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academic culture in general and some of its core values. We saw that critical
thinking
was one of these core values. But what does this
really mean in practice? And how can you develop these
skills in this key area? Despite being celebrated
on campus as a key skill, critical thinking has been referred
to as a slippery eel by Molinari and Kavanagh because it's so hard to define. This
is because it's so complex, and at the same time it can
change according to context. In a moment we'll hear from some academics about what
critical thinking means to
them, so that we can understand what critical thinking is in different
contexts in academic fields. Before we do this though, we'd like to define three
linked terms
that we will use throughout this MOOC. They are critical thinking,
argumentation, and argument. As we've already seen, critical
thinking is complex and multifaceted. We're lucky, though, because a long line of
theorists,
from John Dewey to Richard Ennis and more, have tried to define and
analyze what critical thinking is. We would firstly like to suggest following
Alexander, Argent & Spencer that we remove the problematic term, critical thinking,
and simply see this as thinking, but as a style of thinking that is
questioning and transformative. This kind of thinking,
valued in university settings, is also a thinking that reflects and
considers its own basis, its background and its reasons as well
as considering these things in others' thinking, a thinking that seeks to make
original connections between ticks and points of view, but always supported
by reasons and evidence, and a thinking that aims to be objective and
free of personal bias. While critical thinking is more related to
thinking and learning, argumentation and argument are more closely related to
communicating critical thinking to others. Before I go on I do need to point out
that at university when people talk about an argument they don't mean it in
the everyday sense of angry disagreement. At university an argument is
instead presenting a set of reasons that show that a conclusion is correct or
valid. Arguments are in a sense, the smallest
observable unit of critical thinking. In an essay, a tutorial, or a presentation,
you might have
many arguments linked together. This broader process of linking arguments,
we will term argumentation. Following Andrews, we see argument as the
product and argumentation as the process. A key part of argumentation is
taking a certain position or stance in relation to a topic. This position is one
supported
by critical thinking. Okay, so you've heard our definition of
critical thinking, argumentation, and argument. Let's now hear from some academics
to find
out how they define critical thinking, and find out from them how you can
develop your critical thinking skills. [MUSIC] >> Critical thinking,
in an academic context, is quite different to
thinking about problems and critical issues in the wider world,
even though we prepare you at university to use critical
thinking to apply those particular skills to your life and
your job and whatever you're doing. So critical thinking in an academic and
university context is really
about wrestling with an idea, and thinking about how you can
actually articulate your own perspective and
your own idea about an issue or a problem. And it usually means in an academic
sense,
that it's not just your idea, but that you've thought about that idea
with the support of scholarship, other people who are experts in the field,
their ideas and their resolutions,
how they've tested something. So that's really thinking critically. It's about
multiple perspectives and
then your own ideas overlaid with those particular
discoveries I guess you've made. >> Critical thinking in an academic
context means to be able to scrutinize the relation between evidence and claims. It
means to be able to be method critical, to judge if a method is appropriate in a
specific context for a specific question. And it needs to be self-critical, to be
aware of one's preconceptions,
of one's biases, and indeed, being aware of one's purely
academic stance towards a topic. >> I'm going to answer these I think
from a more pragmatic perspective, from a student's perspective. Because the
reality is that very
few students will actually go on to be academics or researchers, and
critical thinkers in an academic context. And so for these students you have to
ask,
what's the goal of a university education? What's the end product of
a university education? And when I ask my students these very
often the answer that I get is that it's to get a good job or to give me the skills
to be employable in the workplace. And then of course you have to ask well, what
makes you employable
in the workplace? What are the skills that
are valued in the workplace? And very often, aside from your technical
and specialist knowledge in your field or discipline, what's valued is
the ability to think systematically and objectively through decision making
processes and problem solving processes. And this is, in essence,
what critical thinking is. The other side of this thing, of course,
is that critical thinking and this kind of systematic and objective thinking
then becomes part of the learning process. Learning at university is not about
just accepting what your lecturers and tutors tell you and reproducing this. It's
about asking questions of them, and becoming involved in
a kind of dialogue with the ideas that you meet in your lectures
and asking questions and evaluating. >> Well, critical thinking skills,
I think it's kind of like you have to be able to assess things
in a kind of objective way. That means kind of realizing that there
are different perspectives, different ways of looking at everything, and being
able to look at those and assess those different ways of looking at something
from an objective kind of standpoint. Try not to be biased, they'll try
not to favor one or the other, and just kind of try to assess them on
the same grounds and try to see them as equals and just kind of different
ways of looking at something as opposed to fixing on whether semething's good or
bad or whether something's right or wrong. It's just kind of assessing each
argument
or viewpoint against each other and kind of assessing the strengths and
weaknesses of each one. [MUSIC] >> Well, students demonstrate critical
thinking within the fields of commerce and accounting by taking existing knowledge
and comprehending that knowledge, but taking that knowledge to a higher level,
so what they do is use analytical skills. And hopefully that leads them to be over
synthesized existing knowledge with their own ideas, their own interpretations, and
to come up with really good evaluations or suggestions for what we should
do moving forward in business. >> In my discipline, English Literature, critical
thinking might be thought
of as a method of reading and writing about literary texts and
non-literary or theoretical texts. We might say that it
involves thinking about or analyzing the kinds of representation or
thought that are at work in those texts. And it can involve interpreting
a literary text, or it can involve deciding on the value of
a text, whatever we might mean by value. >> In human-computer interaction,
students demonstrate critical thinking by knowing in the outset that their first
assumptions are likely to be valuable, and working continually to check that it
stages throughout the design process. Knowing and recognizing the way you might
use a computer or work with a computer may differ quite significantly to
other people, and that you're going to need data and you're going to need
research to try and understand that. And that you can't rely on your first
assumptions or beliefs about that. [MUSIC]