Critical Thinking has been organized around Halpern's (2003) framework for teaching critical thinking skills across disciplines. According to this framework, well-rounded critical thinking instruction helps students acquire:
- a critical thinking attitude or habit of intellectual deliberation;
- individual intellectual skills like analysis and inference;
- the ability to use these skills in new contexts, and
- the ability to reflect upon and evaluate one's own thinking (metacognition).
Concrete examples are critical for teaching abstract concepts. Both real and fictional cases can be useful, but often need explanation about unfamiliar settings and characters. The Simpson have become a nearly universal reference point in popular culture, and includes reasoning of many kinds.