Brooke Noel Moore & Richard Parker: Critical Thinking ⋆ Book Box PDF

Critical Thinking pdf by Brooke Noel Moore and Richard Parker – 9th edition

WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?

In this book, authors give a couple of brief characterizations of critical thinking. But the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Project of the Council for Aid to Education has come up with a list of skills that covers almost everything your authors believe is important in critical thinking.

If you achieve mastery over all these or even a significant majority of them, you’ll be well ahead of most of your peers-and your fellow citizens. In question form, here is what the council came up with:

■ determine what information is or is not pertinent;
■ distinguish between rational claims and emotional ones;
■ separate fact from opinion;
■ recognize the ways in which evidence might be limited or compromised;
■ spot deception and holes in the arguments of others;
■ present his/her own analysis of the data or information;
■ recognize logical flaws in arguments;
■ draw connections between discrete sources of data and information;
■ attend to contradictory, inadequate, or ambiguous information;
■ construct cogent arguments rooted in data rather than opinion;
■ select the strongest set of supporting data;
■ avoid overstated conclusions;
■ identify holes in the evidence and suggest additional information to collect;
■ recognize that a problem may have no clear answer or single solution;
■ propose other options and weigh them in the decision;
■ consider all stakeholders or affected parties in suggesting a course of action;
■ articulate the argument and the context for that argument;
■ correctly and precisely use evidence to defend the argument;
■ logically and cohesively organize the argument;
■ avoid extraneous elements in an argument’s development;
■ present evidence in an order that contributes to a persuasive argument?