Critical thinking has been much in my mind recently.
I just designed a new workshop on Critical Thinking for Academic Skills, which we expected to be full of first year Arts students grappling with their first essay assignment. Instead, it was full of medical students.
A few days before, a colleague had circulated a link to CASP–a UK based cricical appraisal skills program (you should totally go and check it out) that claims to:
enable individuals to develop the skills to find and make sense of research evidence, helping them to put knowledge into practice
Using critical appraisal to acheive evidence based practice is a great skill–and I’d love to hear people’s views on it.
the use of explicit, transparent methods to assess the data in published research, applying the rules of evidence to factors such as internal validity, adherence to reporting standards, conclusions and generalizability. (Thank you Mr Wikipedia)
When we look at qualitative research though, particularly when we look at disciplines like Literature, Musicology, Theology or Philosophy, it becomes much more difficult to achieve. Critical analysis may involve critical faculties, and there are definitely ways to get it wrong–but, as I often tell my students
There are no right answers. There are some wrong answers, and lots of good answers, and some better answers. That is all.
Those two kinds of close appraisal or analysis of the data are therefore going to lead to very different kinds of pictures, and those two pictures are going to need to be framed in different ways. In science, that reference ‘frame’ is going to be doing something different from what it’s doing in arts.
This is a musing, a discussion, a seed, a metaphor than needs development–but there’s a new critical thinking ‘staircase’ coming next week that is going to rescue your argument!
