I’ve had the following abstract accepted for a presentation at a conference in December at the University of Melbourne, Higher Education Research & the Student Learning Experience in Business.

A Pragmatic Definition of Critical Thinking for Business

This presentation will lay out a pragmatic definition of critical thinking.  It doesn’t purport to be the definitive characterization of what critical thinking is. Rather, it is offered as a convenient framework for understanding the nature and scope of critical thinking, which may be useful for purposes such as developing a dedicated subject in critical thinking for business, improving the teaching of critical thinking within existing subjects, or evaluating the effectiveness of a business course in developing critical thinking.

The definition is constructed around five commitments:

    • First, the essence of critical thinking is correct or accurate judgement. That is, to think critically is to think in ways that are conducive to being “more right more often” when making judgements.
    • Second, “being more right more often” can be achieved through the skillful application of general thinking methods or techniques.
    • Third, these techniques range on a spectrum from the simple and easily acquired to technical methods which require special training.
    • Fourth, for all but the simplest of methods, there are degrees of mastery in application of these techniques.
    • Fifth, there are many different kinds of judgements made in business, including decision making, prediction, estimation, (causal) explanation, and attribution of responsibility. For each major type of judgement, there are typical pitfalls, and a range of critical thinking methods which can help people avoid or compensate for those pitfalls.

These commitments enable us to define a kind of three-dimensional chart representing the critical thinking competency of any individual. Along one (categorical) axis is the various kinds of judgements (decision making, etc.). Another axis represents the spectrum from simple through to advanced critical thinking methods. Particular methods can then be placed in appropriate “boxes” in the grid defined by these axes. A person will have a degree of mastery of the methods in each box; this can be represented on a third dimension. A person’s critical thinking competency is thus a distinctive “landscape” formed by the varying levels of mastery.

This characterisation is tailoring, for business, a more general pragmatic approach to understanding critical thinking.  About a year ago I developed this approach in preparation for a workshop in the US on development of a test of critical thinking for intelligence analysts; my role in the workshop was to lay out a general framework for understanding what critical thinking is.   That approach was described in a manuscript Dimensions of Critical Thinking.

I’m also supporting a team from the University of Sydney Business School, who have had the following abstract accepted:

Evaluating critical thinking skill gains in a business subject

Helen Parker, Leanne Piggott, Lyn Carson
University of Sydney Business School
Tim van Gelder
University of Melbourne and Austhink Consulting

Critical thinking (CT) is one of the most valued attributes of business school graduates, and many business school subjects claim to enhance it. These subjects frequently implement pedagogical strategies of various kinds aimed at improving CT skills. Rarely however are these efforts accompanied by any rigorous evaluation of CT skill gains. But without such evaluation, it is difficult to answer questions such as:

    • Are our students’ CT skills in fact improving? By how much?
    • Are those skills improving more than they would have even without our special CT instruction?
    • Are the marginal gains worth the cost?
    • Are our attempts to improve our instruction from semester to semester making any difference?

These kinds of questions are particularly relevant to the University of Sydney Business School, which has an entire subject dedicated to improving CT (BUSS5000 – Critical Thinking in Business), enrolling some 800 students per semester. Consequently, in 2013, the Business School embarked on a large-scale, multi-year evaluation program. The evaluation is based on pre- and post-testing using an independent objective test (the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment), whose coverage overlaps with the range of critical thinking skills taught in the subject. This presentation will give an overview of the approach it has adopted. It will discuss some of the challenges and pitfalls in the testing process, and how to interpret results. Finally, it will present data and insights from the first semester of full-scale evaluation. The session should be of interest to anyone interested in evaluating CT skills, or more generally in how business school education can enhance CT.

There’s an obvious complementarity between these two topics.