Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

This article argues that the goal of an undergraduate liberal education should be to educate a competent layperson rather than a disciplinary specialist preparing for graduate school or employment. A competent layperson is someone who has a broad understanding and appreciation of the intellectual landscape, someone who has strong generic intellectual abilities such as critical thinking and research skills which enable them to make inquiries into any area of specialization with efficiency and appropriate confidence. The goal is to develop the skills and understanding necessary for thoughtful citizenship and an intellectually empowered life.

The authors suggest that “critical thinking” is a term that is much used, extravagantly praised, and little understood. Worse, they contend that teaching critical thinking in a business curriculum is made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that, contrary to all evidence, students believe they already understand critical thinking, and thus have no need to learn more. This article contains some remedies for this dilemma. Using Brookfield’s model of critical thinking in the context of business education, the authors offer a case study, “Ultratec,” with teaching notes, which they have found useful in overcoming obstacles to teaching critical thinking. They close by explaining how they have been able to use the Ultratec case to address what they see as the central challenge to teaching critical thinking: It’s difficult to teach anything to people who think they already know it all.

Less than two decades ago, Halpern (1998) presented a convincing approach for teaching critical thought. However, nowhere in her article did she explain how to “get” faculty to teach to thinking skills to transfer across domains of knowledge using: “(a) dispositional or attitudinal component, (b) instruction in and practice with critical thought, (c) structure–training activities, and (d) a metacognitive component used to direct and assess thinking.” (p. 451) It is an open question as to what type of strategies will faculty need to demonstrate to create productive, knowledgeable, thinking citizenry? In this paper I focus on the faculty’s role in promoting the teaching of critical thought, that is, critical thought processes, with particular reference to dental education. Many students can develop processes of critical thought with frequent practice involving the active use of multiple types of ill-structured problems and situations designed to require the ability (1) to recall useful information, (2) to use pattern recognition, (3) to discern pertinent information, (4) to think ahead, and (5) to anticipate outcomes and problems while (6) remaining composed enough so that their emotions do not hinder decision-making skills.

In this review of Mark Weinstein’s Logic, Truth, and Inquiry, a book in which Weinstein explains his conception of the Method of Emerging Truth (MET), the reviewer, Paul Wagner, appreciates Weinstein’s assertion that “The MET attempts to characterize the process of truth emerging as evidence of the epistemic adequacy of the warrants that support theoretical explanations and govern theory driven inferences.” While he finds several things to question in Weinstein’s explanation of this conception, the reviewer, nonetheless, concludes that “This is a book I heartily recommend to every reader especially those interested in critical thinking but whose academic preparation and home is outside philosophy or logic.”