Critical Thinking in Real Life
I can say that the main area of critical thinking is decision making. You can find a number of books and articles how to do that. There are also many researches supporting making decisions with critical thinking.
This broad approach isn’t bad, because we can reduce many problem to decision making. But unfortunately there aren’t many resources about specific examples of using critical thinking. I can even say it isn’t a good for promoting critical thinking because people love to see detailed and concise guides how to solve specific problems. We can teach more general approach later when people become interested in this topic.
So before our first course I spend some time to find examples of using critical thinking in daily life. I also applied what I knew of critical thinking to my own life. I found several interesting examples of practical approaches in critical thinking. Here is an interesting text about using critical thinking in fitness. It is mostly about avoiding biases which can lead to wrong decisions in this area. The author tells how availability heuristic, recency bias, and confirmation bias can influence you, providing several examples.
Another example of applying critical thinking is foreign language learning. I can point on this article which discusses how critical thinking can improve language learning and how it can be enhanced for better use in language practice. Language learning is a cognitive process and critical thinking can show its metacognitive nature and influence a learning process. Another article proposes a number of methods and approaches to use tools from critical thinking. For example, metacognitive learning strategies can be applied. Language learning also requires good reasoning and self-reflection, skills that are used in critical thinking too.
There are also a number of texts about using critical thinking to resist propaganda, advertising, and harmful influence. But this topic is very broad and should be discussed in a separate story.
Published on 2018-09-12
Tag: critical thinking
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