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students have insufficient critical thinking skills, but instead that the students are dis-
tracted from applying those skills by enthusiasm for the moral aspect of an issue, or that
they simply assume that those belief evaluation skills are irrelevant to a situation because
they already know the belief to be true. As a result, we believe that instructors need to
address the issues of personal experience and morality directly. In this section we will pro-
vide a few suggestions for teaching and assessment with respect to this problem.
Assess Critical Thinking in a Variety of Contexts
Are students learning to think critically in general, or are they just learning to defend
their uncritical beliefs? If all of our assessments of students’ critical thinking skills ask
them to evaluate research conclusions, we will never find out whether they have learned
to apply those skills outside of that context. Most of our students do not need our urging
to be skeptical of science, the media, medicine, or politicians. Assessments focused solely
on claims in these areas as the targets of critical thinking risk “letting students off the
hook” with respect to thinking critically about their own beliefs. Assessments aimed
solely at paranormal beliefs run a similar risk. At a minimum, critical thinking assess-
ments should also explicitly assess students’ critical thinking about anecdotes and per-
sonal experience-based beliefs: Do they apply their skills as well in those contexts as they
do when critiquing research or media claims? It would also be very helpful to know if
students understand that a person’s certainty about a claim is not evidence for the truth
of the claim and that false claims can reflect honest mistakes and not just deliberate
deceptions.
Similarly, students should learn explicitly that immediate emotional reactions to highly
charged topics are not evidence of the rightness of their judgments. Though it is unrealis-
tic to expect to derail intuitive moral judgment and its emotional correlates, students may,
with practice, learn to identify their emotional reactions and take a metaphorical deep
breath before considering the content of the argument and the quality of evidence. To
assess critical thinking effectively in these contexts we may need to require students to
reflect on their thinking and emotional responses in parallel—a challenging task even for
the most self-aware among us.
Model Critical Thinking About One’s Own Beliefs
Because of the emotional responses evoked by challenges to personal values and to per-
sonal experience, it is very important to model critical thinking about one’s own beliefs.
For example, we might discuss a list of things we do to avoid coming down with a cold,
and then point out that because we do many of those things every time we are concerned
about getting a cold, we cannot know from our personal experiences which, if any of those
things, are effective at warding off a cold. The “Counterattitudinal Advocacy” method
(Miller, Wozniak, Rust, Miller, & Slezak, 1996) may also be particularly useful here in
helping students come to understand that we want them to think critically about their
own beliefs.