Understanding and Teaching Critical Thinking: A Phenomenographic Approach

Running head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Project Management
Name of the Student
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Author Note

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Introduction
The purpose of this essay is to critically review and argue the findings of an article. The
understanding and teaching of critical thinking will be critically evaluated in this essay to
understand the background of the research and the objective that the research is establishing. The
core research problem will be identified in the essay in order to understand the need of critical
thinking. The way by which the research is conducted will be discussed in the essay. A particular
article will be critically evaluated in this research study in order to understand the limitation of
the research under consideration, the assumptions and effectiveness of the article. The analysis of
the article “Understanding and teaching critical thinking—A new approach” is provided in the
following section.
Understanding and teaching critical thinking
Critical Thinking
It is essential to develop student’s critical thinking as it is a significant goal of education
of the societies across the globe. The research background mainly deals with the issues
associated with the critical thinking. The research paper makes use of phenomenographic
theoretical approach to evaluate to understand critical thinking (Larsson, 2017). Critical thinking
can be described as process and ability of thinking rationale and clearly by getting to know the
logical connection between ideas. The concept and idea of critical thinking has been a concept of
debate over the years. Critical thinking skills are important in education because it helps in
creating the link between the ideas (Yang & Chang, 2013). Furthermore, it helps in identifying
the inconsistencies and errors in reasoning. Therefore, it is essential to infuse the idea of critical
thinking in school level.

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A similar study was conducted with an aim of creating digital classrooms that will enable
the students in developing the skills of critical thinking and information literacy. The Students in
such experimental set up were instructed to act on quantitative comparison among the data sets
and between the data models. The experiment proved that the students in such experimental
setup found to be 12 times more spontaneous to propose chances to their process of thinking
(Holmes, Wieman & Bonn, 2015). These students further showed much more sophisticated
reasoning of the data. Therefore it can be said that it is possible to infuse the idea of critical
thinking in students’ mind from the elementary school level. According to Kettler, (2014),
developing the critical thinking skills is found to be worthy of educational goal as the
reorganization of the importance of critical thinking has been increasing over the years (Liu,
Frankel & Roohr, 2014). The article under analysis performs an experiment with a number of
students to identify and understand their critical thinking ability.
Critical thinking is a process to clearly think and understand the logical interconnectivity
between different ideas. Understanding and teaching critical thinking is essential as it provides
an ability to think clearly and rationally (Smith & Szymanski, 2013). It is an ability to engage in
reflective and independent thinking and therefore teaching critical thinking is essential. Critical
thinking provides an ability to rigorously question an idea and assumptions without just
accepting them.
A research about understanding and teaching critical study was undertaken. The research
aimed to describe the different processes and hierarchically ways for understanding the tasks and
different types of critical thinking those tasks delimit (Ku et al., 2014). There are certain core
research questions that the article under evaluation addresses. In this article, the researcher
evaluates the solving of an essay task that is designed in order to elicit critical thinking. Since a