How to Increase Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking skills help a person solve problems and offer creative solutions. Critical thinking also leads to reflective thinking, so each experience is an educational one. Even people who do not have strong critical thinking skills can improve those skills. It is important to increase critical thinking skills to look at problems in a logical way.

Instructions

1. Ask more questions instead of giving an answer right away. This can help to stimulate critical thinking because you are digging further into a problem.

2. Look beyond the words on a piece of paper. When using critical thinking, it's important to read between the lines. Just because the answer is not spelled out in the text, there may be clues to lead you to certain assumptions about a person's motive or thought process.

3. Work with groups when solving a problem. Getting another person's perspective can help you brainstorm creative ideas.

4. Think outside the box when solving a problem. Come up with the most absurd solutions you can think of, and then pare back. Critical thinking involves a creative thought process that looks at all possibilities.

5. Look back on your experiences and think of how you dealt with them. A critical thinker is reflective and can find what methods worked and which did not. For example, if you did well on a test that you studied hard for, then you know studying hard will help in the future.

References

• Increase Brain Power: Critical Thinking Skills
• Mentoring Minds: Critical Thinking Wheel