Application: One of the most valuable things you can do to help students retain information is to hold weekly review sessions. Help students step back and assess their own habits and skills. The subjects are told to either count the number of passes made by one of the teams or to keep count of bounce passes vs. aerial passes. Now a movement is in the works across school districts to promote “emotional literacy” in students. Definition: A heuristic is an experience-based technique that helps in problem solving, learning, and discovery. 1. The best way to apply critical thinking is to know what questions to ask in any area of life. You review what actions you take in a day and how long you take to do them. Application: Bonus and extra credit assignments are some of the most basic examples of positive reinforcement. Information that was processed meaningfully was well remembered whether or not there was an intention to retain it. In most groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla. Application: It is far more difficult to remember concepts and definitions than it is to remember actions and descriptions. Definition: An effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. 35 Psychology-Based Critical Thinking Strategies. You do research and play out scenarios with the benefits and drawbacks from the perspective of the people of the town, the ecological perspective of the forest and the benefit of the company you are advising for. If critical thinking is a key phrase in the job listings you are … State-Dependent Recall. There are probably thousands of critical thinking examples in your life where you have applied critical thinking to either solving a problem, creating a new perspective, or presenting yourself in a clear and relevant way. If the answer is no, you may want to rethink your notions of psychology and its place in the learning environment. Application: Some types of recognition, such as facial recognition and pattern recognition, require large amounts of brain processing capacity. Application: Expecting students to remember the verbatim wording of an answer is asking too much in most cases. Critical thinking is using reason and evidence to evaluate claims. Definition: The finding that memory recall is higher for the first item(s) on a list and the last item(s) on a list. 35 Psychology-Based Critical Thinking Strategies, contributed by Sara Briggs, opencolleges.edu.au. When items are intertwined or associated they are said to be interacting and they become a single chunk or whole in memory. Application: There is nothing wrong with changing your mind in light of new evidence. Encourage students to use their immediate learning environment to build associations and boost memory. A typical curve shows that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material. Application: Studies show that awareness of one’s learning is enough to enhance it. Definition: Positive reinforcement is a concept first described by psychologist B. F. Skinner in his theory of operant conditioning. Which of these examples of critical thinking stood out to you? Reflecting on your behavior in a certain confrontation with a person, you see things from their perspective and realize that the way you have behaved isn’t to your liking. When you start getting a better and more objective viewpoint. Let them listen to music when they complete their mid-term essays if they usually listen to it when they write. (Examples of bad design can be found in The Critical Thinking Companion for Introductory Psychology or they can be easily constructed with a little time and imagination). Allport et al. Definition: A term referring to the process of taking individual units of information (chunks) and grouping them into larger units. Application: Urge your students to sit in the same room they studied in when they complete their take-home quiz. This video can help to show you the immense power of knowing how to question everything: The following are examples of where critical thinking affects your everyday life: As the team leader in your department, you have to come up with a strategy to improve on a specific product. Keep in mind that teaching your students “what” is not the same as teaching them “how.”. Do you think there was a more effective way to accomplish what you accomplished and how would you utilize it in the future? Application: Unfortunately, effort does not always correlate positively with performance. Proven to be significantly more effective than massed repetition (i.e. Share this wisdom with your students to promote critical thinking. cramming). Development of Critical thinking skills is one of the most important parts of undergraduate education, and also the American Psychological Association (APA) includes it as one of the five major learning goals.. Application: The brain doesn’t remember facts; it remembers connections. The failure to perceive the change is attributed to the failure to attend to it while engaged in the difficult task of counting the number of passes of the ball. How can any teacher reasonably expect this to be effective? Definition: After an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one’s past performance as more difficult than it actually was, thereby inflating the perceived value of the result.