The ability to assess our reasoning features as one of the fundamental skills of critical thinking. Assessing our reasoning adequately requires us to take our thinking apart to examine the elements for quality. Intellectual standards of accuracy, clarity, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, and fairness, all help us to do this. Forward from, our reasoning improves when we are clear about its purpose, when we are using accurate information. In this, how to assess your critical thinking skills accommodates ideas helping you to improve the quality of your reasoning and lift your effectiveness.
Evident from, These ideas spotlight as the questions whether you are clear, logical, accurate, precise, being relevant, justifiable in context, dealing with a matter of significance. The afore-mentioned questions help us to think about our thinking.
Here headlines how to assess your critical thinking skills.
1. Aim At Clarifying Your Thinking
Being clear is about getting yourself, the listener or reader, to understand what you are thinking or saying. First, a statement has to be clear, for us to determine whether it is accurate or relevant. Here, a clear understanding of the problem at hand is helpful. For instance, the question “how can we initiate and implement actions to ensure that students learn the skills to function effectively on the job and in their daily decision making, is clearer than “how can we deal with the education system in the district?” A clearer question is a better guide to thinking. Here are questions to ask to improve clarity. Do I need to elaborate the point, express it differently, give an illustration or an example or state in my own words what I just heard?
2. Allow For Thinking Accurately
We are being accurate when we represent something in accordance with the way it actually is. So, present or describe things, events, people, ideas in a way they actually are. Also, question the extent to which what you hear, or read is true and accurate. As critical thinkers, we need to accurately assess our own views together with those of others. If necessary, do research to confirm or refute them. The ideas of how to assess your critical thinking skills begin to add up as you start thinking accurately.
3. Bank On Being Precise
We are precise when we give the details necessary for someone to understand exactly what we mean. Since the specifics of a situation help us to identify the inherent problems, variables that bear on the problem, and possible solutions, specifics are crucial to good thinking. For instance, the statement “I scored 30% in the test” is more precise than “I failed.” Questions to ask for preciseness include “Can you avail me more details?” “Can you be more specific?”
4. Be Out To Think For Relevance
When an idea is directly connected with and bears on the issue at hand, it becomes relevant. It is pertinent or applicable to the problem to be solved. For example, effort does not often equate to the quality of student learning. Therefore, it is irrelevant to the grades.
5. Beaver Away To Think For Depth
To get beneath the surface of a problem or an issue, to identify and deal with its complexities, intellectually, responsibly, we need to think deeply. We become more effective thinkers when we recognise complicated questions and address the various dimensions of complexity. Clear with, thinking that has depth addresses the history of the problem, its politics, economics, psychology of associated behaviours. Following from, you beef up ideas of how to assess your critical thinking skills, as you think For depth.
6. Bolster Up Your Drive To Think For Breadth
Frequently, arguments from either the liberal or conservative perspective delve deeply into an issue, but prop up insights into only one side of the question. In both cases, the thinking lacks breadth. To think broadly is to consider the issue at hand from every relevant perspective. Correlative to, to keep from unhelpful myopic thinking or narrow mindedness, stand wise, to entertain alternative or opposing viewpoints that could help you address a problem better. Again, when we enter others’ viewpoints, we find it easier to intellectually empathise with them, and practice fairness and consideration. In consequence, our relationships become more productive.
7. Brace Up To Think For Logic
To bring together a variety of thoughts in some order, to support each other and make sense together, means we are being logical. Combined thoughts contradictory in some sense or not making any sense together, the circumstance reveals we are being illogical. For instance, here is a situation to consider. Students are deficient in basic academic skills like reading, writing, speaking, and the teachers conclude there is nothing they can or should do, to change their methods, and improve student learning. In this situation, the teachers are being illogical. Given the facts, the conclusion appears not to follow from them.
8. Breeze Along As You Think For Significance
To think for significance is to concentrate on the most vital information, and take into account the most important concepts and ideas. Doing this helps us to escape the mire of superficial questions, questions of little weight. Hereabouts are relevant questions to ask. How can I reduce the amount of time I spend on superficial things and increase the amount of time I spend on significant things? What is the most important goal or purpose I should focus on at this point in my life? Why is that purpose important? Focusing on what is important helps you to buff up the notions of how to assess your critical thinking skills.
9. Bulk Up Your Effectiveness By Thinking For Fairness
Thinking for fairness means thinking in accord with reason. To practice this thinking virtue, we have to consider significant relevant information that may cause us to change our views. As a result, we keep from pursuing narrow selfish interests. What is more, the attitude to make sure that the assumptions we are basing our conclusions on are justifiable, given the facts of the situation, also features here. A note of caution with, our prejudices and stereotypes often function as assumptions, and they are not justifiable in that role. They cause us to prejudge situations and people, and draw faulty inferences or conclusions.
Furthermore, taking to justifiability and fairness in thinking, helps us to discover how we may be distorting our own thinking, to attain self-serving ends, or how others are doing so to our disadvantage. In plain, we accord each evidence the weight it deserves.
Conclusion
Every now and then, we reason to an end, to satisfy some desire or solve some problem. In view of this, how to assess your critical thinking skills shelters ideas helping you to spy out the flaws in your thinking and remedy them, for enhanced effectiveness.
