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).
Summary:Making an inference is drawing a conclusion from a body of information. Often this information includes many unstated assumptions. Observations are not purely objective: the assumptions we bring to a situation change the meaning of the evidence we observe.