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: Distinguishing correlation from causation can be quite difficult. It is important to sensitize students to this difficulty, as the difference between them can be used to fool people. Show students bad arguments and good ones, and give them practice turning bad arguments into good ones.