Critical Thinking As A Higher Order Skills By Tim Van Gelder

To describe Critical Thinking (CT) as a “Higher-order skill” is to put it mildly. After spending twelve hours reading this week’s assigned articles and a great deal more on the subject of CT, I still feel like a first-grader being asked to solve a calculus equation. To paraphrase Tim van Gelder, learning CT skills is hard and a life-time journey. It is not enough to know the concepts, the student must actively practice CT themselves to improve their understanding (2004). I first became a critical thinker in third grade, after moving to London. As an American child, I had been taught that important history began in 1776, a history measured in hundreds of years. In England I saw a history measured in thousands of years and was taught the opposing

I work in the event technology field and have been responsible for managing the setup and operation of sound, visual, lighting and tele-communications technology for events. Success requires the synchronization of disparate technologies and following a timeline of events that may require on the fly reevaluation and modification. Inevitably technology will fail, either through its own internal fault or in the connections between devices, by electrical/internet problems and/or when media compatibility/playback issues fail or do not perform as

If I had spent several weeks preparing a term paper and received an assessment I did not agree with, LOI could help me see past the emotive and think critically about the feedback. At age fifty-two, I am still just a beginning student of critical thinking. I have used, in layman’s terms some of the principals in my professional and personal life. This week’s reading have helped to formulize some of the processes and attitudes I have practiced for over forty years.
To borrow from van Gelder a second time, CT requires skills which are the natural outcome of practice in our quest to understand belief, truth and accuracy. CT is moving away from allowing beliefs to dictate evaluation and allowing the evaluation of evidence to determine beliefs. (2004). CT can be as simple as “think before you act,” and as complex as accepting an entirely new belief