Ways of Enhancing Critical Thinking among the College Students

There are various ways in which the students can improve their skills of critical thinking. A college student can improve his ability to think critically by asking questions that are relevant to a college education. Students use the information that they already have to mark the basis of their questions concerning a particular topic. The critically thinking student does ask about their concern issues in education. A student who asks for more information concerning a particular idea gets a variety of information about the idea making him or her think and achieves the best idea. Critically thinking students always want to understand how the information or idea that is on the ground is working and how it came about.

Reversing the ideas is also another good way that students use in a developing their critical thinking skills. A student can also enhance his or her critical thinking skills through reversing the ideas that are already in the record. Reversing an idea helps greatly in finding the origin of the ideas. Working with an idea in a reverse way requires big thinking and hence brain expansion. Reversing the ideas and working with them for their educational purposes serves students by improving their ability to think in solving critical issues that they face in the process of their education.

Thinking about ones’ self also plays a role in improving the critical thinking ability of an individual. A student at the college should embrace the character of thinking about how their bodies work and the operation of all their body activities. When a student thinks about himself or herself, he or she begins to think about the relationship between the body operations and the ideas that they are written in the various sources of information that they use for their academic purposes. Students who think too much about things that have happened end up depressed and stagnant, thereby not showing any sign of progressing in their academics and other activities in the colleges.

A college student can improve his skills in critical thinking by coming with ideas that challenge the ones that they find from the various sources that they use for their academic information. College students are expected to think of ideas that work by challenging the ones of the scholars (Colucciello, 1997). To challenge information that is already in place, a student must think well and have evidence to support his or her argument. Through this, they can improve their critical thinking skills greatly. This means that students should try challenging the ideas that already exist in the bid to improve their critical thinking capabilities.

In the colleges, certain assumptions are made and taken as facts. Students believe that such ideas are the truth and never dispute them in every aspect of their academic lives. Through questioning the basic assumptions, students make their critical thinking skills grow bigger. Questioning an assumed fact requires a student to have a lot of information that he can use in disputing the perceived fact. Disputing or questioning a basic assumed idea, therefore, boosts the critical thinking skill of a student greatly.

The tutors can also help students improve their critical thinking in various. Tutors can introduce group-based assignment to the students in the bid of ensuring participation of the students at the same level. Group discussions require that every member participates to his or her level best so that he doesn’t appear a liability to the group. The students in the membership of the group would, therefore, work hard as possible to ensure that he or she gives the highest number of valid points in the discussion. Through group assignments, students also learn to know the ideas that are with their fellow students and adopt them for their personal use. Students also get motivated to read a lot and get every bit of information understood so that their participation can be effective to the group. Further, a tutor can help the student by introducing them to the connections between what they are taught to what is happening in the real-life situations. Students who are made to understand that what they learn is important for their performance in the real-life situation automatically responds by studying to know the maximum that they can contain in their brains so that they can be able to have their feature life perfect.

Intellectual Errors that Inhibit Critical Thinking in College Students

Although the college students are expected to think critically, there are a lot of errors that they make in the way they think that tend to hinder them from being critical thinkers. Some college students have their thinking aligned toward making them look perfect in the school society. This is called egocentric kind of thinking. In this kind of thinking, this category of students fails to appreciate the points of views that the other students give to a subject (Gokhale, 1995). The feeling that one’s view can never be right makes egocentric thinkers make academic decisions on a certain topic in a way that directly objects the way critical thinkers make their academic decisions. Egocentric thinking sometimes causes students to be in the context of cultural conditioning where they fail to recognize those from the other cultures that cross their ways. This sometimes reduces their abilities to resolve issues that are resulting from their opinion and belief differences. As opposed to critical thinkers who try to be neutral in their communication, recognize others ideas and easily resolve their opinion difference issues with their fellow students.

Over-relying on authority is also an intellectual error that has greatly affected the students’ critical thinking skills (Kurfiss, 1988). Authority means an outside expert that one feels is always right. In the college, there are some groups of students who do not even trust themselves in certain academic issues and have set their mind that they cannot do without certain individuals. This kind of mindset prevents students from thinking of other problem-solving methods, which is a basic component of critical thinking.

In the college, the moral judgment that a student makes for himself or herself dictates a lot about the academic outcome. Making a hasty mortal judgment is very dangerous for the student’s college life and often lead them into nasty situations. A hasty moral judgment does not give enough time for an individual to think of the particular topic of discussion in all the directions that are expected and necessary. Making hasty moral decisions, therefore, blocks the student’s path towards becoming critical thinkers. Hasty decision making, therefore, lags the critical thinking abilities of many college students.

Some of the college students tend towards thinking of the information that they get from the sources to be belonging to specific categories. This is black and white thinking whereby one fails to examine to find out the detailed information concerning the topic of discussion. This turns out to be opposing the critical thinking path whereby a student tries to get all the details of the information that he or she wants to find out more about. Some individuals are just resistant to the changes in their environment.  If a student happens to be resistant to environmental change, he or she will likely not to be accepting the changes in opinions. A student, however, should be ready to take any idea and verify it in case of any doubt. Those who are resistant to changes normally fail to make any necessary changes on the ideologies that they have had in their minds form the past.

Stereotyping is also another character that is common among the college students. Some of the college students believe that some of the units are very difficult and are meant for specific courses. Such students get disadvantaged greatly when they meet such units in their courses and mostly end up failing. Such a student fails to think of finding a solution to particular issues that they meet in their academic process and most likely fail terribly in those areas. Such students fail to recognize the simplicity of the concepts that the instructions need to be used (Furedy, 1985).  On the opposite direction, some of the students misunderstand the differences that may exist from one case to the other. Stereotyping affects the student’s keenness to read the instructions adequately and deduce the meaning that it tries to communicate. Irrelevancy among the student’s results forms stereotyping information that they get from the various academic sources that are used by the college students.

Critical thinking tries to trim students to be thinking of about how to make greater academic futures. However, some of the college students think a lot about their past academic experiences at the expenses of thinking on how they can correct their past academic events. Too much thinking of the past failures causes great depression among the students and results to students ending up failing throughout their academic life. Getting depressed about the issues that have already occurred and are irreversible inhibits the student’s ability to think about their future due to concern about what has already past (Halpern, 2002). Students who want to grow their critical thinking skills should, therefore, avoid getting involved in depression as a result of the past events so that they can set their minds free and ready for developmental thinking.

Many college students show characteristics of being resistant to the changes that take place in their environments. Students who are not ready to change become very difficult to deal with when they are introduced to new information that they had not known before. College curriculum is made such that it introduces a lot of new ideas to the students. The interaction with other students also become difficult as such students often have the feeling of being perfect and better than all the others and hence do not take the other’s ideas or give them time to express themselves.