MODULE 4

CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

Critical Thinking: Thinking that avoids blind acceptance of conclusions or arguments but
instead closely examines all assumptions, evidence, and conclusions.

Such thinking closely examines all claims and assumptions, carefully evaluates existing
evidence, and cautiously assesses all conclusions. In actual practice, critical thinking involves
the following guidelines:

• Never jump to conclusions; gather as much information as you can before making up
your mind about any issue.
• Keep an open mind; don’t let your existing views blind you to new information or
conclusions.
• Always ask “How?” as in “How was the evidence obtained?”
• Be sceptical(doubtful); always wonder about why someone is making an argument,
offering a conclusion, or trying to persuade you.
• Never be stampeded(rush) into accepting some view because others accept it.
• Be aware of the fact that your own emotions can strongly influence your thinking, and
try to hold such effects to a minimum.

Steps in critical thinking

Step 1: Knowledge

For every problem, clear vision puts us on the right path to solve it. This step identifies the
argument or the problem that needs to be solved. Questions should be asked to acquire a deep
understanding about the problem. In some cases, there is no actual problem, thus no need to
move forward with other steps in the critical thinking model. The questions in this stage should
be open-ended to allow the chance to discuss and explore main reasons. At this stage, two main
questions need to be addressed: What is the problem? And why do we need to solve it?

Step 2: Comprehension(understanding)

Once the problem is identified, the next step is to understand the situation and the facts aligned
with it. The data is collected about the problem using any of the research methods that can be
adopted depending on the problem, the type of the data available, and the deadline required to
solve it.

Step 3: Application

This step continues the previous one to complete the understanding of different facts and
resources(methods) required to solve the problem by building a linkage between the
information and resources. Mind maps can be used to analyze the situation, build a relation
between it and the core problem, and determine the best way to move forward.

Step 4: Analyze

Once the information is collected and linkages are built between it the main problems, the
situation is analyzed in order to identify the situation, the strong points, the weak points, and
the challenges faced while solving the problem. The priorities are set for the main causes and
determine how they can be addressed in the solution. One of the commonly used tools that can
be deployed to analyze the problem and the circumstances around it is the cause effect diagram,
which divides the problem from its causes and aims to identify the different causes and
categorize them based on their type and impact on the problem.

Step 5: Synthesis(combination)

In this stage, once the problem is fully analyzed and all the related information is considered,
a decision should be formed about how to solve the problem and the initial routes to follow to
take this decision into action. If there are number of solutions, they should be evaluated and
prioritized in order to find the most advantageous solution. One of the tools that contribute
choosing the problem solution is the SWOT analysis that tends to identify the solution’s
strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats.

Step 6: Take Action

The final step is to build an evaluation about the problem that can be put into action. The result
of critical thinking should be transferred into action steps. If the decision involves a specific
project or team, a plan of action could be implemented to ensure that the solution is adopted
and executed as planned.

The critical thinking method can be adopted to replace emotions and perusal(inspection) biases
when trying to think about a situation or a problem. The time for adopting critical thinking
varies based on the problem; it may take few minutes to number of days. The advantage of
deploying critical thinking is that it contributes to widening our perspectives about situations
and broadening our thinking possibilities. However, these steps should be translated into a plan
of action that ensures that the decided resolution is well achieved and integrated between all
the involved bodies.

CREATIVE THINKING

Creativity: The ability to produce work that is both novel (original, unexpected) and
appropriate (it works– it is useful or meets task constraints). By creativity people perceive the
world in unique ways and organize events in an unusual manner. It brings dignity and meaning
to their lives.

It is the ability to come upwith or generate creative ideas and possibilities. It involves thinking
in new and originalways to reach a solution. Creativity thus entails originality, but originality
is not alwayscreativity.

Creativity is important; it provides us with new knowledge and new inventions that can
improve the quality of human life. According to Torrance (1962), creative thinking is process
of sensing gaps of disturbing, missing elements, forming ideas or hypotheses concerning them,
testing the hypotheses and communicating the results, possibly modifying and retesting the
hypotheses.

Newell, Shaw and Simon (1963) have suggested four criteria for creativity. One ormore of
these criteria must be satisfied for an answer to be considered creative:

• It has novelty and usefulness, either for the individual or the society
• It demands that we reject ideas we had previously accepted
• It results from intense motivation and persistence.
• It comes from clarifying a problem that was originally vague.

Moreover, a cognitive approach to creativity calls attention to the fact that creativity is part of
our everyday lives: Each time we utter a new sentence or understand a new concept we are
showing creativity. Thus, a key task in the study of creativity is that of distinguishing between
this kind of everyday creativity (termed mundane creativity) and exceptional creativity the
emergence of something dramatically new, such as the idea of integrated circuits, which made
modern computers possible.
According to Perkins (1997), the difference between these two types of creativity may lie in
the fact that everyday creativity occurs with respect to problems for which our past knowledge
and experience give us valuable clues: the individual knows where to look for a solution. In
contrast, exceptional creativity may arise in the individual don’t know even where to begin
looking. When a person does find a solution in such situations, it is likely to be dramatic and
to require thinking that is “outside the box”.

Personality traits also make people creative and the environmental conditions that either
encourage or discourage creativity (e.g., Simonton, 1994). Intrinsic motivation also leads to
creativity.

According to Guilford (1950), creativity involves divergent thinking in contrast to convergent

thinking. The convergent thinking refers to thinking in conventional set pattern whereas
divergent thinking refers to thinking out of the box. Divergent thinking is having divergent
ideas and possibilities.

Divergent thinking consists of fourprocesses/aspects such as,

• Fluency: refers to how rapidly the person comes up with ideas. It can be in respect of
words, ideas, expression or associations. For example, write words containing a
specified letter like p, ‘pot’, ‘hop’, ‘option’ etc
• Flexibility: refers to the ability to produce a large variety of ideas such as thinkingof
varied uses of a particular object, e.g., list the different ways of using a rope ora
newspaper. It also includes activities to make objects, e.g., drawing specifiedobjects
using a set of given figures.
• Originality: refers to the uniqueness or novelty of ideas. It is the ability to
produceideas that are unusual, statistically infrequent and not obvious.
• Elaboration: involves the ability to develop and describe an idea, such
as,consequences of a hypothetical event, e.g., what would happen if no sleep
isrequired?

Graham Wallas,observed that the creative process normally takes five steps:

• Preparation: becoming immersed in problematic issues that are interesting and

arouses curiosity.

The person in this stage tries to understand the problem. As Einstein had said, “the
formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution”. Thus, focus needs to be
 more on knowing about the problem in detail. Mackworth (1965) views that problem
finding is more important than problem solving. It is crucial to discover the right problem
that needs to be solved. For this, one needs to collect all the information about the problem
that will help identify the problem, analyze it and understand it. Further, it involves setting
the goal and generating ideas towards the solution of the problem.

• Incubation: ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness/awareness.

This is the time out phase where the individual does not engage in any activity. At least
there is no overt activity, but the processing of all the information gathered during the
preparation stage goes on in this stage. The person does not Motivation and Creativity 195
consciously or actively think about the problem, but the creative processes carry on within
the individual at an unconscious level.

• Illumination/Insight: the “Aha!” moment when the puzzle starts to fall together.

A new idea or new possibilities emerge and the individual is more active and conscious in
this stage. She/he may also reformulate the problem based on the illumination or
inspiration obtained in this stage. It may be noted that this ‘eureka’ moment involves a lot
of thinking and effort in the preparation stage.

• Evaluation: deciding if the insight is valuable and worth pursuing.

The person then tries to evaluate and verify the ideas and solutions in this stage. It may
result in some modifications of the solution. In some cases, the person may also need to go
back to the first stage to gather or generate more information about the problem, thus more
‘preparation’ is required.

• Verification/Elaboration: translating the insight into its final work. Bring the idea to
life, and share it with the world.

The process is cyclical. However, sometimes, if the person has good knowledge of the problem
area, the stages may appear in a different order, directly proceeding to the stage of incubation
or insight or even to the evaluation stage.

In order to be called creative, a new finding must be socially valued. Without some form of
social valuation, it would be impossible to distinguish ideas that are simply bizarre from those
that are genuinely creative.
BARRIERS TO CREATIVE THINKING

Perceptual blocks

Perceptual Blocks are obstacles that prevent the problem solver from clearly perceiving either
the problem itself or the information needed to solve it. A few types of perceptual blocks are
stereotyping, limiting the problem unnecessarily, saturation or information overload.

Emotional blocks

Emotional Blocks interfere with your ability to solve problems in many ways. They decrease
the amount of freedom with which you explore and manipulate ideas, and they interfere with
your ability to conceptualize fluently and flexibly. Eg. fear of risk taking, lack of appetite for
chaos, judging rather than generating ideas, lack of challenge, inability to incubate

Cultural Blocks

Cultural Blocks are acquired by exposure to a given set of cultural patterns, while
environmental blocks are imposed by our immediate social and physical environment.

Environmental Blocks

Distractions (phones, interruptions) are blocks that inhibit deep prolonged concentration.
Working in an atmosphere that is pleasant and supportive most often increases the productivity
of the problem solver.

Intellectual Blocks

This block can occur as a result of inflexible or inadequate uses of problem-solving strategies.
Lacking the necessary intellectual skills to solve a problem can certainly be a block as can lack
of the information necessary to solve the problem.

Expressive Blocks

The inability to communicate your ideas to others, in either verbal or written form, can also
block your progress.

Habitual block

Habits are essential for our normal daily routine. But often people tend to get so over-
empowered by them, that they can’t think of other novel or new ways. They get satisfied with
our first judgment, and thus don’t look for other ways in which things could be done. Therefore,
habits lead us to follow our usual path, rather than thinking of new or out-of-the-box ideas.

Motivational blocks

Sometimes we lack motivation, for putting in efforts, in solving a problem in novel ways.

STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE CREATIVITY

To promote creativity, an individual need different viewpoint. Divergent thinking is needed to

produce as many ideas as possible. Nickerson (1999) provides a summary of the various
creativity techniques that have been proposed. These include approaches that have been
developed by both academia and industry:

1. Looking at things differently.

2. Analysing information

3. Asking questions.

4. Solving problems.

5. Distinguishing facts from opinion.

6. Seeking truth in arguments and persuasion.

Based on Torrance’s work (1995), enhancing of creativity involves soft thinking,

deconstruction/ reconstruction, imaging, playing, exploration, dialectical thinking, learning
from failure, and collaboration/ cooperation. Indeed, human creativity can be enhanced or
discouraged in many ways. Any time people are confronted with situations for which they have
not already learned and practiced a response; some degree or kind of creativity is needed.

Creative thinking is much more than using our fantasy to produce innovative ideas. Creative
thinking can become a lifestyle, a personality trait, a way of looking at the world, a way of
interacting with others, and a way of living and growing. Living creatively means developing
your talents, tapping your unused potentials, and becoming what are capable of becoming
through self-discovery and self-discipline. You can develop your creative abilities by
approaching everyday problems in an innovative way.

DECISION MAKING

It is the process of choosing among various courses of action or alternatives.

An individual who is a perfectly rational decision maker will make each of the available choices
in a cool, almost mathematical way, taking into consideration (1) the utility or value to you of
the outcomes each alternative might yield and (2) the probability that such results would
actually occur. As you know from your own life, though, people don't usually reason in such a
systematic manner. Instead, they make decisions informally, on the basis of hunches, intuition,
the information stored in our memories, and the opinions of others.

STRATEGIES FOR DECISION MAKING

Making decisions is hard work, so it is only reasonable to expect people to take shortcuts in
performing this activity. One group of cognitive shortcuts is known as heuristics which are
mental rules of thumb that permit us to make decisions and judgments in a rapid and efficient
manner. They may not necessarily enhance the quality or accuracy of the decisions reached
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). Heuristics are extracted from past experience and serve as
simple guidelines for making reasonably good choices quickly and efficiently.

Mainly three heuristics are used most frequently.

Availability Heuristic

A cognitive rule of thumb in which the importance or probability of various events is judged
on the basis of how readily they come to mind.

Representativeness Heuristic

A mental rule of thumb suggesting that the more closely an event or object resembles typical
examples of some concept or category, the more likely it is to belong to that concept or
category.

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic

A cognitive rule of thumb for making decisions in which existing information is acceptedas a
reference point but then adjusted (usually insufficiently) in light of various factors.

DECISION MAKING PROCESS

Defining and analysing the problem:The first step in making the right decision is recognizing
the problem or opportunity and deciding to address it.

Gather relevant information: Collect some pertinent information beforemakinga decision:

what information is needed, the best sources of information, and how to get it. This step
involves both internal and external “work.” Some information is internal: an individual can
seek it through a process of self‐assessment. Other information is external: one can find it
online, in books, from other people, and from other sources.

Developing alternative solution: As a person collect information, s/he will probably identify
several possible paths of action, or alternatives. An individual can also use their imagination
and additional information to construct new alternatives. In this step, one will list all possible
and desirable alternatives.

Evaluation of alternative solutions: the individual draw on information and emotions to

imagine what it would be like if they carried out each of the alternatives to the end. Evaluate
whether the need/problem identified in Step 1 would be met or resolved through the use of each
alternative. As they go through this difficult internal process, they begin to favour certain
alternatives: those that seem to have a higher potential for reaching the goal. Finally, place the
alternatives in a priority order, based uponthe individual’s own value system.

Selecting the best solution:Once a person has weighed all the evidence, they are ready to
select the alternative that seems to be best one for the situation. They may even choose a
combination of alternatives. An individual’s choice in the previous step may very likely be the
same or similar to the alternative they placed at the top of the list while prioritising the
alternatives.

Implementing the decision: The individual is now ready to take some positive action by
beginning to implement the alternative you chose in the last step.

Follow up: In this final step, consider the results of decision and evaluate whether or not it has
resolved the need/ problem identified in Step 1. If the decision has not met the identified
need/problem, a person may want to repeat certain steps of the process to make a new decision.
For example, they might want to gather more detailed or somewhat different information or
explore additional alternatives.

PROBLEM SOLVING

A problem is any situation in which we are trying to reacha goal and we must find a means to
reach that goal.

Problems themselves can be classified into two different categories known as ill-defined and
well-defined problems (Schacter, 2009). Ill-defined problems represent issues that do not have
clear goals, solution paths, or expected solutions whereas well-defined problems have specific
goals, clearly defined solutions, and clear expected solutions. Problem solving often
incorporates pragmatics (logical reasoning) and semantics (interpretation of meanings behind
the problem), and also in many cases require abstract thinking and creativity in order to find
novel solutions.

Problem solving is defined as the efforts to develop or choose among various responses in order
to attain desired goals.

STEPS IN PROBLEM SOLVING

The first step is problem identification: An individual must recognize that a problem exists
and then figure out just what issues, obstacles, and goals are involved. Until you identify the
problem and understand the issues involved, it is difficult to move ahead with a solution.

Second, is to formulate potential solutions: Solutions do not arise out of a cognitive vacuum;
they require thinking critically about a problem, and they depend heavily on the information at
our disposal information stored in long term memory that can be retrieved. The more
information available, the greater the number and the wider the scope of potential solutions we
can generate. Formulating a wide range of possible solutions is an extremely important step in
effective problem solving.

Third, evaluation of alternatives and outcomes, one must evaluate each alternative and the
outcomes it will produce. Individual must considerations all the aspect related to each outcome.

Finally, trying potential solutions, the person tries potential solutions and evaluate them on
the basis of the effects they produce. All too often, a potential solution is only partially
effective: It brings us closer to where we want to be but doesn't solve the problem completely
or finally. In many other situations, though, it is difficult to know how effective a potential
solution will be until it is implemented. Thus, careful assessment of the effects of various
solutions is another key step in the problem-solving process.

METHODS/ STRATEGIES FOR SOLVING PROBLEMS

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Some of them are:

Trial and Error

A method of solving problems in which possible solutions are tried until one succeeds.
Algorithm

Step-by-step problem-solving formula. A rule that guarantees a solution to a specific type of

problem.

Analogy

A strategy for solving problems based on applying solutions that were previously successful
with other problems similar in underlying structure.

Means-ends analysis

choosing and analyzing an action at a series of smaller steps to move closer to the goal.

Metacognitive Processing

An expanded level of awareness that allows us, in a sense, to observe ourselves in the problem-
solving process.

Brainstorming

Refers to collecting andanalyzing a large amount of solutions, especially within a group of

people, to combine the solutions and developing them until an optimal solution is reached.

FACTORS AFFECTING PROBLEM SOLVING

Functional Fixedness

The tendency to think of using objects only as they have been used in the past.

Mental Set

The impact of past experience on present problem solving; specifically, the tendency to retain
methods that were successful in the past even if better alternatives now exist.

Conformation bias

It’s a form of bias in the selection procedure. While collecting evidences to solve a problem,
an individual might be having a tendency to interpret information in a way that conforms to
one’s preconceptions. This can lead to errors. Here the problem solver focuses more on the
information that reinforces the pre-existing beliefs and suppress or disregard anything which
is against their beliefs.
Unnecessary constraints/ Irrelevant information

These are distracting information or irrelevant information to solve the problem.