Learning to Learn: Critical Thinking Skills to Help Students for Life

Abstract

With the last two decades, critical thinking has become imperative for integrated students at the workplace. Critical thinking includes the component skills of analyzing arguments, making inferences using inductive or deductive reasoning, judging or evaluating, making decisions or solving problems. Involves both cognitive skills and dispositions, which can be seen as attitudes or habits of mind, include flexibility, a propensity to seek reason, a desire to be well informed, a respect for and willingness to entertain different viewpoints. This paper describes a study to investigate the impact of critical thinking strategies applied to work with students, to develop critical thinking skills. The research was conducted about 6 months, in a technical university, focuses on developing critical thinking skills in part by using complex contextualized problems. Upon conclusion of the study and analysis of the data, we observed significant gain in those skills, measured with the standard instrument: Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA). The WGCTA has been used to compare students on entry and exit program, make comparisons between different levels and investigate the correlation between critical thinking and variables. All test items include problems and arguments based on situations experienced in the daily workplace, classrooms, social media and others. The tool has five subsets designed to evaluate different elements of critical thinking, comprise deduction, inference, the relevance of assumptions, interpretation, and evaluation of arguments.