As I've stated before, my professional background is in education; and "critical thinking" is straight outta "education 101" and "Bloom's Taxonomy" and "Higher Order Thinking Skills" (HOTS) which teachers must use/apply everyday in preparing their lesson plans across every subject area.
Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior in learning. This taxonomy contained three overlapping domains: the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Within the cognitive domain, he identified six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. These domains and levels are still useful today as you develop the critical thinking skills of your students. Critical Thinking Critical thinking involves logical thinking and reasoning including skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive reasoning, forecasting, planning, hypothesizing, and critiquing. Creative thinking involves creating something new or original. It involves the skills of flexibility, originality, fluency, elaboration, brainstorming, modification, imagery, associative thinking, attribute listing, metaphorical thinking, forced relationships. The aim of creative thinking is to stimulate curiosity and promote divergence. While critical thinking can be thought of as more left-brain and creative thinking more right brain, they both involve "thinking." When we talk about HOTS "higher-order thinking skills" we're concentrating on the top three levels of Bloom's Taxonomy: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. ...http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm
...Critical thinking in higher education: What is it and how do we assess it? What is critical thinking? Not surprisingly, this question is at the heart of the literature on critical thinking... In its simplest form, critical thinking could be said to be - challenging a claim or an opinion (either one's own or another person's) with the purpose of finding out what to believe or do....Robert Ennis described critical thinking in this way: "Critical thinking is reasonable and reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do." (Norris & Ennis, 1989, p. 1) ...the following definition by Halpern is more embedded in cognitive theory. "Critical thinking is the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed – the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihood, and making decisions when the thinker is using skills that are thoughtful and effective for the particular context and type of thinking task." (Halpern, 1996, p. 5)....http://textos.pucp.edu.pe/pdf/1112.pdf
Critical & Creative Thinking Program using critical and creative thinking to develop reflective practice as we change our work, learning and lives To be successfully intelligent (see Graphic 13) is to think well in three different ways: analytically, creatively, and practically. Typically, only analytical intelligence is valued on tests and in the classroom. Yet the style of intelligence that schools most readily recognize may well be less useful to many students in their adult lives than creative and practical intelligence. The three aspects of successful intelligence are related. Analytical or componential thinking is required to solve problems and to judge the quality of ideas.Creative or experiential intelligence is required to formulate good problems and ideas in the first place. Practical or contextual intelligence is needed to use the ideas and their analysis in an effective way in one’s everyday life. Successful intelligence is most effective when it balances all three of its analytical, creative, and practical aspects. It is more important to know when and how to use these aspects of successful intelligence than just to have them. Successfully intelligent people don’t just have abilities, they reflect on when and how to use these abilities effectively... ...cont...http://cct.wikispaces.umb.edu/Three Aspects of Successful Intelligence