Critical and Creative Thinking

In this chapter, students will continue to develop their rhetorical capabilities as they learn to generate and evaluate knowledge, clarify concepts and ideas, seek possibilities, consider alternatives, and solve problems. These capabilities combine the use of two types of specialized intellectual activity: critical and creative thinking. Though the two are not interchangeable, they are strongly linked, bringing complementary dimensions to thinking and learning. Both critical and creative thinking involve students in: thinking broadly and deeply about a topic, developing precise analytical, research, and listening skills, and enhancing academic behaviors and dispositions such as using reason, logic, resourcefulness, imagination, and innovation in all learning areas, both within the college experience and beyond.

Critical thinking is at the core of most intellectual activity that involves students learning to recognize, analyze, or develop an argument. We use critical thinking to establish evidence in support of, or in opposition to, a given proposition. We also use it to draw reasonable conclusions and to clarify confusing information. Examples of critical thinking skills are interpreting, analyzing, evaluating, explaining, sequencing, reasoning, comparing, questioning, inferring, hypothesizing, appraising, testing, and generalizing.

Creative thinking involves students learning to generate and apply new ideas in specific contexts, seeing existing situations in new ways, identifying alternative explanations, and seeing or making new links or connections that generate iterative and meaningful outcomes. This includes combining various, often conflicting, parts to form something original, sifting and refining ideas to discover new possibilities, constructing and analyzing theories and objects, and using critical thinking skills to collaborate with others to solve problems. What is essential, in any case, is that the process encourages us to use our thinking to explore wide-ranging possibilities, engage otherness, consider alternative options, and synthesize new information.

It is essential, as we begin our discussion, to clarify how each mode of thinking is distinct from the other, but also how they work together to help us make sense of the world around us. Responding to the challenges of the modern world – with its complex environmental, social, psychological, political, and economic pressures – requires people to be creative, innovative, enterprising, and adaptable, with the motivation, confidence, and skills to use critical and creative thinking purposefully.

Concept formation is the mental activity that helps us compare, contrast, and classify ideas, objects, and events. Concept learning can be concrete or abstract and is closely allied with metacognition: the ability to think about one’s own thinking. Dispositions such as inquisitiveness, reasonableness, intellectual flexibility, open- and fair-mindedness, a readiness to try new ways of doing things and consider alternatives, and persistence promote, and are enhanced by, the use of critical and creative thinking skills.

Next, let us examine some of the latest research on our critical and creative thinking capacities and how the brain uses these techniques to make sense of the world. We will eventually apply what we are learning to your own assignments in the course.

TED Talks on Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, and the Brain

• View the TED Talk: How Schools Kill Creativity

• View the TED Talk: How to Think, Not What to Think

• View the TED Talk: My Stroke of Insight

• View the TED Talk: The Divided Brain

• View the TED Talk: The Empathic Civilization

NOTE: Please make sure to watch all of these videos and take notes. Refer back to them in the coming weeks as these videos will serve aspart of the basis for the research you will do for your major essays.