Critical Thinking Skills and Learning

Author's note: I wrote this response essay a few years back. I can't seem to find the original copy of the journal where the original article was published. I tried to do a google search using the title as keywords and got a link to the ERIC database. The abstract is available online, but I could not locate the full-text article, unfortunately.
A lot of what Patricia Braswell has discussed in her article holds true in the case of classrooms today. I'm amazed to see how some issues never seem to change.

Patricia Braswell’s article, “Cabbage Worms and Critical Thinking,” that was published in the Teaching English in the Two Year College Journal, Volume 20, n1 p64-70, Feb 1993, discusses the importance of incorporating critical thinking skills into college-level writing classes in order to enhance comprehension skills and active learning.
Braswell begins her essay with an explosive accusation. She claims that most composition teachers only check for basic comprehension skills. They do not take the time or the effort to “move toward emphasizing the higher skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.”
As teachers we are all faced with a great challenge – we want our students to become better thinkers, readers and writers. Braswell explores her Beaufort’s County Community College’s ambitious project aimed at incorporating critical thinking skills into a college level reading/writing class and its result on student learning. For students to develop literary abilities and for them to apply the abstract knowledge they receive in college classes in to concrete settings in real life, the development of critical thinking skills is a must. The powers-that-be at LaGuardia Community College have established the claim that thinking process can be improved through support and reinforcement on the part of instructors.
Problem solving is the highest level of thinking. It requires a bunch of critical reasoning abilities. Instructors must, therefore, encourage students to read literary material that will force them to don their thinking caps. The writing assignments that follow the reading exercises must tap into these critical thinking skills. Of course, we must not forget that critical thinking will only follow if comprehension is accomplished. Students cannot be asked to “think” about something that they have not yet fully understood.
Braswell quotes a number of renowned scholars and veteran teachers in her effort to put across her point better. Joseph Eulie, Gordon Wells, Jerome Harste and Richard Paul are some of the research scholars she refers to.
Braswell gives us specific examples of two class sections of English Composition 102 from Beaufort County Community College, which were chosen to be a part of the Critical Thinking Project. One class section followed traditional course competencies as laid out by the College Board mandate. The other section sought to “sharpen (the students’) skills of thinking, reading, and writing logically, critically, and effectively through a variety of methods – lectures, work-shopping, discussion, problem solving activities, writing assignments, and examinations” (Braswell). In this section, 30% of the final course grade was set aside for class participation. Both sections were given standardized pre- and post-tests in critical thinking.
Students from section 2 protested loudly that they were being made to do more work and were not initially ready to accept responsibility for their own learning. But by the end of the course, they did express the feeling that they could “make sense of their own ideas and those in the world around them” (Braswell). The ones who dropped out of this section were the ones who ingested the proverbial “cabbage worms.” They only wanted to sit and listen and were not prepared to do anything.
As a result of projects like the one described above, the approach that college teachers take toward their classes has changed significantly in the past decade. Our instruction is now designed to ensure that students become willing participants in the class work and that they use their thinking powers to reason and solve literary and conceptual problems.
The best admonition that Braswell provides in her article appears toward the very end, when she cautions teachers that “It takes more than one quarter to effect significant changes in students’ critical thinking abilities…”
As teachers we might often get frustrated at our seemingly minute accomplishments. In the long run, however, the right efforts will, definitely, produce more analytical thinkers, readers, and writers.