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Critical Thinking in Critical Courses
a psychologist. Instead, some aspire to careers in law, medicine, social work, education, or
business while for others the Bachelor’s degree will be their first and last stop in postsec-
ondary education. Many express academic burnout and the fervent desire to “get on with
it,” by which they mean their real lives. Usually, the students are as bright as (or brighter
than) the majors going on to graduate programs in psychology. However, teaching this
group poses unique challenges because they do not automatically see how psychology
figures in their future endeavors. These considerations influenced the aims of the course.
The course has two main elements. About one-third of the course is devoted to lectures,
readings, and class discussions related to what psychologists think about critical thinking.
Thus the class takes an explicit approach to CT instruction. Students first contrast their
preconceptions about CT with experts’ definitions (see Table 12.1). We also contrast CT
with other related constructs, including wisdom, common-sense, and street smarts. They
generate their own lists of people they admire as critical thinkers and justify their selec-
tions in terms of the individual abilities that constitute critical thinking. We discuss differ-
ent perspectives on the development of CT (e.g., trait vs. habit), including Perry’s (1970)
stage theory of reflective thinking, which students find thought-provoking. They also
review psychological evidence pertaining to the implications of language use and memory
for critical thought. Additionally, we examine psychological explanations for a variety of
critical thinking errors and fallacies (e.g., fundamental attribution error, intervention-
causation fallacy; see Ross, 1977). Students practice identifying fallacies and pseudoscience
in newspaper articles and on Internet sites. Ideally, this explicit focus on CT reinforces
critical thinking lessons in prior courses. This instruction further serves as a backdrop for
the remaining two-thirds of the course which emphasizes application of critical thinking
to team projects involving problem-solving.
The project problems are of the sort students may encounter after graduation in the
so-called “real world”—on the job, in their communities, or in their personal relationships.
Durso (1997) described projects in which students applied psychological theory and
methods to real problems generated by local businesses. Similarly, this class requires that
students assemble the distinct CT skills acquired in prior courses—such as the social
psychology course described above—in the service of a complex problem in the world.
According to Halpern (1998), CT learning does not readily transfer to new tasks and
situations, especially when taught more implicitly. Reminding students that they are
applying what they are learning about doing CT to real-world problems helps them to
practice transferring those abilities to contexts outside the classroom. Additionally, the use
of real-world problems helps students connect psychology in the classroom with the field’s
potential to help solve problems they may encounter after graduation.
Specifically, their projects must target ill-defined problems, those for which “correct
answers” are not immediately discernable. Moreover, the problems must involve prescrip-
tive issues. Prescriptive issues can often be stated in terms of a “Should we do x or should
we do y?” question. In past semesters, for example, students critically examined whether
or not the legal age of driving should be increased to 18 and whether recess should be
eliminated in elementary schools. Prescriptive issues are characterized by competing values
and multiple stakeholders, and therefore lend themselves to more than one solution
(Browne & Keeley, 2007). Solutions to the project problems therefore typically “depend”
on a host of factors. The primary task for students is to seek out and comprehend multiple