Customer Reviews

Critical Thinking: Building the Basics (Study Skills/Critical Thinking)

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This book teaches improved reading comprehension, and the ability to answer exam questions based on that. Identification of the higher-order category to which a topic belongs is a critical metacognitive skill. The book teaches and exercises basic metacognition very well without ever naming it. Identification of the relevance of a topic is fuzzy business however. It requires and assumes that the student is actually motivated to build a knowledge schema, which alas, is not usually the case.Standard generic motives are assumed (e.g., people want food, comfort and happiness) to ground "relevance." After "Part I" the first 42 pages, the rest of the book is mind-numbing repetition. Evaluation is never addressed: it is assumed that the material presented should just be accepted as given. That may be okay for beginners.This would be an excellent exercise book for high school students or even bright junior-high students. For college level it would be remedial, in my opinion.

This book is short, but has high impact on the students. I used it in my college level Critical Thinking course. The greatest feature of the book is that it uses samples from actual text books across the university curriculum. The simple technique of identifying topic, class, relevance and description of a body of information provides an excellent framework for a beginning critical thinker. I used the text in a 12 day /complete semester course and had some excellent teaching-learning moments in the classroom working with the material.

An excellent buy.