Evaluate the Core Critical Thinking Skills

Every problems has their own solution, there are no problems that be cannot solve. All the problems we face in the world have at least a solution and it’s unique. It depends on us to take the right decision to choose the best solution. Critical thinking helps us to understand the argument or the problems and take the right decisions on it. It also will weigh the value needed in the possible outcome that we want to achieve. Using the right technique in critical thinking can helps us to make a better solution for education world especially; it will also reduce our mistakes and improve the understanding between each other. This will increase our collaboration within our education team.

Before we go further, let us define critical thinking, Critical thinking can be viewed as the intellectual processing of information or situations to reach the point of clarity. It is pervasive and is seen as vital to any developed life since it entails ‘reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe and do (Ennis, 1987,p.10). Whereas, in website Walker Teaching Resource Centre at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (http://www.utc.edu/Teaching-Resource-Centre/critical.html), they define Critical thinking is conceptualized as “a process which involves analysing assumptions and being aware of one’s own thinking”; the thinker then “use[s] this awareness to correct what [he or she] is doing.”

As a general rule, critical thinking is a subjects or field that need us to let our emotion down and make our brain to reason. A good critical thinker need some set of skills that will be elaborate in this essay later. For Peter A Facione (2011), he stated that critical thinking is thinking that has a purpose (proving a point, interpreting what something means, solving a problem), but critical thinking can be a collaborative, non-competitive endeavour. There are no borderlines in critical thinking. He also differentiates critical thinking into two part; which are cognitive skills and disposition.

We will take a look at core critical thinking skills that has been suggested by A. Facione (2011). There are six core critical thinking; interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation.

The first core critical thinking skills are interpretation. For example, in the classroom, when the student did not want to speak to each other, we cannot simply label them as anti-social. We use interpretation skills to understand the students and how to react with such situation. Usually when we interpret something, we will use our own judgement. To be critical thinker, our interpretation has to be justifying the truthfulness. We need to search for the facts and data needed. Without any supporting data or facts, we will easily jump into a bias interpretation. This will affect us and the others when or interpretation seem bias.

The second core critical thinking is analysis. We usually analyse something simply by categorizing it. From the categorization, we can come out with the relationship of any events that occur. For example, the head of newspaper article today is about “Malaysia amongst the lowest in TIMSS and PISA achievement”. How we can analyse this article? It starts with questioning ourselves about the title itself. We also can pick out another author that write the same things and make a comparison. Then, we can identify any implicit statement from the article; this will helps us to create a way to denote a conclusion. To analyse in depth, we can also outline the relationship and the main ideas in the articles. Graphically organizing the idea in