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Simple Strategies for Teaching
Critical Thinker,” and they generally do not provide physical demonstrations of their
critical thinking prowess at parties and socials. However, critical thinkers do demonstrate
a variety of behaviors and skills that are readily apparent in situations requiring problem
solving. For example, the literature (e.g., Bensley, 1998; Diestler, 2001; Fisher, 2001;
Halpern, 2003; Levy, 1997) notes that critical thinkers can accurately explain their
decisions; consider alternative explanations for any state of affairs; curb their emotional
reactions to others’ arguments; determine the truth or falsity of assumptions; develop and
present reasoned and persuasive arguments; distinguish between primary and secondary
sources of information; distinguish credible (e.g., APA) from noncredible sources of
information; distinguish evidence from opinion, common sense, anecdotes, and appeals
to authority; distinguish opinion from fact; draw inferences; formulate and ask appropri-
ate questions; gather data from multiple sources relevant to a problem to be solved or a
decision to be made; identify their preconceptions about important issues; and under-
stand the use and abuses of mathematical and statistical information in decision
making.
All of these qualities have relevance to what teachers reveal to students about their par-
ticular academic disciplines as well as to how students negotiate problems in everyday life.
Surely, if there is one skill that college should teach students, it is how to apply what they
learn in their classes to their lives.
Although the list of attitudes and behaviors seems almost intuitive with regard to the
picture it paints of the salience of critical thinking to academic and everyday life, students
do not exactly beat down faculty doors and demand that they be taught the fundamentals
of critical thinking. Indeed, critical thinking is the type of hard work that many college
students would rather avoid. In fact, Buskist, Sikorski, Buckley, and Saville (2002) showed
that students rate critical thinking near the bottom of those characteristics that they believe
are important to effective college and university teaching (fortunately, in contrast, faculty
rate critical thinking near the top of their list).
Student Resistance to Learning How to Think Critically
As teachers, it is sometimes easy to attribute deficits in student performance to sheer
laziness—a misguided attribution certainly, although some students, like some teachers,
are, in fact, lazy. However, students’ resistance to investing the time necessary to develop
critical thinking skills is likely not solely due to slothfulness. In our interactions with stu-
dents both at Auburn University and elsewhere, we have found several other student-
centered barriers to learning to think critically:
● The outcomes of reasoned decisions do not match their personal preferences. In
other words, sometimes students’ desire to engage in a particular behavior overpow-
ers their reasoning as to why such behavior may or may not be beneficial.
● Some students are accustomed to being told what to do and when to do it. This
point is particularly true for those students who come from backgrounds in which
other people (parents, teachers, coaches, and other authority figures) have made