How to Evaluate Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is a self-guided process of eliminating personal prejudice and bias in concluding analysis.

Critical thinking is the practice of actively conceptualizing and analyzing information gleaned from observation, experience, reflection, communication or other sources. Critical thinking skills vary from person to person and develop over time. Evaluation of critical thinking largely hinges upon the critical thinking capacity of the evaluator. Clarity, relevance, completeness, depth, fairness and rationality are essential to critical thinking.

Instructions

1. Evaluate the clarity of the result of a period of critical thinking. Assess whether any question was left unanswered or whether any detail caused confusion. Look for clues, such as something not making sense or a momentary distraction in the middle of an exposition.

2. Consider whether the result of a period of critical thinking is accurate. If not, investigate whether the fundamental facts of the question were incorrect or whether the facts were misunderstood. An inaccurate fact base may detract from a person's ability to successfully draw a conclusion. On the other hand, the critical thinking could be considered flawed if the thinker did not realize he or she's facts were wrong in the process of analyzing them.

3. Estimate the fairness of the conclusion. Determine whether the basis of judgment was skewed by a personal bias, whether conscious or subconscious. Learning certain things such as the thinker's personal feelings on the topic or their past experience with things concerning the topic may uncover any bias that may have been undetected at the the matter was thought through.

4. Measure the depth of the conclusion. Establish whether the conclusion encompasses the complexity of the matter. Weigh what you know about topic against the conclusion drawn. Understand that some matters are necessarily complex. Expect some lower-skilled critical thinkers to eliminate complexities by omitting inconvenient facts from their logic process.

5. Gauge the feasibility of the conclusion. Understand that some theories, though thought critically, overestimate an individual's logical thinking abilities.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember that logic is a method of processing inputs. Depending on the weighted values that are input, the results will differ.

References

• The Critical Thinking Community: Defining Critical Thinking
• The Critical Thinking Community: The Elements of Reasoning and Intellectual Standards

Resources

• The Critical Thinking Community: Respources