Emphasise critical-creative thinking skill at senior school level through classroom processes: Short Note

SHORT NOTE

Critical thinking skill (not be confused with criticism), is a purposeful and constructive critiquing cognitive skill or one the top-most higher order thinking skills that evolves the multi-perspective evaluation leading to effective learning.

Critical thinking is employed to re-assess and review the inputs, processes and outcomes vis-a-vis the norm-referenced, self-referenced and criterion-referenced formative evaluation of an entity for solution finding, fine-tuning, trying alternatives, improvement or effectiveness.

Bloom’s [1] taxonomy of cognitive psychology (consisting of thinking levels of Knowledge; Comprehension; Application; Analysis; Synthesis; Evaluation) was updated by Anderson and Krathwohl [2] (2001) by incorporating new findings in psychology and education into the framework in which the cognitive processes are presented as verbs and the knowledge content are presented as nouns to frame the competency statements for a given of specific learning episode. They added another cognitive level - an exchanging the levels of Evaluation and Synthesis - called 'Creation.'

The cognitive level of 'critical-creative thinking' as far as learners and teachers or classroom processes is concerned must lead to meta-cognition - an awareness of their (students' and teachers') own cognition to processes for knowledge construction, contextual and conditions in which cognitive tasks and self-knowledge are being transacted. Thus, from the view point of cognitive psychology, the critical-creative thinking involves generation and application of fresh ideas in new ways to learn to promote learning with highest level of thinking. Practicing teaching and learning processes and strategies with 'critical-creative thinking' skills leads to self-reflection and intuitive thinking of mid-course correction in a task.

REFERENCES

[1] Bloom, B. S. (1969). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals : Handbook I, Cognitive domain. New York: McKay.

[2] Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., & Bloom, B. S. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.