Critical Thinking, Scientific Thinking, and Everyday Thinking: Metacognition about Cognition

questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo When I began teaching science I had hoped that students could learn to employ biological concepts in a reasonable way to solve the everyday problems they will face in the future. I wanted students to have beliefs and even passionate beliefs, if not about the environment and the miracle of their own bodies, then about something--anything--that was important to them. The scientific method is, of course, very powerful in continually refining our view of how the world works. However, in science classes, the scientific method is taught as a series of steps that are dutifully memorized and repeated usually without any detailed explanation about how to get from one step to the next. I believe that if science teachers had a better understanding of critical thinking they could provide students with the necessary link between learning factual knowledge and applying that knowledge to their belief systems. In order to clarify this statement, let me explore two questions: First, what is meant by the term critical thinking. As a trained biologist, I was not aware of the time and effort that education and psychology has invested in the term critical thinking. In 1916 John Dewey imagined that we deliberately seek out the basis for our beliefs and the adjunct information to support them (Dewey, 1916). Dewey called this process reflective thought. Self-directed thought examines a belief to determine what it is based on and to ascertain what consequences will follow from that belief. Dewey felt that reflective thought was the only thing that keeps us from acting on habit and impulse alone. Many others define critical thinking (see Adams, 1993; Facione, 1984; Moll & Allen, 1982; Morgan, 1995) but rather than list all of the definitions, it probably makes more sense to determine what they may have in common. First, nearly every definition has some reference to reason or using reasoning. Second, the terms reason or reasoning also convey the notion of logic or being logical. Those who study logic appear to agree that, with or without formal training in logic, humans are (at least in principle) reasonable and rational (Eysenek & Keane, 1990). The second question to explore is, if we are all reasonable and rational then why do we not think critically all the time? There has been some research that suggests why we may not. Perkins and Hafner (1983) found that reasoning processes were routinely impaired by problems of bias and incomplete reasoning. The adult and college students they studied had committed sins of omission where reasoning skills were all right as far as they went, but never went far enough. What is of interest here is that even though we as humans are logical and rational, we cannot recognize our own biases, the biases of others, and the validity of opposing arguments. Thus, another point that the definitions appear to have in common, is the assumption that there is an awareness on the learner's part about the thought process itself, and therefore a willingness and desire to make appropriate decisions. In order to clarify this last concept Zeidler, et al. (1992) studied Dewey's concept of reflective thought. First, critical thinkers possess a certain mind-set with which they approach ideas. Dewey imagined that one must be willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching. Second, the critical thinker is a skeptic who is willing to suspend judgement or is unwilling to accept any idea until evidence can be demonstrated to permit its acceptance, perhaps developing a critical thinking ethic as recommended by Halpern (1998). This mind-set or ethic will require learners to reflect on the reasoning of others and on their own reasoning to solve the socio-scientific dilemmas of the future (Zeidler, et al., 1992). Unfortunately, undergraduate and graduate college students do not seem to exhibit the level of reflective judgement and reasoning skills expected for 16-20 years of education (Mine, King, Hood, & Wood, 1990). …