Critical Evaluation Toolkit

Evaluating ideas and written text

Some suggestions for giving students practice in evaluating ideas and written text are given below.

Why not:

Create some critical thinking writing activities that

• give students raw data and ask them to write an argument or analysis based on the data;
• have students explore and write about unfamiliar points-of-view or 'what if' situations;
• think of a controversy in your field, and have the students write a dialogue between characters with different points-of-view. Select important articles in your field and ask the students to write summaries or abstracts of them. Alternately, you could ask students to write an abstract of your lecture; and
• develop a scenario that places students in realistic situations relevant to your discipline, where they must reach a decision to resolve a conflict.

Promoting and Assessing Critical Thinking.
Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 2 September, 2004
http://www.trace.uwaterloo.ca/PandACThinking.html

Why not:

Explore what textual analysis involves. Ask your students to:

• Identify what is being said;
• Distinguish what is relevant from what is not;
• Find connections between different strands of thought;
• Recognise vagueness and ambiguity, then clarify the terms;
• Identify members of a class in terms of likenesses;
• Identify counter instances as different in some respect; and
• Identify analogies.

Adapted from: Lipman, M. (1991). Thinking in Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, cited in Slade, C. (1995). Higher order thinking in institutions of higher learning. Unicorn, 21 (1), pp. 39.

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