Critical Thinking Elements
Critical thinking has six basic elements. Each of the six elements of critical thinking serves a purpose in making it beneficial to the college students. This would, therefore, mean that a student must show all the six elements for him or her to be considered as thinking critically. Information evaluation, interpretation, analysis, synthesis, explanation and idea application are the elements that make up critical thinking among the college students. If there miss any of these elements in the way a student carry on, then he or she is considered not thinking critically.
Information evaluation is the first element of critical thinking that a student should show. A critical thinker can evaluate information from a source. Such a student can systematically determine the weight and worth of information ideas, or she gets from a source. A student should be able to understand that each of the ideas that he or she gets from a source has the advantaging and disadvantaging side. This helps the student to choose the information idea that is more advantaging and can result in more success in academics. More advantaging information should be understood by a student to be fetching higher grades than the others that have more limitations in their context.
A college student should also be able to synthesize the idea information that he or she gets from a source. Synthesis of information is also an important aspect of critical thinking in college students. Students should be capable of using different information sources in bringing up an idea. Using a variety of sources enables him or her to infer the relationships between the information that are contained in the articles, books essays, and the non-written sources.
Moreover, analysis of information, especially research data also makes part of critical thinking in college students. Critical thinking insists that college students should understand the procedure of analyzing the information they get from the various educational sources. Students through critical thinking learn how to analyze the information that they get and come up with the best idea that would result in best grades in their education. Information analysis also helps the college to do well in the research units that they study in the schools. Studying a trend of an event also demands college students to have good analysis skills such that they can address student issue and be able to predict the next event to occur.
Explaining considering an idea is also very important in critical thinking (Stupple, 2017). Critical thinking is also aimed at making everyone understand the information concerning an idea or a topic. It, therefore, trains the college students to develop such that their knowledge concerning an idea such that they can be able to share the same information with others in a more clear way. An explanation may sometimes include the skills of students bringing the information to a real-life context for faster and deeper understanding of the target audience. Having studied deep an idea, a student should be able to make the information in the idea simpler through breaking it down to easily understandable sub-topics.
Application of the learned information and ideas is also very basic in critical thinking among the college students. Successful students apply what they have been taught in theory form into the practical. The college education is much into enabling students to apply the theoretical ideas into the real-life situation through performing practical work. The ability of the student to apply the theory ideas into his or her practical work determines how much they are likely to perform and meet the targets expected of them when they get to the industrial environment. Critical thinking works on the basis that a student learns to be able to apply what they have learned in performing practical works (Niu, 2015). Application of ideas also involves students applying the concepts that they have learned in their previous units of education in developing into the next stage of learning. A college education is based on how much a student can remember and use the information that he or she had learned previously in becoming more superior in the next stage of education. Second-year topics are performed based on the ideas that had been developed in the previous years of study.
Developing on the quantity of knowledge with a student is among the major components of critical thinking among the college students. Critical thinking values students becoming more knowledgeable. Students should be improving the degree of how much they know as they learn. College learning is progressive and therefore makes knowledge increase a great component of critical thinking. Finally, a student needs to understand what they are taught. If a student fails to understand the ideas that they learn from the various sources they use for information, they definitely will have nothing but consider themselves losers in education. Critical thinking tries to save students from becoming academic losers by ensuring that they become very smart upstairs and grasps every detail of information that they learn in class or even from the readings.