Customer Reviews

The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking-Concepts and Tools

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This brief 23 page guide offers some wonderful concepts that can help improve critical thinking skills. It also describes how these concepts can be applied in areas such as problem-solving and analyzing/assessing research. The work would have been better had the authors used some examples of actually applying the ideas in the guide. However, overall the coverage of the book's subject matter is sufficiently deep, and the guide itself is small enough to be kept on hand anywhere for quick reference.

This 20 page mini-book was assigned reading for a grad class I took at Columbia International University. The booklet serves as an introductory guide to the concepts and tools of critical thinking and is by no means an in depth study of critical thinking. The mini-guide should be used to supplement other books related to the topic. Written by two critical thinking experts, this book can be used by professors and teachers to develop instructional activities, enhance teaching techniques, design creative classwork, and simply improve overall learning. The contents of the book briefly include the importance of critical thinking, the elements of thought, a checklist and criteria for evaluating reasoning, the problem with egocentric thinking, universal intellectual standards, a template for analyzing the logic of articles and textbooks and for problem-solving, essential intellectual traits, analyzing and assessing research, and the stages of critical thinking development. Several charts and diagrams are provided to help us better understand abstract ideas. Although the font is tiny, the content is well organized and easy to read. Bold numbers and letters are regularly used to highlight key information. This review pertains to the fourth edition which came out in 2006.

I really enjoy all the books by Paul and Elder. They offer a very simple guide to making sure you are evaluating discussions critically. This book is so inexpensive, it's foolish not to have it (and all the others in the series). However, if you are looking for logic oriented critical thinking, this is not the book you want. The author offers their principles of critical thinking as a guideline. I use it when writing academic papers all the time. It was a life saver as a graduate student. All you have to do is write something for each area and you have a full paper. So, if you're a student at any level, get this series and you will find writing papers very easy.

The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking is a fine "primer" or beginning to the study of critical thinking. The study of critical thinking can be applied to almost any facet of modern day life, especially those areas that can or must be analyzed. There are more in-depth books on the subject but for someone interested in exploring a very big subject for a very small price, you can't go wrong with this book. A few examples of detailed rational analysis applications would have earned this book five stars, but I consider that a small drawback. Even if your university curriculum doesn't require this small book, you should get it regardless. It will be tremendously helpful in developing your initial critical thinking skills, and those are skills that can be used every day.

This little guide presents three conceptual tools with several processes for applying each; elements of thought, intellectual standards, and intellectual traits. Together, these tools are arranged for easy reference and application. The tools are simple, but very flexible, and could be applied to almost any intellectual endeavor. What these tools do for you; they allow you or anyone else for that matter, to assess a document, speech, or presentation for logic and intellectual rigor. Once mastered, the user will be able to rapidly address the critical aspects of intellectual efforts.

This book is heresy and must be banned, all copies located and burned, and anyone who has read it banned from sharing the contents under threat of immediate arrest. How dare Drs. Paul and Elder (of the Foundation for Critical Thinking) allow a tool like this to fall in the hands of the hoi polloi. First they'll start applying it to Fox news, then to MSNBC, press releases from unions, corporations, and the government next, then to the products of the academics that know so much more than the rest of us, then the whole system will collapse. The last thing our world needs is average people thinking clearly.

Jefferson would have whole heartedly endorsed this and Hamilton would have been outraged.
I like it.

E. M. Van Court

If you're thinking of buying this book used, be aware that what you're getting is a small, cardboard stock, stapled-together booklet. While there's nothing wrong with that, for the price some of the used sellers here and on eBay were charging (12 dollars? For real?) I expected something with binding (luckily, I only paid around 7 dollars total). Get the cheapest you can find.

Book is great but very "heady". Took me a few times to read the 22 page booklet, but it did EXACTLY what it said it was going to do, and that's to give you tools to know how to think critically; a way of thinking not always encouraged in life, or sometimes even, taught.