Critical thinking lecture

CRITICAL THINKING
The power to think beyond

What comes into your mind
when you hear the word:
Critical Thinking?

What is
Critical Thinking?
“Thinking about your thinking while thinking to
make your thinking better.”

A.K.A. DEEP THINKING
• It is “deeper” than memorization and recall of
factual information. When students think
critically, they think deeply; they not only know
the facts, but they take the additional step of
going beyond the facts to do something with
them.
• Critical thinking involves reflecting on the
information received, moving away from
“surface” memorization and toward deeper levels
of learning.

Imagine for a moment what could happen when a
person or a group of people decides important matters
without pausing first to think things through.

Patient deaths
Lost revenues
Ineffective law
enforcement
Job loss
Gullible voters
Garbled
communications
Imprisonment
Combat casualties
Drug addiction
Vehicular homicide
Bad decisions
Unplanned pregnancies
Financial
mismanagement
Heart disease
Family disease
Repeated suicide
attempts
Divorce
Academic failure

Critical Thinking is useful not only
in school
but also in our daily lives.

If your teacher asks you to make a critique or an
analysis of the story you’ve read or the movie you
watched with your classmates at school…
Do you find it hard?
Do you know where to start?
What to write?

I. Critical Perspective: Approaches
to the Analysis and
Interpretation of Literature
II. The Core Critical Thinking Skills
III. Teaching Critical Thinking Skills

Critical Perspective: Approaches to the
Analysis and Interpretation of Literature
1. Formalist Criticism.
2. Biographical
Criticism.
3. Historical Criticism.
4. Psychological
Criticism.
5. Sociological Criticism
--Marxist Perspective
--Feminist Criticism
6. Reader’s-Response
Criticism
7. Mythological Criticism
8. Structuralist Criticism
--Semiotics
9. Deconstructive
Criticism
10. Cultural Studies

Formalist emphasize the form
of a literary work to determine
its meaning, focusing on
literary elements such as plot,
character, setting, diction,
imagery, structure, and point
of view.

A checklist of Formalist Critical Questions
1. How is the work structured or organized? How
does it begin? Where does it go next? How does
it end? What is the work’s plot? How is its plot
related to its structure?
2. What is the relationship of each part of the work
to the work as a whole? How are the parts
related to one another?
3. Who is narrating or telling what happens in the
work? How is the narrator, speaker or character
revealed to readers? How do we come to know
and understand this figure?

4. Who are the major and minor characters, what
do they represent, and how do they relate to one
another?
5. What are the time and place of the work— its
setting? How is the setting related to what we know
of the characters and their actions? To what extent
is the setting symbolic?
6. What kind of language does the author use to
describe, narrate, explain, or otherwise create the
world of the literary work? More specifically, what
images, similes, metaphors, symbols appear in the
work? What is their function? What meanings do
they convey?

In the biography perspective, we are
looking in the biography of the author,
we linked with an understanding of
the writer’s world. Facts about
authors’ experiences, struggles or
difficulties may help the readers
decide how to interpret those works.

Biographical Critical Questions
1. What influences— persons, ideas,
movements, events— evident in the writer’s
life does the work reflect?
2. To what extent are the events described in
the work a direct transfer of what happened
in the writer’s actual life?
3. What modifications of the actual events has
the writer made in the literary work? For
what possible purposes?

4. Why might the writer have altered his or her
actual experience in the literary work?
5. What are the effects of the differences
between actual events and their literary
transformation in the poem, story, play, or
essay?
6. What has the author revealed in the work
about his or her characteristics modes of
thought, perception, or emotion? What place
does this work have in the artist’s literary
development and career?

Historical critics show how literary
works reflect ideas and attitudes of
the time in which they were written.
They compare prevailing cultural
attitudes about these issues today
with those of the times in which the
story and poem were written.

Historical Critical Questions
1. When was the work written? When was it
published? How was it perceived by the critics
and the public? Why?
2. What does the work’s reception reveal about
the standards of taste and value during the time
it was published and reviewed?
3. What social attitudes and cultural practices
related to the action of the work were prevalent
during the time the work was written and
published?
4. What kinds of power relations does the work
describe, reflect or embody?

5. How do the power relations reflected in the
literary work manifest themselves in the cultural
practices and social institutions prevalent during
the time the work was written and published?
6. What other types of historical documents,
cultural artifacts, or social institutions might be
analyzed in conjunction with particular literary
works? How might a close reading of such a non-
literary text illuminate those literary works?
7. To what extent can we understand the past as
it is reflected in literary work? To what extent
does the work reflect differences from the ideas
and values of its time?

Psychological criticism approaches a
work of literature as the revelation of
its author’s mind and personality.
They rely heavily on symbolism to
identify and explain the meaning of
repressed desires.

Psychological Critical Questions
1. What connections can you make between
your knowledge of an author’s life and the
behaviour and motivations of characters in
his or her work?
2. How does your understanding of the
characters, their relationships, their actions
and their motivations in a literary work help
you better understand the mental world and
imaginative life, or the actions and
motivations of the author?

3. How does a particular literary work— its
images, metaphors and other linguistics
elements— reveal the psychological motivations
of its characters or the psychological mindset of
its author?
4. To what extent can you employ the concepts
of Freudian psychoanalysis to understand the
motivations of literary characters?
5. What kinds of literary works and what types
of literary characters seem best suited to a
critical approach that employs a psychological or
psycho analytical perspective? Why?

6. How can a psychological or psychoanalytic
approach to a particular work be combined with
an approach from another critical perspective—
for example, that of biological or formalist
criticism or that of feminist or deconstructionist
criticism?

Sociological critics focus on the values
of a society and how those values are
reflected in literary work.
Marxist criticism
Feminist criticism

Marxist Critical Perspective
Marxist critics examine literature for its
reflection of how dominant elite and middle-
class/bourgeois values lead to the control and
suppression of working classes. They are
concerned both with understanding the role of
politics, money and power in literary works, and
with redefining and reforming the way society
distributes its resources among the classes.

Marxist Critical Questions
1. What social forces and institutions are
represented in the work? How are these
forces portrayed? What is the author’s
attitude toward them?
2. What political economic elements appear in
the work? How important are they in
determining or influencing the lives of the
characters?

3. What economic issues appear in the course of
the work? How important are economic facts in
influencing the motivation and behavior of the
characters?
4. To what extent are the lives of the characters
influenced or determined by social, political, and
economic forces? To what extent are the
characters aware of these forces?

Feminist Critical Perspective
Feminist critics examine what those works
reveal about the role, position and influence of
women. They see literature as an arena to
contest for power and control. They see
literature as an agent for social transformation.
They undermine the partriarchal or masculinist
assumptions that have dominated critical
approaches to literature.

Feminist Critical Questions
1. To what extent does the representation of
women (and men) in the work reflect the
place and time in which the work was
written?
2. How are the relations between men and
women, or those between members of the
same sex, presented in the work? What roles
do men and women assume and perform
and with what consequences?

3. Does the author present the work from within
a predominantly male or female sensibility?
Why might this have been done and with what
effects?
4. How do the facts of the author’s life relate to
the presentation of men and women in the
work? To their relative degrees of power?
5. How do other works by the author
correspond to this one in their depiction of the
power relationships between men and women?

Text-centered reader-response critics
emphasize the temporal aspect of
reading, suggesting that readers make
sense of text over time, moving through a
text sentence by sentence, line by line,
word by word, filling gaps and making
inferences about what is being implied by
textual details they read.
In reading, they would consider a
reader’s emotional reactions to the
story’s action.

Reader-Response Critical Questions
1. What is your initial emotional response to
the work? How did you feel upon first
reading it?
2. Did you find yourself responding to it or
reacting differently at any point? If so, why?
If not, why?
3. At what places in the text did you have to
make inferences, fill in the gaps, make
interpretive decisions? On what bases did
you make these inferential guesses?

4. How do you respond to the characters, the
speaker, or the narrator? How do you feel about
them? Why?
5. What places in the text caused you to do the
most serious thinking? How did you put the pieces,
sections, parts of the work together to make sense
of it?
6. If you have read a work more than once, how has
your second and subsequent readings differed from
earlier ones? How do you account for those
differences, or for the fact that there are no
differences or for the fact that there are no
differences in either your thoughts or your feelings
about the work?

Myth criticism uses archetypes or universal
symbols. The patterns myth critics typically
identify and analyze those that represent
common, familiar, even universal human
experiences. They are more interested for
how these symbols represent religious
beliefs, social customs and cultural attitudes.
For example a lion can represent strength
while the fox is cunning.

Mythological Critical Questions
1. What incidents in the work seem common or
familiar enough as actions that they might be
considered symbolic or archetypal? Are there
any journeys, battles, falls, reversals of
fortune?
2. What kind of character types appear in the
work? How might they be typed or classified?
3. What creatures, elements of nature, or man-
made objects play a role in the work? To
what extent might they be considered
symbolic?

4. What changes do the characters undergo?
How can those changes be characterized or
named? To what might they be related or
compared?
5. What religious or quasi-religious traditions
with which you are familiar might the work’s
story, characters, elements, or objects be
compared to or affiliated with? Why?

Structuralist critics find all kinds of
opposition in literature, from small-scale
elements such as letters and syllables,
through symbols, such as light and dark; to
motions or directions (up and down),
times (before and after), places (inside and
outside), distances (far and near); to
elements of plot and character, such as
changes of feeling and reversals of fortune.

Semiotics
Is the study of signs and sign systems; it is more
importantly the study of codes, or the systems
we use to understand the meaning of events
and entities including institutions and cultural
happenings as well as verbal and visual texts—
From poems, to songs, to advertisements and
more.

Structuralist Critical Questions
1. What are the elements of the work— words,
stanzas, chapters, parts, for example— and how
can these be seen as revealing “difference”?
2. How do the characters, narrators, speakers, or
other voices heard in the work reveal
difference?
3. How do the elements of the work’s plot or
overall action suggest a meaningful pattern?
What changes, adjustments, transformations,
shifts of tone, attitude, behavior, or feeling do
you find?

4. How are the work’s primary images and
events related to one another? What elements
of differentiation exist, and what do they
signify?
5. What system of relationships governs the
work as a whole?
6. What system of relationships could be used to
link this work with other of its kind? With other
different kinds of things with which it shares
some similarities?

Deconstruction arose further than
structuralism. Like structuralism,
deconstruction emphasizes difference or
the structure of constituent opposition in a
text or any signifying system (male/female,
black/white). They argue that literary
works mean more than their authors are
aware of and their meaning are as unstable
as the language of which they are
constructed.

Deconstructive Critical Questions
1. What oppositions exist in the work? Which of
the two opposing terms of each pair is the
privileged or more powerful term? How is this
shown in the work?
2. What textual elements (descriptive details,
images, incidents, passages) suggest a
contradiction or alternative to the privileged or
more powerful term.
3. What is the prevailing ideology or set of cultural
assumptions in the work? Where are these
assumptions most evident?

4. What passages of the work most reveal gaps,
inconsistencies or contradictions?
5. How stable is the text? How decidable is its
meaning?

Cultural studies includes a wide range of
critical approaches to the study of
literature and society. It does not only
includes approaches to the of the society
such as Marxism, feminism, structuralism,
deconstruction and new historian but also
refers to a wide range of interdisciplinary
studies including women’s studies,
African-American studies, Asian, Native
American, Latino studies and other types
of area studies.

Cultural studies is broader than any
perspective describe in this chapter. It is
not restricted.

Answer the following
1. How do you put a giraffe in your refrigerator?
2. How do you put an elephant into your
refrigerator?
3. The Lion King is hosting an animal
conference. All the animals attended except
one. Which animal does not attend?
4. There is a river you must cross but it is used
by crocodiles and you do not have a boat.
How do you manage it?

1. The correct answer to question number 1 is: Open the
refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door. This
question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an
overly complicated way.
2. Did you say, Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant, and
close the refrigerator? Wrong answer. Correct answer: Open
the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant
and close the door. This tests your ability to think through
the repercussions of your previous actions.
3. Correct Answer: The elephant. The elephant is in the
refrigerator. You just put him in there. This tests your
memory. Okay, even if you did not answer the first three
questions correctly, you still have one more chance to
show your true abilities.
4. Correct Answer: You jump into the river and swim across.
Have you not been listening? All the crocodiles are
attending the animal conference. This tests whether
you learn quickly from your mistakes.

The Core Critical Thinking Skills
1. Interpretation
2. Analysis
3. Evaluation
4. Inference
5. Explanation
6. Self regulation.

1. INTERPRETATION
to comprehend and express the meaning
or significance of a wide variety of
experiences, situations, data, events,
judgments, conventions, beliefs, rules,
procedures, or criteria.
#Categorize #Decode significance #Clarity meaning

Can you think of examples of interpretation?
How about recognizing a problem and describing it
without bias?
 How about reading a person’s intentions in the
expression on her face?
 Distinguishing a main idea from subordinate ideas in a
text?
 Constructing a tentative categorization or way of
organizing something you are studying?
 Paraphrasing someone’s ideas in your own words?
 Clarifying what a sign, chart or graph means?
 What about identifying an author’s purpose, theme, or
point of view?

2. ANALYSIS
to identify the intended and actual inferential
relationships among statements, questions,
concepts, descriptions, or other forms of
representation intended to express belief,
judgment, experiences, reasons, information,
or opinions.
#Examine ideas #Identify arguments #Identify reasons
and claims

Your examples?
What about identifying the similarities and differences
between two approaches to the solution of a given
problem?
What about picking out the main claim made in a
newspaper editorial and tracing back the various
reasons the editor offers in support of that claim?
 What about identifying unstated assumptions;
constructing a way to represent a main conclusion and
the various reasons given to support or criticize it?
Sketching the relationship of sentences or paragraphs
to each other and to the main purpose of the passage?
What about graphically organizing this essay, in your
own way, knowing that its purpose is to give a
preliminary idea about what critical thinking means?

3. EVALUATION
 to assess the credibility of statements or other
representations which are accounts or descriptions
of a person’s perception, experience, situation,
judgment, belief, or opinion; and to assess the logical
strength of the actual or intended inferential
relationships among statements, descriptions,
questions or other forms of representation.
#Access to credibility of claims #Access to quality of
arguments that were made during inductive or deductive
reasoning

Your examples?
How about judging an author’s or speaker’s credibility?
 Comparing the strengths and weaknesses of
alternative interpretations?
 Determining the credibility of a source of information?
 Judging if two statements contradict each other?
 Judging if the evidence at hand supports the
conclusion being drawn?
 Judging if an argument’s conclusion follows either with
certainty or with a high level of confidence from its
premises?
 Judging if a given argument is relevant or applicable or
has implications for the situation at hand?

4. INFERENCE
 to identify and secure elements needed to draw
reasonable conclusions; to form conjectures and
hypotheses; to consider relevant information and
to educe the consequences flowing from data,
statements, principles, evidence, judgments,
beliefs, opinions, concepts, descriptions,
questions, or other forms of representation.
#Query evidence #Conjecture alternatives #Draw
conclusions using inductive or deductive reasoning

Your examples?
 You might suggest things like seeing the implications of the
position someone is advocating, or drawing out or
constructing meaning from the elements in a reading.
 You may suggest that predicting what will happen next based
what is known about the forces at work in a given situation,
or formulating a synthesis of related ideas into a coherent
perspective.
 After judging that it would be useful to you to resolve a given
uncertainty, developing a workable plan to gather that
information
 When faced with a problem, developing a set of options for
addressing it.
 Conducting a controlled experiment scientifically and
applying the proper statistical methods to attempt to confirm
or disconfirm an empirical hypothesis?

5. EXPLANATION
 This means to be able to give someone a full
look at the big picture: both “to state and to
justify that reasoning in terms of the
evidential, conceptual, methodological,
criteriological, and contextual considerations
upon which one’s results were based; and to
present one’s reasoning in the form of cogent
arguments.
#State results #Justify procedures #Present arguments

Some people want to call this
“metacognition,”
meaning it raises thinking to
another level.

Your examples?
 to construct a chart which organizes one’s findings
 to write down for future reference your current thinking on some
important and complex matter
 to cite the standards and contextual factors used to judge the
quality of an interpretation of a text
 to state research results and describe the methods and criteria
used to achieve those results
 to appeal to established criteria as a way of showing the
reasonableness of a given judgment
 to design a graphic display which accurately represents the
subordinate and superordinate relationship among concepts or
ideas
 to cite the evidence that led you to accept or reject an author’s
position on an issue
 to list the factors that were considered in assigning a final course
grade.

SELF-REGULATION
 Self-consciously to monitor one’s cognitive
activities, the elements used in those
activities, and the results educed, particularly
by applying skills in analysis, and evaluation to
one’s own inferential judgments with a view
toward questioning, confirming, validating, or
correcting either one’s reasoning or one’s
results.
#Self monitor #Self correct

Your examples?
 to examine your views on a controversial issue with
sensitivity to the possible influences of your personal biases
or self-interest,
 to check yourself when listening to a speaker in order to be
sure you are understanding what the person is really saying
without introducing your own ideas,
 to monitor how well you seem to be understanding or
comprehending what you are reading or experiencing,
 to remind yourself to separate your personal opinions and
assumptions from those of the author of a passage or text,
 to double check yourself by recalculating the figures,
 to vary your reading speed and method mindful of the type
of material and your purpose for reading,
 to reconsider your interpretation or judgment in view of
further analysis of the facts of the case,

Your examples?
 to revise your answers in view of the errors you discovered in
your work,
 to change your conclusion in view of the realization that you
had misjudged the importance of certain factors when
coming to your earlier decision.

Education is
not learning of
facts but
training the
mind to think
-Albert Einstein

Fluency
• Thinking of and listing many ideas
Flexibility
• Thinking from different
perspectives
Originality
• Coming up with unique ideas
Elaboration
• Building upon an existing idea – adding
details
Teaching
critical
thinking may
boost
inventiveness
and raises IQ

TEACHING CRITICAL
THINKING SKILLS

Begin by teaching the students what
critical thinking is and how a good
critical thinker behaves
1) Good critical thinkers are rational, curious persons who
seek the truth. Their goal is to find the truth not confirm
their own opinion. They recognize that they could be wrong.
They are open to revising their reasoning.
2) Good critical thinkers are open-minded, fair and
empathetic: They value other people and can imagine
another person’s point of view, assumptions, values and
reasoning. They practice intellectual humility and recognize
what they do not know.
3) Good critical thinkers are intellectually autonomous, strong
and courageous: They think for themselves in spite of
adversity; they persevere in their inquiry and reasoning
through obstacles such as social pressure.

Teach what critical thinkers AVOID
Fallacy is a false argument. It appears to be
correct but technically and formally it is not.
Example:
• The fallacy of Sweeping Generalization
Sample: Rizal wrote a book,
Filipinos are really bright.
• The fallacy of Hasty Generalization a.k.a. Dicto Simpliciter or “Jumping to
Conclusions,” or "Converse Accident" – there is already a
prejudice/judgment
Sample: All lawyers are liar.

Give assignments that are graded
purely on content of thought
Ask students to write and/or present
persuasive arguments that are data and
evidence based

Teach how to analyze elements of reasoning
including point of view, assumptions,
information it presents, problems it tries to
resolve, inferences, purpose, concepts,
implications and consequences
Debate format gets students to see
multiple sides of an issue

References
 Facione P.A. (2011). Critical Thinking: What it is and why it
counts. Retrieved at:
http://www.student.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003
/1922502/Critical-Thinking-What-it-is-and-why-it-counts.pdf
 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D © 2009-2012. Teaching critical thinking:
An evidence-based guide. Retrieved at
http://www.parentingscience.com/teaching-critical-
thinking.html
 McGlynn A.P. Helping College Students Develop Critical
Thinking Skills
 Emswiler S. Creating Critical Thinkers, University of Miami

Critical thinking lecture

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Critical thinking lecture