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: To minimize the assumptions that students bring to a case, assign them cases that occurred before they were born.
Have students research the case in specific ways to determine "what happened."
To stimulate learning transfer across contexts, ask students to find a contemporary case that has much in common with the old one, and compare / contrast the two cases.