This book is about thinking. But it is not about any thinking. It is
about those kinds of thinking that take conscious effort, and which can
be done well or badly. Most of our thinking takes little or no conscious
effort. We just do it. You could almost say that we think without
thinking! Expressing a preference or stating a fact are not in
themselves thinking skills. There are language and communication skills
involved, of course, and these are very considerable skills in their own
right. But they are contributory skills to the activities which we are
calling ‘thinking’. activities which we are calling ‘thinking’. This
distinction is often made by assigning some skills a ‘higher order’ than
others. Much work has been done by psychologists, educationalists,
philosophers and others to classify and even rank different kinds of
thinking. Most would agree that activities such as analysis, evaluation,
problem solving and decision making present a higher order of challenge
than simply knowing or recalling or understanding facts. What
distinguishes higher orders of thinking is that they apply knowledge,
and adapt it to different purposes. They require initiative and
independence on the part of the thinker. It is skills of this order that
form the content of this book.Skills are acquired, improved, and judged
by performance. In judging any skill, there are two key criteria: (1)
the expertise with which a task is carried out; (2) the difficulty of
the task. We are very familiar with this in the case of physical skills.
There are basic skills like walking and running and jumping; and there
are advanced skills like gymnastics or woodwork or piano playing. It
doesn’t make much sense to talk about jumping ‘well’ unless you mean
jumping a significant distance, or clearing a high bar, or somersaulting
in mid-air and landing on your feet. There has to be a degree of
challenge in the task. But even when the challenge is met, there is
still more to be said about the quality of the performance. One gymnast
may look clumsy and untidy, another perfectly controlled and balanced.
Both have performed the somersault, but one has done it better than the
other: with more economy of effort, and more skilfully. The first of
these two criteria also applies to thinking. Once we have learned to
count and add, tell the time, read and understand a text, recognise
shapes, and so on, we do these things without further thought, and we
don’t really regard them as skilled. You don’t have to think ‘hard’
unless there is a hard problem to solve, a decision to make, or a
difficult concept to understand. So, as with physical performance, we
judge thinking partly by the degree of challenge posed by the task. If a
student can solve a difficult problem, within a set time, that is
usually judged as a sign of greater skill than solving an easier one.
However, when it comes to assessing the quality of someone’s thinking,
matters are more complicated. Mental performance is largely hidden
inside a person’s head, unlike physical performance which is very
visible. If two students give the same right answer to a question, there
is no telling from the answer alone how it was reached. One of the two
may simply have known the answer, or have learned a mechanical way to
obtain it or even just guessed it. The other may have worked it out
independently, by reasoning and persistence and imagination. Although
the difference may not show from the answer given, the second student
scores over the first in the long term, because he or she has the
ability to adapt to different challenges. The first is limited to what
he or she knew and could recall, or simply guessed correctly
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| Thinking Skills Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Second edition By John Butterworth and Geoff Thwaites |
Thinking Skills Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Second edition By John Butterworth and Geoff Thwaites chapters
- What you will learn in this book a short overview.
- Thinking and reasoning
- Critical thinking: the basics
- Problem solving: basic skills
- Applied critical thinking
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