Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking

Features
What challenges do your students have learning to think critically as a process?
- Critical Thinking as a Process - Emphasizes that critical thinking is not primarily an effort to demonstrate what is faulty about the thinking of others. Instead, it is a process for improving the beliefs and decisions we each must make.
- A step-by-step approach to learning–Introduces a particular critical thinking learning skill in each chapter, and adds to the list of accumulated skills with each subsequent chapter.
- Reminds students that each skill is but one part of a critical and constructive process–a process that will serve them as the most rewarding pathway to finding better arguments.

 

How do students learn the values of critical thinking?
- Highlights the values of critical thinking to provide a stronger rationale for why critical thinking is essential for a thoughtful life.
- Relevance - Applicable to numerous life experiences extending far beyond the classroom.
- The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions.

 

What challenges do your students have evaluating evidence and biases?
- Broad understanding of different types of evidence.
- Explores the criteria for rational conversation and the quality of reasoning.
- Analysis of biases.
- Familiarizes students with preconceived ideas that hinder critical thinking.
- An integrated series of question-asking skills that can be applied widely.
- Teaches students to develop their critical-thinking abilities by not always accepting what they hear as truth.