ABSTRACT
Intellectual competence requires that we take responsibility for educating ourselves. While many people seek information online, this does not automatically lead to intellectually competent ways of engaging information. It takes work and practice to gather reliable information, sort through what it means, determine why it is important—or why it is, perhaps, less important—in order to develop our understanding of an issue, a problem, or a question. Our understanding is no better than the information we have at our disposal, which is why intellectual competence requires that we learn how determine the reliability of what we read. With reliable information in hand, we build our knowledge base in order to express with clarity what we know, how we know it, and why it matters. From here, our depth and breadth of understanding develops because, as we will see, when combined with critical thinking, intellectual competence is the first, most important step to higher order thinking that we call critical awareness.
