Triple 'A' – Questioning: Home

What is critical thinking?

As a university student, you need to be able to think critically about the resources and information you use in your work. You need to ask the right questions when reading the work of others; your writing needs to show you have the ability to weigh up different arguments and perspectives and use evidence to help you form your own opinions, arguments, theories and ideas. Critical thinking is about questioning and learning with an open mind.

Critical thinking should help you to:

• interpret evidence, data, arguments, etc. and be able to identify the significance to your assignment question
• develop well-reasoned arguments of your own for your assignments
• use and draw on evidence to justify your arguments and ideas
• synthesise your thoughts and the thoughts of differing authors/researchers/theorists.

This useful guide from Plymouth University provides an introduction to critical thinking and stresses the importance of asking and answering questions. Critical, is the attempt to ask and answer questions systematically. This means asking the most useful questions in the most productive sequence in order to yield a coherent and credible ‘story’. Download the guide from here!

Thinking, reading and writing critically

My Learning Essentials from The University of Manchester have created this interactive tutorial that explores how to be critical, highlighting practical strategies you can use in your academic reading and writing that will enable you to demonstrate critical analysis in your assignments.

Access the tutorial from here!

A model for critical thinking

The critical thinking model can help you develop a more systematic and analytical approach to your studies and to develop your critical thinking, reading and writing skills.

The model shows you how to use common questioning words such as "What?", "Who?", "How?", "Why?" and "What if?" to take you through the stages of description, analysis and evaluation:

1. Describe what you are reading.
2. Analyse the material’s core arguments and conclusions.
3. Evaluate its significance and its successes / failures.

Description

We start with the descriptive segment of the model. At this stage you should ask yourself: "Who?", "What?", "Where?", "When?" and "Why?"

These questions will generate purely descriptive answers. You will gain a general understanding of who wrote the text, when it was written, and what the main ideas or arguments are.

Through answering these questions you will only be able to reiterate what an author has said, but not demonstrate your understanding of the significance of the text.

Whilst these questions are important to gain an initial understanding of an issue, topic or text, this is not thinking critically. For that we need to ask more in-depth and challenging questions.

Analysis

We now move on to the analysis stage. We are not going to accept at face value what we have read, seen or heard.

We need to:

• pull it apart and explain and examine how each part fits into the whole
• give reasons, comparing and contrasting different elements
• show our understanding of relationships.

At this stage we are interested in the process or method, as well as the causes, theories and evidence. These questions, especially ‘how?’ and ‘why?’, will help you to develop more analytical answers and deeper thinking.

For example, you might ask yourself:

• How has the author reached their conclusions?
• What method has been used and was the method appropriate?
• Why does the author think what they think?
• Is relevant and reliable evidence used to support any arguments, ideas or conclusions presented?
• Does the data presented support the conclusions made?

Evaluation

Finally we come to the evaluative segment. This involves judging the failure or success of something, its implications, significance and/or value.

Evaluation leads us to conclusions or recommendations. This contains questions such as ‘what if?’ and ‘so what?’

Asking these questions will help you to assess the worth and significance of what you have read.

Questions might include:

• How relevant is this text to your purpose?
• What do you think about what you have read?
• What is your position on the subject?
• How does this relate to other information you have read or heard?
• Does it contradict, support or challenge other evidence?

You won't need to think or read about everything in this much depth. Sometimes just asking the descriptive questions may be enough, for example if you are just reading something to gain a basic understanding of a topic. It is when you need to make sense of and produce assignments, in particular, that you need to engage critically with a topic and this model can be used to help you.

Adapted from University of Leeds (2017) Academic skills – Critical thinking Available at: https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/1401/academic_skills/105/critical_thinking/2 (Accessed: 23 July 2019).

Download a copy of the Questions to Fire Up Our Critical Thinking Skills to save for later from here!

Further Information

Rationale is an extensive directory of quality online resources focusing on different aspects of critical thinking. Access the website here!