Why Teach Critical Thinking Skills?

If we teach children everything we know, their knowledge is limited to ours. If we teach children to think, their knowledge is limitless. Our ability to succeed in life is directly proportional to our ability to solve the problems we encounter along life’s journey. Tragically, elementary and secondary education is mostly memorization. The biggest problem facing educators today is the inability of most students to think analytically. Educators and parents commonly see the following list of academic problems, which are directly related to a child’s ability to think.

Reading
Students read well, but fail to understand what they have just read. Reading comprehension is simply “Depth of Analysis.” Students with poor thinking skills have poor reading comprehension skills.

Writing
Students cannot present or relate written ideas logically. To communicate an idea clearly, a student must have a solid understanding of what he or she wants to say and the ability to outline a logical sequence and structure to his or her audience.

Mathematics
Students commonly succeed in working basic operations, but fail to reason mathematically. Students struggle with word problems—not because they can’t do the mathematics—but because they can’t comprehend the problem well enough to see the math problem. Higher level math requires several thinking skills including deductive reasoning, classification, identifying sequences, and inferential reasoning.

Science
Students cannot apply the scientific method to their analysis of scientific studies. Critical thinking is the very foundation of the principles of science.

Social Studies
It is said, “Those that do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it.” Students frequently fail to see analogous events in social studies because of poor analysis skills and the inability to reason by analogy.

Testing
Students fail to perform well on the growing number of tests that assess their ability to think.

Research has found that the more often a student is exposed to critical thinking, the greater the probability that the student will transfer critical thinking to other areas of his or her life. Based on this research, it is important to expose students to critical thinking in education wherever possible.

Designing critical thinking into academic lessons not only helps students transfer critical thinking skills to other areas of their lives, it improves the effectiveness of the lessons. Critical thinking requires deeper analysis of the lesson. Deeper analysis produces deeper understanding, resulting in better grades and higher test scores. Critical thinking empowers students to be independent, innovative, and helps them succeed in school and in life.