preview

The Elements Of Critical Thinking As A Critical Thinker

Decent Essays

“Critical thinking is that mode of thinking-about any subject, content, or problem-in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them.” (Paul and Elder, 2014). Like going to the gym, deciding to go back to school to improve your way of life, or saving for a long-awaited vacation, critical thinking similarly requires a self-controlled, well organized, and strategic order of procedures in an effort to reach your intended goal successfully. Additionally, along this path of success, a thinker may find themselves in a “self-correcting” stage, as one may attempt to allow their biases, partiality, or ill-informed thoughts to take control. However, a well refined critical thinker can ascertain this success by actively and expertly enhancing their quality of thought. This attribute is achieved by implementing specific concepts; such as theory development, exploration, construction, and/or the investigation of material assembled. According to Paul and Elder, “Excellence in thought must be systematically cultivated”. Therefore, a critical thinker, must purposely put in the work to accomplish success. Richard Paul and Linda Elder created a critical thinking framework that consists of three major components: 1. The elements of thought; which is your basis for reasoning, 2. the intellectual standards; which are applied to the elements of reasoning, and 3. intellectual traits; which are produced from the application of discipline.

The Elements of Thought
According to Paul and Elder (1997), there are two essential dimensions of thinking that students need to master in order to learn how to upgrade their thinking. They need to be able to identify the "parts" of their thinking, and they need to be able to assess their use of these parts of thinking. The elements of thought consist of 8 key mechanisms; which helps the thinker to implement reasoning on different aspects on each “thought” level. 1.Purpose: All reasoning has a purpose; therefore, it is the thinker’s responsibility to understand the purpose, goals and objectives of any given concept to satisfy a specific wish and justify some need. 2.

Get Access