Critical Thinking and its Benefits in Life

Critical Thinking is the ability to think and analyze with an open, logical mind, to understand the logical relationship between ideas and, ultimately, to make logical judgments.

Essentially, critical thinking requires the use of the ability to think, and one who has such skill must be an active learner rather than passively receiving information.

Critical thinkers are questioning ideas and theories rather than simply accepting them. They always seek to evaluate the comprehensiveness of ideas, arguments, and findings and are not surprised if the opposite proves true. They act systematically in identifying, analyzing, and solving problems, and are not dependent on their inner sense or instinct.

What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is one of the ten skills that the World Health Organization recommends every person should learn that. Acquiring these skills teaches us not to simply accept or reject anything. At first, it is good to question and argue, then to accept or reject it. Those who are critical thinkers are not deceived by others and are not easily attracted to groups and individuals, because they are always thinking about the results by asking questions and do not mindlessly follow others and in fact, they find the power to distinguish good from the bad.

Critical thinking is not to accept anything without previous thought, but evaluate it to see whether it is true or not. Criticism is not just about others, it is about our own behaviors and acts.

Stages of Critical Thinking Development

Any person goes through the following steps in order to acquire critical thinking skills:

1. The Unreflective Thinker

Unreflective thinkers are fundamentally unaware of the role that thinking has in their lives. We all are born as unreflective thinkers and may die this way without receiving any education to learn it. As an unreflective thinker, we lack the ability to be metacognitive and do not identify concepts or assumptions of what thinking entails. In this stage, we lack the ability to analyze and assess our thinking and this may cause many problems in our lives. Our ideas, beliefs, and thoughts seem logical to us and we think they are true confidently.

2. The Challenged Thinker

Challenged thinkers in this stage become aware of the role thinking plays in their lives. They have begun to understand that they can get into trouble due to the problems in thinking and reasoning, and begin to recognize that poor thinking may threat their lives and understand the difficulties in improving their thinking and achieving a productive thinking skill.

3. The Beginning Thinker

Beginning thinkers actively try to dominate the quality of their thinking in several areas of their lives. They recognize that sometimes they may experience difficulty in their reasoning or problem solving so that they take action to control and improve their thinking. They want to improve their thinking but don’t have a regular plan.

4. The Practicing Thinker

Practicing thinkers have an awareness of how their thinking tends to have fundamental weakness or imperfection. They understand the fundamental factors of reasoning and standards for the evaluation of reasoning. They believe in the monitoring and correction of their thinking because without challenging their own assumptions, they are egocentric.

5. The Advanced Thinker

Advanced thinkers have established good habits of thought and know they will succeed in this process. They are now active in the process of thinking, they analyze, evaluate and criticize their own thinking in many important parts of their lives. They deeply know understand the problems and actively apply elements and standards in many parts of their lives.

6. The Accomplished Thinker

Accomplished thinkers have established a systematic plan to evaluate and correct their own thinking. They are constantly and repeatedly criticizing critiquing their systematic plan to upgrade their thinking. They have fully internalized elements and standards in the way that their application is both conscious and deeply intuitive for them.

Key Skills for Critical Thinking

As you know critical thinking is a very important and vital skill in life and its teaching it people is a must. The skills that we need in order to be able to think critically are varied:

Ability to analyze

Part of critical thinking involves having the ability to test ideas. People with high analytical skills can ask conceptual questions, analyze data, gather important information, interpret information, and make rational evidence-based judgments.

Effective communication skills

Sometimes you need to share your conclusions with your co-workers and employer. To do this, you need to have a high level of communication skills so that you can effectively convey your message to others. High communication skills include asking important questions, evaluating answers, expressing ideas and views, interpersonal skills, speaking and writing skills, and participating in team works.

Creativity

Critical thinking often also involves levels of creativity. You may need to find patterns in existing information or find a solution that wasn’t applied before, all of which require creativity. Creativity involves cognitive flexibility, conceptual thinking, curiosity, imagination, and communication between abstract concepts.

Problem-solving ability

Problem-solving is another part of critical thinking skills that involves analyzing a problem, producing and applying a solution, and evaluating the success of a plan. Employers need employees who are capable of finding practical solutions in addition to thinking critically.

Learning to think critically will help people take control of their own lives and play an active role in the decision-making process. Remember: learning to think critically is a lifelong journey, and there’s always more to learn.