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: Give students exposure to several cause-effect hypotheses and the primary source data that supports those hypotheses. Ask students to make an argument for one of the cause-effect hypotheses using primary data as evidence. Now ask the students to turn the argument back on themselves, and where the weaknesses are in their arguments for which they cannot account.