Reflective Learning Report
Dear student:
The following material, Critical Thinking: Concepts & Toolsdescribes ingredients of intellectual reasoning. After carefully studying Critical Thinking: Concepts & Tools, compose and submit a 1-page reflection on these critical thinking standards/concepts. As you compose your reflective essay, ask yourself and answer the following question in writing: to what extent have I been applying or failed to apply these tools so far in my college experience? Note that going forward, you are expected to apply these standards for intellectual reasoning to your written responses to the assignments of this course.
“Universal Intellectual Standards:
And questions that can be used to apply them
Universal intellectual standards are standards, which must be applied to thinking whenever one is interested in checking the quality of reasoning about a problem, issue, or situation. To think critically entails having command of these standards. To help students learn them, teachers should pose questions, which probe student thinking, questions which hold students accountable for their thinking, questions which, through consistent use by the teacher in the classroom, become internalized by students as questions they need to ask themselves. The ultimate goal, then, is for these questions to become infused in the thinking of students, forming part of their inner voice, which then guides them to better and better reasoning. While there are a number of universal standards, we have elected to comment on the following:
Clarity
Could you elaborate further on that point? Could you express that point in another way? Could you give me an illustration? Could you give me an example? Clarity is a gateway standard. If a statement is unclear, we cannot determine whether it is accurate or relevant. In fact, we cannot tell anything about it because we don’t yet know what it is saying. For example, the question “What can be done about the education system in America?” is unclear. In order to adequately address the question, we would need to have a clearer understanding of what the person asking the question is considering the “problem” to be. A clearer question might be “What can educators do to ensure that students learn the skills and abilities which help them function successfully on the job and in their daily decision-making?”
Accuracy
Is that really true? How could we check that? How could we find out if that is true? A statement can be clear but not accurate, as in “Most dogs are over 300 pounds in weight.”
Precision
Could you give me more details? Could you be more specific? A statement can be both clear and accurate, but not precise, as in “Jack is overweight.” (We don’t know how overweight Jack is, one pound or 500 pounds.).
Relevance
How is that connected to the question? How does that bear on the issue? A statement can be clear, accurate, and precise, but not relevant to the question at issue. For example, students often think that the amount of effort they put into a course should be used in raising their grade in a course. Often, however, “effort” does not measure the quality of student learning, and when that is so, effort is irrelevant to their appropriate grade.
Depth
How does your answer address the complexities in the question? How are you taking into account the problems in the question? Is that dealing with the most significant factors? A statement can be clear, accurate, precise, and relevant, but superficial (that is, lack of depth). For example, the statement “Just Say No” which is often used to discourage children and teens from using drugs, is clear, accurate, precise, and relevant. Nevertheless, it lacks depth because it treats an extremely complex issue, the pervasive problem of drug use among young people, superficially. It fails to deal with the complexities of the issue.
Breadth
Do we need to consider another point of view? Is there another way to look at this question? What would this look like from a conservative standpoint? What would this look like from the point of view of …” A line of reasoning may be clear, accurate, precise, relevant, and deep, but lack breadth (as in an argument from either the conservative or liberal standpoints which gets deeply into an issue, but only recognizes the insights of one side of the question).
Logic
Does this really make sense? Does that follow from what you said? How does that follow? But before you implied this and now you are saying that, I don’t see how both can be true. When we think, we bring a variety of thoughts together into some order. When the combination of thoughts is mutually supporting and makes sense in combination, the thinking is “logical.” When the combination is not mutually supporting, is contradictory in some sense, or does not “make sense,” the combination is “not logical”
Significance
Is this the most important problem to consider? Is this the central idea to focus on? Which of these facts are most important?
Fairness
Do I have any vested interest in this issue? Am I sympathetically representing the view points of others?”
(Paul & Elder, 2003, p. 7-9).
*For additional details, go to: The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts & Tools