TITLE: Critical Thinking Skills Don't Transfer; They Overlap
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 10, 2016  3:09 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
A few years ago, I was giving a short presentation about one
of our new programs to people from the community and campus.
One of the prompts for the talk was how this program would
contribute to teaching "critical thinking skills" across the
curriculum.  I made a mild joke about the idea, wondering
aloud which programs on campus taught uncritical thinking
skills.  Only later did I learn that our new provost, who was
in the audience, had just announced a major focus on critical
thinking.  Fortunately, our new provost had a sense of humor.

I don't believe that we can teach critical thinking in any
useful way outside the context of a particular discipline.  I
do believe, though, that we can teach it as a part of any
discipline -- not just in the humanities or liberal arts, which
in too many people's minds don't include the sciences.  Studies
show that these skills don't tend to transfer when we move to a
different discipline, but I am convinced that people who learn
to think deeply in one discipline are better prepared to learn
another discipline than someone who is learning deeply for the
first time.

In
<A HREF="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/06/07/can-colleges-truly-teach-critical-thinking-skills-essay">
   a recent essay</A>
for <EM>Inside Higher Ed</EM>, John Schlueter offers a new analogy
for thinking about critical thinking:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 When it comes to thinking skills, it would be much more productive
 if we stop thinking "transfer" and start thinking "overlap".  That
 is, once thinking skills become more explicitly taught, especially
 in general education classes, both professors and students will
 notice how thinking in the context of one domain (say, economics)
 overlaps with the kind of thinking processes at work in another
 (biology).
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

The idea of overlap fits nicely with how I think about these
skills.  Making thinking skills more explicit in our instruction
might enable students to notice intersections and differences
across the disciplines they study.  That awareness may help them
to internalize general strategies that are useful across
disciplines, for times when they are in unknown waters, and be
aware of possible points of failure in their own thinking.

I'm not sure if this analogy is any easier to operationalize or
test than the notion of transfer, but it does give me a different
way to think about thinking.
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