ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION One of the most important jobs teachers have in the classroom is not just imparting knowledge and facts to their students, but teaching them how to learn and how to become critical thinkers. As is often the case in social science research, several different terms are used to describe the same basic construct. What we refer to as “critical thinking” in this chapter has also been called higher-order thinking (Grant, 1988; Lipman, 1995), metacognition (Dean & Kuhn, 2003; Kuhn, 1999; Swartz, Costa, Beyer, Reagan, & Kallick, 2008), problem solving (Carlson & Bloom, 2005), evaluating (Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruikshank, Mayer, et al., 2001; Krathwohl, 2002) or analytical thinking (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2007; Sternberg, Torff, & Grigorenko, 1998). No matter what the name, the idea remains the same; in short, critical thinking makes use of cognitive skills and strategies in order to engage in thinking that is “purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed” (Halpern, 2007, p. 6).
