Critical thinking or critiquing is central to university level study, and becomes more important the higher you progress. It\u2019s in your marking criteria, very often in the wording of your assignment question or instruction, and makes a frequent appearance in feedback.<\/p>\n
However, critical thinking can seem strangely contradictory. How can a lowly student criticise the work of an authority with far more expertise than them? For years you\u2019ve been told that you can\u2019t believe all you read on the internet, and that you should look for \u2018high quality\u2019 peer reviewed sources in academic books and journals, as they are more trustworthy than Wikipedia. And then we tell you not to trust even these sources, which the university library provides, but that you have to question those too?! Why?!<\/p>\n
One of the barriers to confident critical thinking is feeling that you have to criticise<\/em> \u2013 to find something wrong with a text. Actually, critiquing or critical reading\u00a0is often simply testing, checking. All academic knowledge is constructed,\u00a0created through the process of research: posing a valid question, gathering evidence objectively, interpreting it logically, forming a\u00a0rational\u00a0argument. Academic peer review is one stage of filtering out poorly constructed knowledge before it is published \u2013 research that is flawed, inaccurate, biased, not rigorous or simply not very important. Peer review is a good process, but can overlook things. And any two scholars may\u00a0see things differently.\u00a0When we as students or academics\u00a0want to draw on scholarship, one of the things we need to do is to take responsibility for just checking to see for ourselves if it was well constructed. We’re asking – how do they really know that for sure? And, following their reasoning, do I see it the same way?<\/p>\n Critical thinking is about more than just finding flaws.\u00a0You may disagree with a source, but to decide on\u00a0careful examination and thought\u00a0that you agree<\/em> with a source is also a critical judgement. And that isn\u2019t necessarily a simple\u00a0‘right or wrong’\u00a0judgement, it\u2019s also more nuanced positions, such as\u00a0\u2018mostly valid but with some reservations\u2019, or perhaps \u2018good as far as it goes, in certain limited contexts\u2019 or ‘that’s one valid way of looking at it, but not the only one’. We\u2019re also looking to see not just if it\u2019s right\/wrong, but if it\u2019s relevant\/not relevant, useful\/not useful to us in our own work.<\/p>\n It\u2019s like grocery shopping \u2013 you go to the supermarket and assume that what you\u2019re buying is probably good quality- there are customer guarantees, after all. But when you select fruit and vegetables, you still just\u2026.check<\/em> them to see if they are damaged, or which is the biggest, best or most appealing. When you\u2019re buying meat or bread, you still just\u2026 check<\/em> the use-by date, brand\u00a0and\u00a0quantity\u00a0to see if it\u2019s going to suit your needs. Sometimes supermarkets make mistakes, sometimes you just want to pick the most suitable ingredients for whatever you want to make. We try to resist being tempted into bad bargains, or things we don’t really need.<\/p>\n Similarly with academic reading \u2013 you\u2019re checking to see if the information contained is good quality (how was it made?), how it compares to other information on the market (what other views are there? which do\u00a0I agree with?), and, no matter what the quality is,\u00a0whether it\u2019s suitable for your own purposes (does this help me answer my own assignment question?). This involves understanding how knowledge in your subject is made \u2013 how data is gathered and interpreted, what counts as \u2018evidence\u2019, how arguments are constructed and conclusions drawn in your discipline. That\u2019s what university study entails \u2013 not just learning the information, but learning to \u2018think like a historian\/medic\/engineer\/biologist etc\u2019 to understand how that knowledge is created, and to begin to create knowledge yourself.<\/p>\n Posted by Helen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Critical thinking or critiquing is central to university level study, and becomes more important the higher you progress. It\u2019s in your marking criteria, very often in the wording of your assignment question or instruction, and makes a frequent appearance in … Continue reading