Teaching Critical Thinking In Psychology

Teaching Critical Thinking in Psychology features currentscholarship on effectively teaching critical thinking skills at alllevels of psychology. Offers novel, nontraditional approaches to teaching criticalthinking, including strategies, tactics, diversity issues, servicelearning, and the use of case studies Provides new course delivery formats by which faculty cancreate online course materials to foster critical thinking within adiverse student audience Places specific emphasis on how to both teach and assesscritical thinking in the classroom, as well as issues of widerprogram assessment Discusses ways to use critical thinking in courses ranging fromintroductory level to upper-level, including statistics andresearch methods courses, cognitive psychology, and capstoneofferings

Explores key topics in psychology, showing how they can be critically examined.

Critical thinking is taught at all universities, often put forward by lecturers as the key skill that can most dramatically improve a student's understanding of a course and transform their writing. It pervades research methods teaching, critical psychology, and a range of other core curriculum elements, in exactly the same way that critical thinking pervades any discipline, and indeed, life generally. But what is it, exactly, and how can we apply it specifically to the field of psychology? In his relaxed and accessible style, Mark Forshaw takes modern real-world examples from psychology and everyday life to lighten the learning of critical thinking, explaining what it entails, why it is important, and how it can be applied to this fascinating field of study.

Originally published in 1990, this title attempts to provide for the educational practitioner an overview of a field that responded in the 1980s to a major educational agenda. This innovative ‘agenda’ called for teaching students in ways that dramatically improved the quality of their thinking. Its context is a variety of changes in education that brought the explicit teaching of thinking to the consciousness of more and more teachers and administrators.

Are people basically selfish? Can psychotherapists help people recover memories of sexual abuse that they have not recalled for decades? Can the moon cause people to go crazy or commit crimes? What do we actually "know" about the world through our senses? These are but a few of the fascinating questions that are addressed in D. Alan Bensley's engaging new book, Critical Thinking in Psychology: A Unified Schools Approach. With each question illustrating the need for critical thinking, Bensley piques student interest and inspires them to think more effectively and critically about both the common and uncommon. Without telling readers what to think, Bensley helps them learn how to think critically about the issues often raised in psychology. And while obtaining answers to the above questions is important, Bensley shows readers how the process of drawing sound conclusions to these queries is even more important.

This special issue presents some important ways of thinking about teaching critical thinking -- well-grounded in an understanding of what research has told us about how students learn. It focuses on how to design the instructional process to enhance critical thinking across the curriculum, and describes innovative ways in which questioning strategies, conference-style learning, negotiation, and writing can be used to promote critical thinking. Individual authors examine specific critical thinking skills of problem solving and argument analysis as taught within psychology courses, as well as critical thinking in psychology courses and in courses that are specifically designed to teach critical thinking. The articles go beyond those typically found in Teaching of Psychology, describing techniques designed to achieve critical thinking as an instructional outcome. They characterize much more precisely those aspects of critical thinking that are the target of instruction, be it distinguishing between correlational and causal reasoning or enhancing metacognitive skills. They strive to make clear the reasons for selecting these particular aspects of critical thinking and particular instructional strategies for specific instructional contexts.