The critical thinking debate: how general are general thinking skills?

By Tim Moore *. 2004

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper takes up the issue of whether the skill of critical thinking in university education is best thought of as a broad universal generic skill or rather as only a loose category taking in a variety of modes of thought. Through the linguistic analysis of some sample texts, I argue that the discourse of general thinking programs should not be thought of as a generalist discourse at all, but in fact a quite specific one. The implications both for the teaching and testing of critical thinking are considered in the light of this position.

Subfields: Education, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fd4785ebe7b24dbc29dc293e7649aa5595e9435

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Citations in the corpus

Educating for critical thinking: thought‐encouraging questions in a community of inquiry (2011, background): “This has been a long‐standing controversy that continues in this journal with Moore ( 2004 ) championing the specifist position, versus Davies ( 2006 ) who takes the generalist position.”
Critical thinking in a second language (2011, background): “Critical thinking (CT), it is argued, is vital to success in tertiary level courses (Cheung, Rudowicz, Kwan, & Yue, 2004; Moore, 2004; Phillips & Bond, 2004).”
Critical thinking and the disciplines reconsidered (2013, background): “…Moore criticises the Graduate Skills Assessment test on the grounds that it assumes a generalist view of critical thinking (assessing relationships between propositions and statements) and does not allow for ‘nuanced judgements characteristic of discipline-based texts’ (Moore, 2004, p. 15).”
Developing First Year Students' Critical Thinking Skills (2011, background): “Critical thinking is crucial to achieving this outcome and is seen by some as the trademark of a well-educated person and as important for becoming an active and engaged employee and global citizen (Facione, 2010; Fagin et al., 2006; Moore, 2004).”
Thinking critically about critical thinking in higher education (2010, background): “This belongs to the questionable notion of critical thinking as a “free-floating entity” (Moore, 2004).”
An ‘infusion’ approach to critical thinking: Moore on the critical thinking debate (2006, methodology): “All the examples are selected because they present different examples of ‘critical thinking’ from different disciplines, and each evaluates a ‘set of ideas’ (Moore, 2004, pp. 7–8).”