This popular pocket-size guide empowers readers with critical thinking tools based on the groundbreaking work of Richard Paul and Linda Elder. This bestselling volume in the Thinker’s Guide Library provides students, educators, and professionals with an authoritative problem-solving framework essential for every aspect of life.

Teaching Critical Thinking in the "Strong" Sense: A Focus On Self-Deception, World Views, and a Dialectical Mode of Analysis.

Now available from Rowman & Littlefield, the third edition of this introductory critical thinking text features streamlined chapters, Think for Yourself activities, and a complete glossary of critical thinking terms.

Background Logic, Critical Thinking, and Irrational Language Games.

Critical Thinking, 2nd Edition is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life—as a professional, as a consumer, citizen, friend, or parent. Richard Paul and Linda Elder identify the core skills of effective thinking, then help you analyze your own thought processes so you can systematically identify and overcome your weaknesses.

As a supplement to other volumes in the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book provides a framework by which to assess the integration of critical thinking into an educational system The critical thinking competency standards articulated in this guide serve as a resource for teachers, curriculum designers, administrators and accrediting bodies.

This essay-based test assesses the extent to which students have acquired the reading and writing abilities required for skilled analysis and evaluation. Developed by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, the test is designed for secondary and higher education students and fosters close reading and substantive writing abilities.

Now available from Rowman & Littlefield, Paul and Elder's concise introductory text focuses on the most basic critical thinking concepts and includes activities to apply these concepts within disciplines and to life.

This book reveals the power of critical thinking to make sense of overwhelming and often subjective media by detecting ideology, slant, and spin at work. Building off the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework, Fact over Fake focuses on the internal logic of the news as well as societal influences on the media.

Thinking about history as only a collection of dates and names prevents us from seeing the true value of the past. This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library reveals history as a mode of thinking with real current-day implications. Students learn to engage with the past in a way that promotes critical thinking about the present and future.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library addresses the vital role of questions in every area of life. As readers develop a questioning mind, they also come to a better understanding of the world and of themselves. This book illustrates how well developed questions lead to deeper knowledge and counteract dangerous ignorance.

This critical thinking guide introduces concepts and strategies for developing essential reasoning skills and intellectual character. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book is an essential resource for students learning new academic disciplines and encountering new situations in life.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library offers insight into the mind’s core functions of thinking, feeling, and wanting and examines how to take command of emotions. It reveals intrinsic barriers to criticality in human thought that impede learning and self-development and is essential reading for those wishing to take full command their minds.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library analyzes the intellectual standards by which reasoning is judged by skilled thinkers. It broadens the discussion of essential standards such as clarity, accuracy, relevance, and fairness to encompass banks of standards useful for any teacher, administrator, or professional in an evaluative role.

As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book explores how to analyze questions, problems, and opportunities through the elements of reasoning. It provides students, educators and professionals a framework for deconstructing and assessing any issue to find the most practical solution, in order to achieve the best consequences.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library introduces healthcare students and professionals to the foundations of critical thinking and offers examples of applications within clinical fields. It is an essential companion for all healthcare courses as it advances critical thinking within all specialties with the clinical professions.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library lays out straightforward, powerful strategies teachers can implement to immediately get students actively engaged in thinking critically in the classroom. Over time students develop a sense of responsibility for their own learning objectives and express curiosity in further areas of study.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library uncovers current well-intentioned educational trends that inefficiently fragment energy and resources in our K-12 education systems. Critiquing the basic idea behind each of these fads illuminates their real motivations and provides for holistic use.

This handbook teaches students to read for deep understanding, properly analyze and assess what they read, and reason within the logic of an author. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this guide includes activities for students to work through in developing close reading skills using the tools of critical thinking.

This handbook teaches students to read for deep understanding, properly analyze and assess what they read, and reason within the logic of an author. Written by critical thinking authorities Richard Paul and Linda Elder as part pf the Thinker’s Guide Library, this guide includes activities for students to work through in developing close reading skills using the tools of critical thinking.

As a companion to How to Read a Paragraph, this volume in the Thinker’s Guide Library helps students develop clear, effective and meaningful written communication skills using critical thinking tools. If you want your students to develop well reasoned papers, and improve their overall reasoning abilities, this guide is a must.

This is Part II of a reflection by Richard Paul on critical thinking, its theory and pedagogy, and on political and personal barriers to critical thinking education and practice. Part I of Paul’s reflection appeared in INQUIRY, Vol. 26 No. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 5-24. In Part II Paul focuses on the concept of critical thinking, pointing out its unifying features as well as the many ways it can be contextualized in human thought and life. He lays out his basic (...) critical thinking theory and offers critical thinking polarities for use in assessing critical thinking approaches. He provides an overview of the work of the Foundation for Critical Thinking in advancing fairminded critical thought in education and in society. (shrink)

This paper is a response to INQUIRY editor Frank Fair’s invitation to me to write a reflective piece that sheds light on my involvement in the field of Critical Thinking Studies . My response is in two parts. The two parts together might be called “Reflections on the nature of critical thinking and on its status across the college/university curriculum.” The parts together have been written with a long term and large-scale end in view. If successful the two parts will (...) shed light on why the critical thinking movement has not yet contributed significantly to human emancipation or to more just and fair-minded communities . It will also present some strategies for making such a contribution. (shrink)

This guide promotes simultaneous teaching of creative and critical thinking and explores them as innately interrelated essential elements of learning. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, it is a useful resource for teachers and administrators at every level, especially as they integrate critical and creating thinking into existing curricula.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library offers a framework for ethical reasoning, illuminating powerful, universal tools for thinking through ethical questions. Linda Elder and Richard Paul discuss the main impediments to ethics and present ethical concepts and principles as guides for people of different backgrounds to find common ground.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library presents critical thinking skills essential to mastering any area of study. Students are empowered to take ownership of their thinking and learning by asking questions, challenging assumptions, and drawing upon reliable sources. The guide makes intellectual work more accessible, practical, and engaging.

Designed to help readers learn to seek out and recognize bias in the news; detect ideology, slant, and spin; and recognize propaganda, this volume in the Thinker’s Guide Library empowers readers to weed through overwhelming and often subjective media. It is an ideal supplement for media courses or a companion to daily news reports.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library introduces the concept of fallacies and shows readers how to discern and see through forty-four types. Focusing on how human self-deception, mental trickery, and manipulation lie behind fallacies, this guide builds reasoning skills and promotes fairminded, logical thought, discussions, and debate.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library applies critical thinking concepts to the unique requirements of engineering. Students and professionals across the field of engineering will find their analytical abilities enhanced by the engaging authoritative framework of inquiry set forth by Richard Paul and Linda Elder.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library introduces readers to powerful methods for questioning that pinpoint underlying beliefs and systems of logic. Richard Paul and Linda Elder show how practical and accessible the Socratic method of inquiry can be and how useful it is when assessing and solving any problem.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library employs critical thinking concepts in the development of productive scientific thought. Readers will learn to reason within the logic of their scientific disciplines and will find their analytical abilities enhanced by the engaging framework of inquiry set forth by Richard Paul and Linda Elder.

The pace of change in the world is accelerating, yet educational institutions have not kept pace. Indeed, schools have historically been the most static of social institutions, uncritically passing down from generation to generation outmoded didactic, lecture-and-drill-based, models of instruction. Predictable results follow. Students, on the whole, do not learn how to work by, or think for, themselves. They do not learn how to gather, analyze, synthesize and assess information. They do not learn how to analyze the diverse logic of (...) the questions and problems they face and hence how to adjust their thinking to those problems. They do not learn how to enter sympathetically into the thinking of others, nor how to deal rationally with conflicting points of view. They do not learn to become critical readers, writers, speakers and listeners. They do not learn how to use their native languages clearly, precisely, or persuasively. They do not, therefore, become ‘literate’, in the proper sense of the word. Neither do they gain much in the way of genuine knowledge since, for the most part, they could not explain the basis for what they believe. They would be hard pressed to explain, for example, which of their beliefs were based on rational assent and which on simple conformity to what they have been told. They have little sense as to how they might critically analyze their own experience, or identify national or group bias in their own thinking. They are much more apt to learn on the basis of irrational than rational modes of thought. They lack the traits of mind of a genuinely educated person: intellectual humility, courage, integrity, perseverance, and faith in reason.Happily, there is a movement in education today striving to address these problems in a global way, with strategies and materials for the modification of instruction at all levels of education. At its foundation is an emerging new theory of knowledge, learning, and literacy, one which recognizes the centrality of independent critical thinking to all substantial learning, one which recognizes that higher-order, multilogical thinking is as important to childhood as to adult learning, and as important to foundational learning in monological as in multilogical disciplines. This educational reform movement is not proposing an educational miracle cure, for its leading proponents recognize that many social and historical forces must come together before the ideals of the critical thinking movement will become a full academic reality. Schools do not exist in a social vacuum. To the extent that the broader society is uncritical so, on the whole, will be society's schools. Nevertheless, the social conditions necessary for fundamental changes in schooling are increasingly apparent. The pressure for fundamental change is growing. Whether and to what extent these needed basic changes will be delayed or side-tracked, thus requiring new periodic resurgences of this movement, with new, more elaborate articulations of its ideals, goals, and methods — only time will tell. (shrink)