than you already do. Top college students observe their own thinking and discover how to make their learning more efficient, more strategic, and more incisive. This means identifying the skills you need to acquire, to improve, and eventually, to master.
So I encourage you to keep this book close at hand as you set off on your intellectual journey and to let it be your guide in unfamiliar and sometime challenging terrain. College will be daunting at times and exhilarating at others. The one thing it doesn’t need to be is mystifying or frustrating. I hope that this book can be your academic GPS, enabling you to navigate college with greater confidence.

Editorial Reviews

What college students need now is a manual to ensure they are well-prepared to get the most out of the next four years. . . . Drawing on his deep expertise and experience in the delivery of student support services at the college level, Louis Newman has taken on the challenge of writing this desperately needed book.”
—Jacques Steinberg, New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College and The College Conversation: A Practical Companion for Parents to Guide Their Children Along the Path to Higher Education

 “There are more than a few ‘how to do college’ books, but none take a deep, informative dive into what it takes for college students to thrive academically and cultivate the habits of an educated mind. Newman offers a treasure trove of helpful examples to illustrate how undergraduates need to think and what they should do to effectively meet and benefit from the range of learning challenges they will encounter during and after college.”
—George D. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Higher Education, Indiana University 

"Even students who have taken college-prep and AP courses are unprepared for the type of learning that will take place in college. Thinking Critically for College is poised to help all students at all types of institutions develop the dispositions and skills necessary for success in college.”
—Lynn Pasquerella, President of Association of American Colleges and Universityies (AAC&U)

“Thinking Critically for College fills a substantial need in higher education resources. The research is available, volumes have been written to support faculty in teaching students so that enduring learning occurs, and there are a growing number of how-to-learn courses in college. What’s missing is a book that speaks directly to our students as they launch their college careers. Thinking Critically for College is a needed resource and I can’t think of anyone better positioned to write this book than Louis Newman.”
—Susan Singer, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Rollins College

"Thinking Critically for College details and exemplifies the differences between high school and college. Students who read this book before coming to college will have an advantage over those who don’t. The book is an excellent candidate for colleges that assign ‘summer reads,’ or for extended orientation programs that have semester-long seminars or programming about the transition to college. Faculty teaching introductory courses or seminars designed for new students will want to assign this book. This unique primer on the college experience offers one-stop-shopping to faculty and students seeking practical advice about the transition to college."
—Lee Cuba, Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College; author of Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College

“Newman prepares incoming college students to get more out of their educations with this educational guide. . . . The author argues that the true value of attending college is the experience of learning new things, which will hopefully make the student a more thoughtful, versatile, and capable human being . . . Specifically, the author outlines the higher-order critical thinking skills that are essential for success in college and beyond. Newman refreshes skills related to reading, writing, quantitative reasoning, and research that students may have learned in high school but need updating for collegiate learning. He also offers sketches of various academic disciplines, providing samples of the prompts and assignments students might encounter within them. The idea is that, by the end of the book, an incoming college student will have picked up a number of skills it might otherwise take several semesters of trial and error to acquire.
The book is essentially pedagogical—it teaches the reader how to learn better. It’s a worthy endeavor and a valuable one for those industrious enough to make their way through these chapters. . . . Newman goes out of his way to demonstrate the thinking behind the concepts he discusses, opening the reader’s eyes (perhaps for the first time) to the reasons underlying the ways they have been and will be taught. The author provides numerous practice exercises to give the reader a taste of what they will encounter as well as sections in which to journal and consider their own interests and goals. . . . The question may be not whether the book will help students but whether readers will willingly read and internalize its lessons. Those who do will undoubtedly have a leg up in their first semester.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher