Teaching how to think is just as important as teaching anything else August 19, 2015 Peter Ellerton Lecturer in Critical Thinking at The University of Queensland A new paper on teaching critical thinking skills in science has pointed out, yet again, the value of giving students experiences that go beyond simple recall or learned procedures. It is a common lamentation that students are not taught to think, but there is usually an accompanying lack of clarity about exactly what that might mean. There is a way of understanding this idea that is conceptually easy and delivers a sharp educational focus – a way that focuses on the explicit teaching of thinking skills through an inquiry process, and allows students to effectively evaluate their thinking. What are thinking skills? Let’s first understand what we might mean by thinking skills. Thinking skills, or cognitive skills, are, in large part, things you do with knowledge. Things like analysing, evaluating, synthesising, inferring, conjecturing, justifying, categorising and many other terms describe your cognitive events at a particular functional level. Analysis, for example, involves identifying the constituent elements of something and examining their relationships with each other and to the whole. One can analyse a painting, a piece of text, a set of data or a graph. Analysis is a widely valued cognitive skill and is not unique to any discipline context. It is a general thinking skill. Most syllabuses from primary to tertiary level are organised by content only, with little mention of such cognitive skills. Usually, even if they are mentioned, little is said about how to teach them. The hope is they will be caught, not taught. Rigour in course design is too often understood as equating to large amounts of recall of content and specific training in algorithms or set procedures. It is far less common, but far more valuable, to have courses in which rigour is found in the demand for high-level cognitive skill formation. This is not to say that knowledge is not important in the curriculum. Our knowledge is hard won; we should value what we have learned for how it makes our lives more productive or meaningful.