ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 discusses Critical Thinking, a ubiquitous tool that should be, but often isn’t, used in project management, systems engineering, and most facets of our daily life. The chapter views Critical Thinking from a Perspectives Perimeter based on the Holistic Thinking Perspectives (HTP) and discusses applications of Critical Thinking, including some that are not often thought of as being Critical Thinking, such as the KISS principle, Miller’s Rule and Occam’s Razor. Two new applications of Critical Thinking are introduced: the ‘Don’t Care’ situation and the STALL technique. The chapter then discusses six different ways of evaluating critical thinking and discusses the challenge of creating student assignments to encourage critical thinking and the application of their cognitive skills in the higher levels of the updated Bloom’s Taxonomy. One way of doing this is via Knowledge Readings which were introduced to postgraduate students at the National University of Singapore (NUS) with encouraging results and student feedback. Lastly, the chapter closes with some of the student feedback and the lessons learned from using the Knowledge Readings.
