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Critical thinking – what it is and why you need it.
What does it mean to be critical?
This non-subject-specific guide will:
Develop your skills in critical thinking and argument
Improve your ability to evaluate what you read, how is it relevant and what is the value of it?
Help you identify what is good evidence and research.
An accessible version of the information on this guide can be found below.
We are very interested to hear your views about the workshop you attended and would welcome your feedback. Please complete the form below:
When thinking about what to include in your assignment and how to take a critical approach ensure you are being focused, comprehensive, even-handed and in-depth.
| Focused | Think about the criteria and instructions for your assignment making sure that all your content is relevant. It is not critical if you include lots of irrelevant material. |
|---|---|
| Comprehensive | Think about the breadth of possible ideas for those topics, thinking of as many ideas as you can. Don’t look at your topic too narrowly. Make sure you cover all the key points. |
| Even-handed | Treat opposing views fairly. Don’t just think of the positives but also consider negatives. |
| In-depth | You need to go beyond what is available to the general public and look at your topic from a specialist viewpoint, this links to research in the field that you will be reading from journal articles. |
Just because something is in print in a journal or a book it doesn’t mean it is necessarily good quality, that you should believe it or that it’s relevant to you. Thinking critically about what you are reading is an important skill at university and the critical reading model below can help you evaluate what you are reading.
When reading think about the case the author is making - the point or points they want you to take away from the piece, this is the argument. Then look at how they are trying to prove the point - this is the evidence. So, when reading books/articles/research critically you need to work out the argument and the evidence.
Judging an argument
A good argument should :
• be clear - you should be able to understand the point the author is putting across.
• have a logical structure - the argument should make sense and be based on logic.
• be even-handed - it should treat the subject fairly and not be obviously biased.
A poor argument is:
• Unclear - it is difficult to understand what the author is arguing.
• Based on flawed reasoning - there are problems with the logic of the case being presented, so when you look closely at the argument you realise that it doesn't make sense.
• Biased - arguments are presented in an unfair way or not showing both sides. The author could have an interest in persuading the reader to believe it.
Questioning
Having established what the author is arguing you then need to ask:
• Why should I believe this?
• Does this claim need evidence to support it? If there is no evidence, then this is an opinion or assertion and you need to question the dependability of the claim based on no evidence.
• If there is evidence, you need to ask how good is the evidence?
For more advice on reading academic research see our helpsheet.
To help you think critically about what you read and ask the right questions, we have created a checklist to use when reading research. The checklist helps you evaluate your sources of information in terms of QUALITY and RELEVANCE by asking questions about What, Who, When and How.
Using the checklist, you are guided to look for meaningful information in the research by breaking down the 4 elements into specific questions regarding:
WHAT? … type of source is it? … approach has been taken?
WHO? …wrote or produced the source? …is the target audience?
WHEN? …was it published or last updated?
HOW? …was it written?
The checklist can be accessed below.
Click on the image to see additional useful resources.
This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Deed.
