Teaching Critical Thinking in Psychology: A Handbook of Best Practices

Chapter 5

Simple Strategies for Teaching Your

Students to Think Critically

William Buskist and Jessica G. Irons

If there is one thing that all college and university teachers want their students to learn,

it is to think critically. Teachers who wish to challenge and thereby further develop their

students’ intellectual skills seldom, if ever, do so by asking them to memorize their text-

books and class notes. To be sure, highly effective teachers realize that the basic facts and

figures related to their discipline will change with time, so teaching only these things is

far less important than teaching students how to think about them (Buskist, 2004).

Thus so-called master teachers use facts and figures in the service of teaching critical

thinking skills.

In psychology, these teachers attempt to teach their students to think like scientists—or

more specifically psychological scientists—in understanding basic psychological princi-

ples and how these principles translate into governing everyday life. However, as Slife,

Reber, and Richardson (2005) have warned, psychologists need to be mindful of the

assumptions and values embedded within their approach to thinking critically lest they err

in their own ability to think critically about critical thinking.

In this chapter, we explore the general characteristics of critical thinking and the key

elements involved in the effective teaching of critical thinking. Our goal is to provide

some insight into the nature of critical thinking, to examine why students sometimes

resist the call to think critically and why teachers may resist asking their students to think

critically, and to offer suggestions for how to infuse critical thinking into any psychology

course.

What is Critical Thinking?

The past decade has seen no shortage of books and articles on critical thinking. Some of

this literature aims at understanding critical thinking from a broad perspective (e.g., Diestler,

Teaching Critical Thinking in Psychology: A Handbook of Best Practices Edited by D. S. Dunn, J. S. Halonen, and R. A. Smith