critical thinking about history

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Turning Students Into Bold Historical Thinkers

By collapsing the distance between historical eras and the present day, we motivate students to ask hard questions and dig deeper into the past.

Thinking deeply about history as a story—and in particular about the values and biases of the people who write those stories—is perhaps the most crucial work of social studies classrooms. According to literacy guru Tim Shanahan , historians read skeptically by nature: “They assume somebody is trying to shape things in a particular way, and they’re looking for bias,” Shanahan told Edutopia. “It is important to teach kids to approach history in that more negotiated sense—to understand that there are facts but they’re contested, and you have to read multiple texts to understand that.”

One way to equip them with these skills is to collapse the distances between historical eras and their current lives. By allowing students, for example, to inhabit the role of a central political figure, or speak from the perspective of a historical governing body, you can provide them with the experience of tackling complex, real-world issues that foster the sort of critical thinking and inquiry that prepares them for their lives as active citizens, consumers, and even employees. 

Immersing students in history can also be far more engaging and lead to better academic outcomes.

A 2021 study funded by Lucas Education Research looked at project-based activities in AP Environmental Science and AP U.S. Government and Politics courses from five school districts. The study concluded that students in project-based classrooms outperformed students who received more traditional direct instruction on the same material by eight to 10 percentage points on AP exams.  

In the AP U.S. Government and Politics course, one fascinating project asked students to learn about and then act as Supreme Court justices, petitioners, and respondents in landmark cases that have shaped our nation, such as Marbury v. Madison (which established the principle of judicial review) and Brown v. Board of Education (which ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional). By consulting former court cases and evaluating documents such as the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, and then engaging in rigorous mock trials and debates, students gained a deep, ground-level understanding of the effects of Supreme Court decisions, while also drilling down on important constitutional concepts like the separation of powers and checks and balances. 

“Students felt like the work was more authentic,” Anna Saavedra, the lead researcher on the study, told Edutopia , speaking about the success of the projects. “There were more connections to their real lives.” 

How can you bring historical thinking into your own class? Here are four activities to get you started.

Study the Micro-Histories All Around Us 

Ainissa Ramirez, author of The Alchemy of Us and a former engineering professor at Yale University, argues that we can merge historical thinking with science by posing hard questions and provocative counterfactuals about groundbreaking inventions that students use every day.

For example, students can choose an invention and list the changes it has made to the material world, but also “to less tangible ideas and concepts, like human psychology and belief systems,” writes Ramirez. Afterward, students can create a timeline of the invention’s history, along with a second timeline that tracks a new history in which the invention never happened.

To go deeper, gather students into groups and have them examine an invention in greater detail. For example, they may study the internet and its effect on modern life, researching the birth of the World Wide Web and discussing what its initial goals were, before asking probing questions about how it changed the way humans listen to music or the improvements in the speed and breadth of communication it enabled.

“The next step might be to look at the pros and cons of the internet, specifically social media. Does being more connected help or hurt us? Does the internet bring us together or divide us? Does the internet make it easier or harder to find the truth?” Ramirez asks. In other words, did the internet achieve its stated goals? 

The purpose of this activity, Ramirez writes, is to “demystify scientific advancements by revealing their messy historical reality” and examine the cultural subtexts and micro-histories that are present all around us. 

Pretend to Be a Founding Father 

To examine the intent of our founding documents, a four-week project-based learning project developed in conjunction with Lucas Education Research asks students to become delegates to the Constitutional Convention. The project aims to get students thinking deeply about the founders’ intentions in framing our government and to enliven discussion about whether, and to what extent, we should remain faithful to the founders’ initial aspirations. 

As part of the activity, students prepare for and engage in debates on controversial constitutional issues, deciding under what circumstances to approve the U.S. Constitution, for instance. As Federalists and Anti-Federalists, students role-play arguments over key issues such as the division of power between the national government and state governments. In teams, students also deliberate a federalism controversy from the past (such as the argument over the national bank) as well as a contemporary controversy rooted in federal concerns (such as the argument over immigration). 

This activity gives students a chance to learn and then apply—rather than simply read—foundational texts such as the Federalist papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Bill of Rights, as evidence with which to form arguments about current and historical issues. Possible assessments can include an editorial or a historical pamphlet, akin to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , for example, that students produce in support of or in opposition to the Constitution. Alternatively, educators can host a mock historical debate over the ratifying of the Constitution.

Analyze Objects Like a Future Historian  

In Fairview, Pennsylvania, high school history teacher Benjamin Barbour asks students to sharpen their analytical skills by choosing a modern-day artifact and imagining what a historian 100 or 200 years from now might infer from the artifact about society today. 

“This activity fits into a variety of curricula, as it gets students to practice evaluating artifacts so that they can make hypotheses about a society from its material culture and weigh how different interpretations of historical objects can shape our understanding of the past,” Barbour writes .  

The first step, he says, is to explain to students what artifacts are and how many objects “fall under the umbrella” of that definition. Everything from musical instruments to kitchen utensils, school supplies, and athletic apparel is fair game, he says. He suggests that teachers point students to artifacts in museums for ideas, including creative museums such as the National Videogame Museum , the Las Vegas Neon Museum , and the International Banana Museum . 

Part of this setup work also includes discussing and modeling for students how to analyze an artifact by attempting to answer questions like these: Who used this artifact? What was it used for? What does it tell you about the people who made it and used it? What does it tell you about technology at the time it was made? 

With this scaffolding in place, students should choose and research an artifact from their personal life and conduct a detailed analysis of it—as if they were encountering it for the first time. Barbour suggests asking students to answer questions like these: What is its significance? What does it suggest about society in the early 21st century? 

While the exercise might seem simple, Barbour writes that it actually “demands that students make several cognitive leaps” to situate themselves in the future and apply deep, analytical thinking about a seemingly inane object. To “encourage high-level work and accountability” on final products, Barbour suggests creating a rubric with clear objectives.

Look Through the Eyes of Another Culture

To get students thinking deeply about what it means for a historical narrative to be “accurate” and how bias often creeps in, try this exercise developed by John J. DeRose, a U.S. history teacher at Whitefish Bay High School in Wisconsin. DeRose asks students to compare and contrast how an American textbook presents a historical event, versus a textbook from another country. 

For example, DeRose writes, students can look at the language and framing around the Vietnam War in a U.S. textbook and then compare it to the language and framing of the same war in a Vietnamese textbook, newspaper, or other primary document. As part of this activity, students “consider disparate historical perspectives, interpret the biases and limited perspectives present in textbook accounts, and evaluate the quality of historical sources of information.” 

Some questions students can consider: How are the historical accounts similar? How are they different? What possible biases or limited perspectives exist in our textbook’s account of this event? What possible biases or limited perspectives exist in the Vietnamese textbook’s account of this event? 

Students should also be asked, “Explain why you think, or do not think, that one of these textbook accounts is more accurate than the other.” According to DeRose, students can be split up into groups to argue and debate why or why not one textbook is more accurate than another and dig deeper into what the concept of accuracy even means when it comes to history.  

DeRose writes that the exercise is effective at getting students to situate themselves as historians, who are often tasked with examining “as many points of view as possible,” as well as the “limited perspectives” of those viewpoints, in their attempt to understand the historical significance and impact of an event. 

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Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke

What Does It Mean to Think Historically?

/ Article Archive

/ What Does It Mean to Think Historically?

Publication Date

January 1, 2007

Graduate Education, K–12 Education, Social Studies Standards, Teaching & Learning, Undergraduate Education

Research Methods, Teaching Methods

Introduction

When we started working on Teachers for a New Era, a Carnegie-sponsored initiative designed to strengthen teacher training, we thought we knew a thing or two about our discipline. As we began reading such works as Sam Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts , however, we encountered an unexpected challenge. 1 If our understandings of the past constituted a sort of craft knowledge, how could we distill and communicate habits of mind we and our colleagues had developed through years of apprenticeship, guild membership, and daily practice to university students so that they, in turn, could impart these habits in K–12 classrooms?

In response, we developed an approach we call the “five C’s of historical thinking.” The concepts of change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency, we believe, together describe the shared foundations of our discipline. They stand at the heart of the questions historians seek to answer, the arguments we make, and the debates in which we engage. These ideas are hardly new to professional historians. But that is precisely their value: They make our implicit ways of thought explicit to the students and teachers whom we train. The five C’s do not encompass the universe of historical thinking, yet they do provide a remarkably useful tool for helping students at practically any level learn how to formulate and support arguments based on primary sources, as well as to understand and challenge historical interpretations related in secondary sources. In this article, we define the five C’s, explain how each concept helps us to understand the past, and provide some brief examples of how we have employed the five C’s when teaching teachers. Our approach is necessarily broad and basic, characteristics well suited for a foundation upon which we invite our colleagues from kindergartens to research universities to build.

Change over Time

The idea of change over time is perhaps the easiest of the C’s to grasp. Students readily acknowledge that we employ and struggle with technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we live by different laws, and that we enjoy different cultural pursuits. Moreover, students also note that some aspects of life remain the same across time. Many Europeans celebrate many of the same holidays that they did three or four hundred years ago, for instance, often using the same rituals and words to mark a day’s significance. Continuity thus comprises an integral part of the idea of change over time.

Students often find the concept of change over time elementary. Even individuals who claim to despise history can remember a few dates and explain that some preceded or followed others. At any educational level, timelines can teach change over time as well as the selective process that leads people to pay attention to some events while ignoring others. In our U.S. survey class, we often ask students to interview family and friends and write a paper explaining how their family’s history has intersected with major events and trends that we are studying. By discovering their own family’s past, students often see how individuals can make a difference and how personal history changes over time along with major events.

As historians of the American West and environmental historians, we often turn to maps to teach change over time. The same space represented in different ways as political power, economic structures, and cultural influences shift can often put in shocking relief the differences that time makes. The work of repeat photographers such as Mark Klett offers another compelling tool for teaching change over time. Such photographers begin with a historic landscape photograph, then take pains to re-take the shot from the same site, at the same angle, using similar equipment, and even under analogous conditions. 2 While suburbs and industry have overrun many western locales, students are often surprised to see that some places have become more desolate and others have hardly changed at all. The exercise engages students with a non-written primary source, photographs, and demands that they reassess their expectations regarding how time changes.

Some things change, others stay the same—not a very interesting story but reason for concern since history, as the best teachers will tell you, is about telling stories. Good story telling, we contend, builds upon an understanding of context. Given young people’s fascination with narratives and their enthusiasm for imaginative play, pupils (particularly elementary school students) often find context the most engaging element of historical thinking. As students mature, of course, they recognize that the past is not just a playful alternate universe. Working with primary sources, they discover that the past makes more sense when they set it within two frameworks. In our teaching, we liken the first to the floating words that roll across the screen at the beginning of every Star Wars film. This kind of context sets the stage; the second helps us to interpret evidence concerning the action that ensues. Texts, events, individual lives, collective struggles—all develop within a tightly interwoven world.

Historians who excel at the art of storytelling often rely heavily upon context. Jonathan Spence’s Death of Woman Wang , for example, skillfully recreates 17th-century China by following the trail of a sparsely documented murder. To solve the mystery, students must understand the time and place in which it occurred. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brings colonial New England to life by concentrating on the details of textile production and basket making in Age of Homespun . College courses regularly use the work of both authors because they not only spark student interest, but also hone students’ ability to describe the past and identify distinctive elements of different eras. 3

Imaginative play is what makes context, arguably the easiest, yet also, paradoxically, the most difficult of the five C’s to teach. Elementary school assignments that require students to research and wear medieval European clothes or build a California mission from sugar cubes both strive to teach context. The problem with such assignments is that they often blur the lines between reality and make-believe. The picturesque often trumps more banal or more disturbing truths. Young children may never be able to get all the facts straight. As one elementary school teacher once reminded us, “We teach kids who still believe in Santa Claus.” Nonetheless, elementary school teachers can be cautious in their re-creations, and, most of all, they can be comfortable telling students when they don’t know a given fact or when more research is necessary. That an idea might require more thought or more research is a valuable lesson at any age. The desire to recreate a world sometimes drives students to dig more deeply into their books, a reaction few teachers lament.

In our own classes, we have taught context using an assignment that we call “Fact, Fiction, or Creative Memory.” In this exercise, students wrestle with a given source and determine whether it is primarily a work of history, fiction, or memory. We have asked students to bring in a present-day representation of 1950s life and explain what it teaches people today about life in 1950s America. Then, we have asked the class to discuss if the representation is a historically fair depiction of the era. We have also assigned textbook passages and Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall , then asked students to compare them to decide which offers stronger insights into the character of Cold War America. 4 Each of these assignments addresses context, because each asks students to think about the distinctions between representations of the past and the critical thinking about the past that is history. Moreoever, each asks students to weave together a variety of sources and assess the reliability of each before incorporating them into a whole.

Historians use context, change over time, and causality to form arguments explaining past change. While scientists can devise experiments to test theories and yield data, historians cannot alter past conditions to produce new information. Rather, they must base their arguments upon the interpretation of partial primary sources that frequently offer multiple explanations for a single event. Historians have long argued over the causes of the Protestant Reformation or World War I, for example, without achieving consensus. Such uncertainty troubles some students, but history classrooms are at their most dynamic when teachers encourage pupils to evaluate the contributions of multiple factors in shaping past events, as well as to formulate arguments asserting the primacy of some causes over others.

To teach causality, we have turned to the stand-by activities of the history classroom: debates and role-playing. After arming students with primary sources, we ask them to argue whether monetary or fiscal policy played a greater role in causing the Great Depression. After giving students descriptions drawn from primary sources of immigrant families in Los Angeles, we have asked students to take on the role of various family members and explain their reasons for immigrating and their reasons for settling in particular neighborhoods. Neither exercise is especially novel, but both fulfill a central goal of studying history: to develop persuasive explanations of historical events and processes based on logical interpretations of evidence.

Contingency

Contingency may, in fact, be the most difficult of the C’s. To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently. Lee could have won at Gettysburg, Gore might have won in Florida, China might have inaugurated the world’s first industrial revolution.

Contingency can be an unsettling idea—so much so that people in the past have often tried to mask it with myths of national and racial destiny. The Pilgrim William Bradford, for instance, interpreted the decimation of New England’s native peoples not as a consequence of smallpox, but as a literal godsend.((William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation , ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Random House, 1952).)) Two centuries later, American ideologues chose to rationalize their unlikely fortunes—from the purchase of Louisiana to the discovery of gold in California—as their nation’s “Manifest Destiny.” Historians, unlike Bradford and the apologists of westward expansion, look at the same outcomes differently. They see not divine fate, but a series of contingent results possessing other possibilities.

Contingency demands that students think deeply about past, present, and future. It offers a powerful corrective to teleology, the fallacy that events pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-determined outcome, since people in the past had no way of anticipating our present world. Contingency also reminds us that individuals shape the course of human events. What if Karl Marx had decided to elude Prussian censors by emigrating to the United States instead of France, where he met Frederick Engels? To assert that the past is contingent is to impress upon students the notion that the future is up for grabs, and that they bear some responsibility for shaping the course of future history.

Contingency can be a difficult concept to present abstractly, but it suffuses the stories historians tend to tell about individual lives. Futurology, however, might offer an even stronger tool for imparting contingency than biography. Mechanistic views of history as the inevitable march toward the present tend to collapse once students see how different their world is from any predicted in the past.

Moral, epistemological, and causal complexity distinguish historical thinking from the conception of “history” held by many non-historians. 5 Re-enacting battles and remembering names and dates require effort but not necessarily analytical rigor. Making sense of a messy world that we cannot know directly, in contrast, is more confounding but also more rewarding.

Chronicles distill intricate historical processes into a mere catalogue, while nostalgia conjures an uncomplicated golden age that saves us the trouble of having to think about the past. Our own need for order can obscure our understanding of how past worlds functioned and blind us to the ways in which myths of rosy pasts do political and cultural work in the present. Reveling in complexity rather than shying away from it, historians seek to dispel the power of chronicle, nostalgia, and other traps that obscure our ability to understand the past on its own terms.

One of the most successful exercises we have developed for conveying complexity in all of these dimensions is a mock debate on Cherokee Removal. Two features of the exercise account for the richness and depth of understanding that it imparts on students. First, the debate involves multiple parties; the Treaty and Anti-Treaty Parties, Cherokee women, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, northern missionaries, the State of Georgia, and white settlers each offer a different perspective on the issue. Second, students develop their understanding of their respective positions using the primary sources collected in Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents by Theda Perdue and Michael Green. 6 While it can be difficult to assess what students learn from such exercises, we have noted anecdotally that, following the exercise, students seem much less comfortable referring to “American” or “Indian” positions as monolithic identities.

Our experiments with the five C’s have confronted us with several challenges. These concepts offer a fluid tool for engaging historical thought at multiple levels, but they can easily degenerate into a checklist. Students who favor memorization over analysis seem inclined to recite the C’s without necessarily understanding them. Moreover, as habits of mind, the five C’s develop only with practice. Though primary and secondary schools increasingly emphasize some aspects of these themes, particularly the use of primary sources as evidence, more attention to the five C’s with appropriate variations over the course of K–12 education would help future citizens not only to care about history, but also to contemplate it. It is our hope that this might help students to see the past not simply as prelude to our present, nor a list of facts to memorize, a cast of heroes and villains to cheer and boo, nor as an itinerary of places to tour, but rather as an ideal field for thinking long and hard about important questions.

—Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews are both assistant professors of history and Teachers for a New Era faculty members at California State University at Northridge. Burke is working on a book for the University Press of Kansas tentatively entitled Longing and Belonging: Mabel Dodge Luhan and Greenwich Village’s Avant-Garde in Taos . Andrews is completing a manuscript for Harvard University Press, tentatively entitled Ludlow: The Nature of Industrial Struggle in the Colorado Coalfields .

• Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. [ ↩ ]
• Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William L. Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron G. Wolfe, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004). [ ↩ ]
• Jonathan D. Spence, Death of Woman Wang (New York: Viking, 1978); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001). [ ↩ ]
• Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall: A Novella (New York: Scribner’s, 2001). [ ↩ ]
• Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). [ ↩ ]
• Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). [ ↩ ]

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critical thinking

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critical thinking , in educational theory, mode of cognition using deliberative reasoning and impartial scrutiny of information to arrive at a possible solution to a problem. From the perspective of educators, critical thinking encompasses both a set of logical skills that can be taught and a disposition toward reflective open inquiry that can be cultivated . The term critical thinking was coined by American philosopher and educator John Dewey in the book How We Think (1910) and was adopted by the progressive education movement as a core instructional goal that offered a dynamic modern alternative to traditional educational methods such as rote memorization.

Critical thinking is characterized by a broad set of related skills usually including the abilities to

• break down a problem into its constituent parts to reveal its underlying logic and assumptions
• recognize and account for one’s own biases in judgment and experience
• collect and assess relevant evidence from either personal observations and experimentation or by gathering external information
• adjust and reevaluate one’s own thinking in response to what one has learned
• form a reasoned assessment in order to propose a solution to a problem or a more accurate understanding of the topic at hand

Theorists have noted that such skills are only valuable insofar as a person is inclined to use them. Consequently, they emphasize that certain habits of mind are necessary components of critical thinking. This disposition may include curiosity, open-mindedness, self-awareness, empathy , and persistence.

Although there is a generally accepted set of qualities that are associated with critical thinking, scholarly writing about the term has highlighted disagreements over its exact definition and whether and how it differs from related concepts such as problem solving . In addition, some theorists have insisted that critical thinking be regarded and valued as a process and not as a goal-oriented skill set to be used to solve problems. Critical-thinking theory has also been accused of reflecting patriarchal assumptions about knowledge and ways of knowing that are inherently biased against women.

Dewey, who also used the term reflective thinking , connected critical thinking to a tradition of rational inquiry associated with modern science . From the turn of the 20th century, he and others working in the overlapping fields of psychology , philosophy , and educational theory sought to rigorously apply the scientific method to understand and define the process of thinking. They conceived critical thinking to be related to the scientific method but more open, flexible, and self-correcting; instead of a recipe or a series of steps, critical thinking would be a wider set of skills, patterns, and strategies that allow someone to reason through an intellectual topic, constantly reassessing assumptions and potential explanations in order to arrive at a sound judgment and understanding.

In the progressive education movement in the United States , critical thinking was seen as a crucial component of raising citizens in a democratic society. Instead of imparting a particular series of lessons or teaching only canonical subject matter, theorists thought that teachers should train students in how to think. As critical thinkers, such students would be equipped to be productive and engaged citizens who could cooperate and rationally overcome differences inherent in a pluralistic society.

Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, critical thinking as a key outcome of school and university curriculum leapt to the forefront of U.S. education policy. In an atmosphere of renewed Cold War competition and amid reports of declining U.S. test scores, there were growing fears that the quality of education in the United States was falling and that students were unprepared. In response, a concerted effort was made to systematically define curriculum goals and implement standardized testing regimens , and critical-thinking skills were frequently included as a crucially important outcome of a successful education. A notable event in this movement was the release of the 1980 report of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities that called for the U.S. Department of Education to include critical thinking on its list of “basic skills.” Three years later the California State University system implemented a policy that required every undergraduate student to complete a course in critical thinking.

Critical thinking continued to be put forward as a central goal of education in the early 21st century. Its ubiquity in the language of education policy and in such guidelines as the Common Core State Standards in the United States generated some criticism that the concept itself was both overused and ill-defined. In addition, an argument was made by teachers, theorists, and others that educators were not being adequately trained to teach critical thinking.

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Using History to Teach Critical Thinking Skills

Feb 26, 2019

Exploring Historical Perspectives for Critical Thinking Development

One of the most important tools we can give our students is the ability to think critically.  In this age of unlimited social media sharing, fake news, and hidden agendas, it has never been more important to be able to look at information and its source and determine if the information is accurate and true.  Dictionary.com defines critical thinking as clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence.  In a good history class, one that moves beyond the textbook, thinking critically is part of the package.

Students of history look at an event from many different perspectives.  The use of both primary (first-hand accounts) and secondary (recounting with interpretation and analysis) sources helps students see an event from many different angles.  Imagine an event like the Boston Massacre.  The account of the British soldier involved would be very different from the patriot on the street. Likewise, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, and King George III would all see the Boston Massacre from a different place.  A twenty-first century historian would add another view of the event. A British historian and an American historian would likely see the event in two different lights.  A student of history learns to read all the accounts and make judgments about the event.  Were the patriots justified in their actions?  Were the soldiers?  Why did Paul Revere refer to the event as a massacre?  How did the event contribute to the tensions between the colonies and the crown leading up to the American Revolution?

Looking at different sources, the perspective of the author, and the bias brought to the event help students learn to discern and think critically.  This important skill can be extrapolated to their non-academic life to determine if a news article, tweet, or report is valid or bait.

Becky Frank has been steeped in American History from her early days growing up on the family farm in Northeastern North Carolina. Although Barrow Creek Farm has been in her family since the 1680s, her parents were the first to live on it in three generations. On the farm she learned to milk cows, sheer sheep, and drive a tractor.

After an internship at Historic Edenton, she received a B.S. in Public History from Appalachian State University in 1992. Answering God’s call to teach in a classroom setting, she added teacher certification from East Carolina University to her degree in 1998. Becky then taught social studies in Gates County, North Carolina where her classes included U.S. History, World History, Economics, Government, and Humanities. In 2003 she married her husband John and left the classroom to start a family.

Becky has been teaching online for more than 10 years.  She also homeschools her three children and is an active leader in the Children’s and Youth’s ministry at her church. She also enjoys gardening, cooking, scrapbooking and long walks with her kids and the family dog. Sharing the heritage of our great country is one of her passions as well. Her lifelong dream is to return to the family farm and make a portion of the acreage a living history site.

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Explicitly Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a History Course

• Published: 20 March 2017
• Volume 26 , pages 93–105, ( 2017 )

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• Anne Collins McLaughlin 1 &
• Alicia Ebbitt McGill 2  

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Critical thinking skills are often assessed via student beliefs in non-scientific ways of thinking, (e.g, pseudoscience). Courses aimed at reducing such beliefs have been studied in the STEM fields with the most successful focusing on skeptical thinking. However, critical thinking is not unique to the sciences; it is crucial in the humanities and to historical thinking and analysis. We investigated the effects of a history course on epistemically unwarranted beliefs in two class sections. Beliefs were measured pre- and post-semester. Beliefs declined for history students compared to a control class and the effect was strongest for the honors section. This study provides evidence that a humanities education engenders critical thinking. Further, there may be individual differences in ability or preparedness in developing such skills, suggesting different foci for critical thinking coursework.

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Appendix 1: Pew test of science knowledge

All radioactivity is man-made. Is this statement true or false?

Correct Answer: False

Electrons are smaller than atoms. Is this statement true or false?

Correct Answer: True

Lasers work by focusing sound waves. Is this statement true or false?

The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future. Is this statement true or false?

Which one of the following types of solar radiation does sunscreen protect the skin from?

Correct Answer: Ultraviolet

Does nanotechnology deal with things that are extremely...

Correct Answer: small

Which gas makes up most of the Earth’s atmosphere?

Correct Answer: Nitrogen

Carbon Dioxide

What is the main function of red blood cells?

Correct Answer: Carry oxygen to all parts of the body

Help the blood to clot

Fight disease in the body

Which of these is a major concern about the overuse of antibiotics?

Correct Answer: It can lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria

People will become addicted to antibiotics

Antibiotics are very expensive

Which is an example of a chemical reaction?

Correct Answer: Nails rusting

Water boiling

Sugar dissolving

Which is the better way to determine whether a new drug is effective in treating a disease? If a scientist has a group of 1000 volunteers with the disease to study, should she...

Correct Answer: Give the drug to half of them but not to the other half, and compare how many in each group get better

Give the drug to all of them and see how many get better

What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise?

Correct Answer: Carbon dioxide

Which natural resource is extracted in a process known as “fracking”?

Correct Answer: Natural gas

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McLaughlin, A.C., McGill, A.E. Explicitly Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a History Course. Sci & Educ 26 , 93–105 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-017-9878-2

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Supplement to Critical Thinking

This supplement elaborates on the history of the articulation, promotion and adoption of critical thinking as an educational goal.

John Dewey (1910: 74, 82) introduced the term ‘critical thinking’ as the name of an educational goal, which he identified with a scientific attitude of mind. More commonly, he called the goal ‘reflective thought’, ‘reflective thinking’, ‘reflection’, or just ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’. He describes his book as written for two purposes. The first was to help people to appreciate the kinship of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry to the scientific attitude. The second was to help people to consider how recognizing this kinship in educational practice “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (iii). He notes that the ideas in the book obtained concreteness in the Laboratory School in Chicago.

Dewey’s ideas were put into practice by some of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study in the 1930s sponsored by the Progressive Education Association in the United States. For this study, 300 colleges agreed to consider for admission graduates of 30 selected secondary schools or school systems from around the country who experimented with the content and methods of teaching, even if the graduates had not completed the then-prescribed secondary school curriculum. One purpose of the study was to discover through exploration and experimentation how secondary schools in the United States could serve youth more effectively (Aikin 1942). Each experimental school was free to change the curriculum as it saw fit, but the schools agreed that teaching methods and the life of the school should conform to the idea (previously advocated by Dewey) that people develop through doing things that are meaningful to them, and that the main purpose of the secondary school was to lead young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18). In particular, school officials believed that young people in a democracy should develop the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems (Aikin 1942: 81). Students’ work in the classroom thus consisted more often of a problem to be solved than a lesson to be learned. Especially in mathematics and science, the schools made a point of giving students experience in clear, logical thinking as they solved problems. The report of one experimental school, the University School of Ohio State University, articulated this goal of improving students’ thinking:

Critical or reflective thinking originates with the sensing of a problem. It is a quality of thought operating in an effort to solve the problem and to reach a tentative conclusion which is supported by all available data. It is really a process of problem solving requiring the use of creative insight, intellectual honesty, and sound judgment. It is the basis of the method of scientific inquiry. The success of democracy depends to a large extent on the disposition and ability of citizens to think critically and reflectively about the problems which must of necessity confront them, and to improve the quality of their thinking is one of the major goals of education. (Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association 1943: 745–746)

The Eight-Year Study had an evaluation staff, which developed, in consultation with the schools, tests to measure aspects of student progress that fell outside the focus of the traditional curriculum. The evaluation staff classified many of the schools’ stated objectives under the generic heading “clear thinking” or “critical thinking” (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942: 35–36). To develop tests of achievement of this broad goal, they distinguished five overlapping aspects of it: ability to interpret data, abilities associated with an understanding of the nature of proof, and the abilities to apply principles of science, of social studies and of logical reasoning. The Eight-Year Study also had a college staff, directed by a committee of college administrators, whose task was to determine how well the experimental schools had prepared their graduates for college. The college staff compared the performance of 1,475 college students from the experimental schools with an equal number of graduates from conventional schools, matched in pairs by sex, age, race, scholastic aptitude scores, home and community background, interests, and probable future. They concluded that, on 18 measures of student success, the graduates of the experimental schools did a somewhat better job than the comparison group. The graduates from the six most traditional of the experimental schools showed no large or consistent differences. The graduates from the six most experimental schools, on the other hand, had much greater differences in their favour. The graduates of the two most experimental schools, the college staff reported:

… surpassed their comparison groups by wide margins in academic achievement, intellectual curiosity, scientific approach to problems, and interest in contemporary affairs. The differences in their favor were even greater in general resourcefulness, in enjoyment of reading, [in] participation in the arts, in winning non-academic honors, and in all aspects of college life except possibly participation in sports and social activities. (Aikin 1942: 114)

One of these schools was a private school with students from privileged families and the other the experimental section of a public school with students from non-privileged families. The college staff reported that the graduates of the two schools were indistinguishable from each other in terms of college success.

In 1933 Dewey issued an extensively rewritten edition of his How We Think (Dewey 1910), with the sub-title “A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process”. Although the restatement retains the basic structure and content of the original book, Dewey made a number of changes. He rewrote and simplified his logical analysis of the process of reflection, made his ideas clearer and more definite, replaced the terms ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’ by the phrases ‘control of data and evidence’ and ‘control of reasoning and concepts’, added more illustrations, rearranged chapters, and revised the parts on teaching to reflect changes in schools since 1910. In particular, he objected to one-sided practices of some “experimental” and “progressive” schools that allowed children freedom but gave them no guidance, citing as objectionable practices novelty and variety for their own sake, experiences and activities with real materials but of no educational significance, treating random and disconnected activity as if it were an experiment, failure to summarize net accomplishment at the end of an inquiry, non-educative projects, and treatment of the teacher as a negligible factor rather than as “the intellectual leader of a social group” (Dewey 1933: 273). Without explaining his reasons, Dewey eliminated the previous edition’s uses of the words ‘critical’ and ‘uncritical’, thus settling firmly on ‘reflection’ or ‘reflective thinking’ as the preferred term for his subject-matter. In the revised edition, the word ‘critical’ occurs only once, where Dewey writes that “a person may not be sufficiently critical about the ideas that occur to him” (1933: 16, italics in original); being critical is thus a component of reflection, not the whole of it. In contrast, the Eight-Year Study by the Progressive Education Association treated ‘critical thinking’ and ‘reflective thinking’ as synonyms.

In the same period, Dewey collaborated on a history of the Laboratory School in Chicago with two former teachers from the school (Mayhew & Edwards 1936). The history describes the school’s curriculum and organization, activities aimed at developing skills, parents’ involvement, and the habits of mind that the children acquired. A concluding chapter evaluates the school’s achievements, counting as a success its staging of the curriculum to correspond to the natural development of the growing child. In two appendices, the authors describe the evolution of Dewey’s principles of education and Dewey himself describes the theory of the Chicago experiment (Dewey 1936).

Glaser (1941) reports in his doctoral dissertation the method and results of an experiment in the development of critical thinking conducted in the fall of 1938. He defines critical thinking as Dewey defined reflective thinking:

Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Glaser 1941: 6; cf. Dewey 1910: 6; Dewey 1933: 9)

In the experiment, eight lesson units directed at improving critical thinking abilities were taught to four grade 12 high school classes, with pre-test and post-test of the students using the Otis Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Test and the Watson-Glaser Tests of Critical Thinking (developed in collaboration with Glaser’s dissertation sponsor, Goodwin Watson). The average gain in scores on these tests was greater to a statistically significant degree among the students who received the lessons in critical thinking than among the students in a control group of four grade 12 high school classes taking the usual curriculum in English. Glaser concludes:

The aspect of critical thinking which appears most susceptible to general improvement is the attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experience. An attitude of wanting evidence for beliefs is more subject to general transfer. Development of skill in applying the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, however, appears to be specifically related to, and in fact limited by, the acquisition of pertinent knowledge and facts concerning the problem or subject matter toward which the thinking is to be directed. (Glaser 1941: 175)

Retest scores and observable behaviour indicated that students in the intervention group retained their growth in ability to think critically for at least six months after the special instruction.

In 1948 a group of U.S. college examiners decided to develop taxonomies of educational objectives with a common vocabulary that they could use for communicating with each other about test items. The first of these taxonomies, for the cognitive domain, appeared in 1956 (Bloom et al. 1956), and included critical thinking objectives. It has become known as Bloom’s taxonomy. A second taxonomy, for the affective domain (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia 1964), and a third taxonomy, for the psychomotor domain (Simpson 1966–67), appeared later. Each of the taxonomies is hierarchical, with achievement of a higher educational objective alleged to require achievement of corresponding lower educational objectives.

Bloom’s taxonomy has six major categories. From lowest to highest, they are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Within each category, there are sub-categories, also arranged hierarchically from the educationally prior to the educationally posterior. The lowest category, though called ‘knowledge’, is confined to objectives of remembering information and being able to recall or recognize it, without much transformation beyond organizing it (Bloom et al. 1956: 28–29). The five higher categories are collectively termed “intellectual abilities and skills” (Bloom et al. 1956: 204). The term is simply another name for critical thinking abilities and skills:

Although information or knowledge is recognized as an important outcome of education, very few teachers would be satisfied to regard this as the primary or the sole outcome of instruction. What is needed is some evidence that the students can do something with their knowledge, that is, that they can apply the information to new situations and problems. It is also expected that students will acquire generalized techniques for dealing with new problems and new materials. Thus, it is expected that when the student encounters a new problem or situation, he will select an appropriate technique for attacking it and will bring to bear the necessary information, both facts and principles. This has been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others. In the taxonomy, we have used the term “intellectual abilities and skills”. (Bloom et al. 1956: 38)

Comprehension and application objectives, as their names imply, involve understanding and applying information. Critical thinking abilities and skills show up in the three highest categories of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The condensed version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al. 1956: 201–207) gives the following examples of objectives at these levels:

• analysis objectives : ability to recognize unstated assumptions, ability to check the consistency of hypotheses with given information and assumptions, ability to recognize the general techniques used in advertising, propaganda and other persuasive materials
• synthesis objectives : organizing ideas and statements in writing, ability to propose ways of testing a hypothesis, ability to formulate and modify hypotheses
• evaluation objectives : ability to indicate logical fallacies, comparison of major theories about particular cultures

The analysis, synthesis and evaluation objectives in Bloom’s taxonomy collectively came to be called the “higher-order thinking skills” (Tankersley 2005: chap. 5). Although the analysis-synthesis-evaluation sequence mimics phases in Dewey’s (1933) logical analysis of the reflective thinking process, it has not generally been adopted as a model of a critical thinking process. While commending the inspirational value of its ratio of five categories of thinking objectives to one category of recall objectives, Ennis (1981b) points out that the categories lack criteria applicable across topics and domains. For example, analysis in chemistry is so different from analysis in literature that there is not much point in teaching analysis as a general type of thinking. Further, the postulated hierarchy seems questionable at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. For example, ability to indicate logical fallacies hardly seems more complex than the ability to organize statements and ideas in writing.

A revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) distinguishes the intended cognitive process in an educational objective (such as being able to recall, to compare or to check) from the objective’s informational content (“knowledge”), which may be factual, conceptual, procedural, or metacognitive. The result is a so-called “Taxonomy Table” with four rows for the kinds of informational content and six columns for the six main types of cognitive process. The authors name the types of cognitive process by verbs, to indicate their status as mental activities. They change the name of the ‘comprehension’ category to ‘understand’ and of the ‘synthesis’ category to ’create’, and switch the order of synthesis and evaluation. The result is a list of six main types of cognitive process aimed at by teachers: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The authors retain the idea of a hierarchy of increasing complexity, but acknowledge some overlap, for example between understanding and applying. And they retain the idea that critical thinking and problem solving cut across the more complex cognitive processes. The terms ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’, they write:

are widely used and tend to become touchstones of curriculum emphasis. Both generally include a variety of activities that might be classified in disparate cells of the Taxonomy Table. That is, in any given instance, objectives that involve problem solving and critical thinking most likely call for cognitive processes in several categories on the process dimension. For example, to think critically about an issue probably involves some Conceptual knowledge to Analyze the issue. Then, one can Evaluate different perspectives in terms of the criteria and, perhaps, Create a novel, yet defensible perspective on this issue. (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270; italics in original)

In the revised taxonomy, only a few sub-categories, such as inferring, have enough commonality to be treated as a distinct critical thinking ability that could be taught and assessed as a general ability.

A landmark contribution to philosophical scholarship on the concept of critical thinking was a 1962 article in the Harvard Educational Review by Robert H. Ennis, with the title “A concept of critical thinking: A proposed basis for research in the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability” (Ennis 1962). Ennis took as his starting-point a conception of critical thinking put forward by B. Othanel Smith:

We shall consider thinking in terms of the operations involved in the examination of statements which we, or others, may believe. A speaker declares, for example, that “Freedom means that the decisions in America’s productive effort are made not in the minds of a bureaucracy but in the free market”. Now if we set about to find out what this statement means and to determine whether to accept or reject it, we would be engaged in thinking which, for lack of a better term, we shall call critical thinking. If one wishes to say that this is only a form of problem-solving in which the purpose is to decide whether or not what is said is dependable, we shall not object. But for our purposes we choose to call it critical thinking. (Smith 1953: 130)

Adding a normative component to this conception, Ennis defined critical thinking as “the correct assessing of statements” (Ennis 1962: 83). On the basis of this definition, he distinguished 12 “aspects” of critical thinking corresponding to types or aspects of statements, such as judging whether an observation statement is reliable and grasping the meaning of a statement. He noted that he did not include judging value statements. Cutting across the 12 aspects, he distinguished three dimensions of critical thinking: logical (judging relationships between meanings of words and statements), criterial (knowledge of the criteria for judging statements), and pragmatic (the impression of the background purpose). For each aspect, Ennis described the applicable dimensions, including criteria. He proposed the resulting construct as a basis for developing specifications for critical thinking tests and for research on instructional methods and levels.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was an upsurge of attention to the development of thinking skills. The annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Educational Reform has attracted since its start in 1980 tens of thousands of educators from all levels. In 1983 the College Entrance Examination Board proclaimed reasoning as one of six basic academic competencies needed by college students (College Board 1983). Departments of education in the United States and around the world began to include thinking objectives in their curriculum guidelines for school subjects. For example, Ontario’s social sciences and humanities curriculum guideline for secondary schools requires “the use of critical and creative thinking skills and/or processes” as a goal of instruction and assessment in each subject and course (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 30). The document describes critical thinking as follows:

Critical thinking is the process of thinking about ideas or situations in order to understand them fully, identify their implications, make a judgement, and/or guide decision making. Critical thinking includes skills such as questioning, predicting, analysing, synthesizing, examining opinions, identifying values and issues, detecting bias, and distinguishing between alternatives. Students who are taught these skills become critical thinkers who can move beyond superficial conclusions to a deeper understanding of the issues they are examining. They are able to engage in an inquiry process in which they explore complex and multifaceted issues, and questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 46).

Sweden makes schools responsible for ensuring that each pupil who completes compulsory school “can make use of critical thinking and independently formulate standpoints based on knowledge and ethical considerations” (Skolverket 2011: 15). Subject syllabi incorporate this requirement, and items testing critical thinking skills appear on national tests in history, Swedish, mathematics and physics that are a required step toward university admission. For example, the physics syllabus emphasizes the importance of “critical examination of information and arguments which students meet in sources and social discussions related to physics” (Skolverket 2011: 124). Correspondingly, the 2013 national test on physics included a question asking students to provide arguments for a recommendation to the Swedish minister of energy on what energy sources to use for electricity production. Other jurisdictions similarly embed critical thinking objectives in curriculum guidelines.

At the college level, a new wave of introductory logic textbooks, pioneered by Kahane (1971), applied the tools of logic to contemporary social and political issues. In their wake, colleges and universities in North America transformed their introductory logic course into a general education service course with a title like ‘critical thinking’ or ‘reasoning’. In 1980, the trustees of California’s state university and colleges approved as a general education requirement a course in critical thinking, described as follows:

Instruction in critical thinking is to be designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief. The minimal competence to be expected at the successful conclusion of instruction in critical thinking should be the ability to distinguish fact from judgment, belief from knowledge, and skills in elementary inductive and deductive processes, including an understanding of the formal and informal fallacies of language and thought. (Dumke 1980)

Since December 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions at the three annual divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association. In December 1987, the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association invited Peter Facione to make a systematic inquiry into the current state of critical thinking and critical thinking assessment. Facione assembled a group of 46 other academic philosophers and psychologists to participate in a multi-round Delphi process, whose product was entitled Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction (Facione 1990a). The statement listed abilities and dispositions that should be the goals of a lower-level undergraduate course in critical thinking.

Contemporary political and business leaders express support for critical thinking as an educational goal. In his 2014 State of the Union address (Obama 2014), U.S. President Barack Obama listed critical thinking as one of six skills for the new economy targeted with his Race to the Top program. An article in the business magazine Forbes reported that the number one job skill, found in nine out of 10 of the most in-demand jobs, was critical thinking, defined as “using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems” (Casserly 2012). In response to such claims, the European Commission has funded “Critical Thinking across the European Higher Education Curricula”, a nine-country research project to develop guidelines for quality in critical thinking instruction in European institutions of higher education, on the basis of the researchers’ findings of the critical thinking skills and dispositions that employers expect of recent graduates (Dominguez 2018a; 2018b). The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) in early 2018 issued a call for institutions of higher education to participate in a two-year study, with control groups, of interventions in undergraduate or teacher education designed to improve creative and critical thinking (OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation 2018).

Copyright © 2018 by David Hitchcock < hitchckd @ mcmaster . ca >

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Historical content matters: a response to the critical thinking skills agenda

Katie barclay | 06 november 2019.

Executive Summary

• Historical knowledge is a significant form of ‘common sense’ knowledge that shapes decision-making
• Academic histories play a key role in shaping this ‘common sense’ knowledge
• As a result, academic historical scholarship plays a significant and undervalued role in producing social, economic and political outcomes in all areas
• Universities, policymakers and society should take greater heed of historical research as vital to the healthy functioning of societies, economies and polities
• The value of history degrees is not just an important skillset in critical thinking, but the historical content that it provides students

Introduction

History is regularly deployed by people from all walks of life for all sorts of purposes. Pro-Brexit campaigners have variously called upon Britain’s imperial heritage or nostalgic imaginings of whiter British past to justify their retreat from the European Union. Remainers have responded with their own histories of Empire and migration. Both sides have wielded experts in universities to support their points, or posed with historical writings in piles behind them as they make political arguments. The Christchurch shooter carved the dates of Crusade battles into his weapon, locating his action – he claimed – in a long history of Christian-Muslim conflict. Recent debates around sex education in schools have deployed arguments about ‘traditional’ family structures , that LGBT families are meant to sit outside. More benignly, journalists and the public display surprise when they encounter academic scholarship that sheds light on contemporary issues, claiming these ‘hidden’ histories have been withheld from them. It is a degree of surprise, sometimes outrage, that is suggestive that the public recognise that history does important work in shaping how we feel about the world, and that gaps in knowledge are somehow unjust or designed to deceive the public.

For all these people, history matters. And it matters to historians that the public has access to the best and most cutting-edge histories to help inform these discussions. One of the key purposes of History & Policy is to direct the knowledge and findings produced by historians towards those addressing similar problems in the present. Historians, deeply appreciative of the importance of context, are loathe to suggest that ‘lessons from the past’ can be directly applied to a new set of circumstances. But equally we argue that understanding the past can help people make better decisions when encountering similar circumstances today. It can be particularly useful for highlighting how a specific problem has arisen, and for offering an appreciation of the scope of an impact of a choice and the variety of dimensions that need to be considered. Thus, for example, research on children and institutions illuminates why institutions have repeatedly failed many of the children that have been brought into them and why these same problems continue into the present. Historical knowledge, however, is also significant because it shapes our understanding of who we are, our identities, and our potential as people. It is important not just where it can be directly applied but as a source of general information that informs how we engage with the world. That it plays this role ensures that we should not only consider historical research and teaching critical when it has an instrumental and applied value but also because of its role in producing people, inclusive democracies, and nations.

Histories and the everyday

Historical knowledge is all around us. It is transmitted through families, fact and fiction books, television, museums and heritage sites, in language, and as ‘common sense’ information that we use to make decisions. Our first encounters with the past are often in the stories told about own ancestors – parents and grandparents – designed to help us understand what is valued in our family or how our childhood experience might have differed in a previous era. These stories offer a set of common sense information that help us locate our own experiences in relation to time and place, to significant events, and to other people. They can be incredibly varied, ranging across histories of childhood, school, workplaces and occupations, political parties and geopolitics, climate and environment, arts and culture, love and friendship, science, medicine and technology to name a few. As we age and encounter other histories, perhaps at school or in books, our knowledge of the world expands and we learn both about diversity and how historical events have differential impacts on groups.

As the histories that help us make sense of our experiences, these accounts become central to how we understand our personal identity, that of others, and our role in the nation. Given our investments in our identity and attachments to our pasts, these stories also ensure that history becomes politically significant in the public sphere. That the public intuitively recognises this can be seen in the debates, protests and highly emotive engagements with public statues associated with controversial figures, such as the imperialist Cecil Rhodes or US confederate leader Robert E. Lee , or in museum displays associated with local conflicts, such as The Troubles in Northern Ireland or Aboriginal-settler conflict in Australia. What is represented in public histories becomes central to debates about who we are, who is included and excluded, who holds power, and the production of contemporary values and rights.

These ‘everyday histories’ are related to academic scholarship in important ways. The popular histories that are taught at school and museums and appear on television, in children’s books, even fiction, typically draw on academic research. If they are sometimes less rigorous or flatten complex arguments, they nonetheless draw on a body of research conducted by professional historians. Increasingly academics also produce public-facing historical writing to aid with this process. The histories that shape identities grow from academic scholarship. Historians play a significant role in determining what is important to remember. A move from histories of monarchs and diplomacy to that of women and workers may have been encouraged by grassroots civil rights movements in the middle of the twentieth century, but it was historians who determined the key features of the new social histories that emerged.

Historical research is often considered an art because the historian plays such a key role in shaping their accounts of the past. It is the questions that they consider to be important that determine what they look for in the archive. It is their sifting and selection from often sizeable collections of material that determine what makes it into history books and what is forgotten. It is these choices, and that others might make different choices, that produce historical debate and argument, and which informs the evolution of the field as a new generation of scholars bring a different set of concerns to the material that survives from the past. Thus the knowledges that we grow up with and that shape our understanding of ourselves and identities reflect the trends and critical questions within the historical discipline in our formative years. It is perhaps natural then that new histories produced by a new generation of scholars can be challenging to those whose identities were shaped by older understandings of the past, just as those same histories have been liberating for many – such as women, the LGBT community, or ethnic minorities – who lacked stories of people like them when they were growing up. Yet this evolution is critical in producing history that remains relevant to our contemporary experience and identity-making, and to answering questions raised by new circumstances and contexts.

Research and teaching history

In recent years, the value of historical research, and indeed humanities research in general, has been questioned. Right-wing commentators have suggested that universities are increasingly driven by ‘identity politics’ . Critics fear that the history curriculum has fragmented into a wide range of modules driven by the politics of their teachers. Others have questioned the value of research that is not seen to hold a direct and measurable social, but especially economic, impact. This has become particularly significant for the student market where degrees are increasingly promoted with claims of a direct and obvious employment route. Both criticisms demand a straightforward account of what a history degree teaches, and a single type of job that those with history degrees take up. Without this, critics argue, history is useless knowledge. Universities have sought to counter such claims by locating the value of history not in historical knowledge – the content of what was learned – but in ‘critical thinking’, ‘writing and communication’ and similar important but generic skills . For such commentators, the historical content is of less significance than the opportunity to read widely, think deeply, research, and solve problems, a skillset that can be applied in any context.

No one would contest that a history degree offers these benefits, but it is an account that fails to recognise the importance of historical knowledge in the everyday. The histories we use are significant in interpreting everyday experiences and identity. Indeed, critical thinking requires historical knowledge. What we determine to be ‘common sense’, how we understand the world to operate, does not arise naturally but is based upon the everyday histories that we are taught in childhood and across our lives. This is the case when we, for example, make an assumption about normative family forms in the past, or when we draw on an interpretation of the causes of the First World War when producing foreign policy. Such ‘common sense’ histories are always partial, reflective of our experience and our encounters with the historical knowledge available to us. Access to a broader, more sophisticated body of historical research counters these ‘common sense’ accounts by offering a firmer grounding for decision-making and critical analysis. This can be seen in the now famous example of the US Supreme Court decision for marriage equality, that referenced the scholarship of key marriage and sexuality historians , and transformed the legal rights of LGBT individuals across the US.

New histories are therefore important for the work they do in shaping individuals and society. A democratic society – one where all members of the polity have a place – requires inclusive accounts that acknowledge and recognise all parts of the community. This is even more critical for groups who have been subject to disadvantage, harm or exploitation, where their histories act as an acknowledgement and first step in redress for past wrongs. It is vital for minorities who need histories of others like them to explain their experience and role in the world. New histories are also important in giving us accounts of art, culture, science, technology, business, economy and more that help us interpret the present, much as History & Policy promotes. Importantly, for a rich account of the past to emerge, a variety of topics and perspectives becomes critical.

In the present moment, a popular television show such as Downton Abbey, exploring changing social relations in early twentieth-century Britain, can draw on histories of war, economy, society, fashion, popular culture, material culture, accent and language use, technology, medicine and more, in its rich ‘world-building’. This is possible due to the work of dozens of scholars and years of effort, which itself builds upon generations of earlier work, though this work is usually unacknowledged within television credits. Such a history is richer, more interesting, perhaps a fuller capture of the past. Its strength lies in collaboration and the representation of a diversity of perspectives. With significant viewing figures both in the UK and internationally, Downton Abbey is an account of the past that will inform how many of us interpret our present experiences. Yet it is an account that is not usually acknowledged as either ‘history’ that people will use in making sense of themselves, nor as rooted in academic historical research – despite it being both. Remarkably, despite the fact that governments and increasingly university campaigns targeting students have sought to instrumentalise historical knowledge by emphasising its benefits for public policy , for productivity and growth, and for future employment, the important and everyday impacts of history – the ways that it is used by ordinary people in their own lives – is rarely considered as a domain shaped by historical research.

For an informed and productive society, the historical knowledge disseminated to the public must be broad, diverse and evolving to reflect new research. Universities are a key space where new accounts of the past can be taught and disseminated. That there is not a core history curriculum taught at every university, as some conservatives suggest there should be, is not a flaw, but a feature. It is not possible for every member of society, nor every historian, to know everything about the past. History courses thus specialise, and disseminate diverse accounts of the past. As history students from different institutions spread outwards, taking their specialist knowledges to an array of workplaces nationally and internationally, they share their educations with others, increasing the opportunity for knowledge to reach those that will find it most useful. Acknowledging the significance of the historical content of degrees may also offer opportunities for individuals to be targeted by employers or communities for historical learning that gives them expertise and critical thinking in specific areas.

Importantly, this is not an account of historical knowledge that attends only to the modern histories that explain the immediate experiences of those in the polity. Historical knowledges have long legacies in culture and society, requiring investment and dissemination in histories both deep and wide. This can be seen most recently in the use of crusading history both by the Christchurch shooter and by conservative political parties in Australia  (where Senator Cori Bernardi recently tabled a motion asking the Senate to note the anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Vienna in 1529), to promote a right-wing agenda. But it can also be seen in our contemporary understanding of love and sex that was first forged in conflicts within the medieval church. Knowing this – like our more well-known modern histories of sex and gender – may well open up new ways of thinking about something so central to our everyday lives. A successful and inclusive democratic state requires not just research skills, but historical knowledge.

Historical knowledge shapes how people interpret their experiences, and those of others. It aids critical thinking and decision-making. Providing people with richer, more sophisticated, and up to date historical content therefore contributes not only to a better educated public but one that can make better decisions in a vast array of areas of life. Acknowledging this requires a move from promoting history degrees for their generic critical thinking and communication skillset to celebrating historical knowledge as a key form of information required by productive members of society. This has implications for how universities promote their history research and teaching, but also for policymakers as they seek to produce the best outcomes in areas as diverse as education, health, industry, politics, economy, technology, arts, and society.

• Barclay, Katie
• History in practice

Further Reading

Anna Green, ‘Intergenerational Family Stories: Private, Parochial, Pathological?,’ Journal of Family History 38, no. 4 (2013): 387-402

Shurlee Swain and Nell Musgrove, ‘We are the Stories We Tell About Ourselves: Child Welfare Records and the Construction of Identity among Australians who, as Children, Experienced Out-of-Home “Care”,’ Archives and Manuscripts 40, no. 1 (2012): 4-14

Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews,’ Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): 65-93

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

About the author

Katie Barclay is Deputy-Director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions and Associate Professor in History, University of Adelaide. Her research explores the transmission of knowledge across generations within families and the implications for self, identity and nation.

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How history matters now, ludmilla jordanova | 27 november 2008, in defence of applied history: the history and policy website, john tosh | 10 february 2006, why history matters, john tosh | 20 november 2008, why history matters - and why medieval history also matters, john arnold | 28 november 2008, related opinion articles, back to the past for the school history curriculum, nicola sheldon | 20 february 2013, papers by author, papers by theme, digital download.

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Let's think about "thinking" before we teach "critical thinking".

Elizabeth Stice is Associate Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University. 

Advocates for the liberal arts often emphasize their role in fostering critical thinking. But how often do we think critically about how we hope to achieve that? Certain subjects obviously emphasize critical thinking very explicitly, but in other courses instructors often count on critical thinking to develop somewhat organically. And critical thinking does emerge fairly naturally in courses that are not about logic or statistics. However, many faculty can do more to consider the relationship between methods of teaching and the development of critical thinking.

The liberal arts tradition has drawn on critical thinking since its start. Socrates has long been an animating influence. But apart from the Socratic method, liberal arts professors sometimes struggle to explain the connections between their approach to teaching and the outcome of critical thinking. The paucity of terminology and explicit method does not mean that nothing is happening, but it does mean that it can be hard to identify what specifically needs improvement and very difficult to instruct others well in the arts of instruction.

A whole host of recent findings and books from psychology offer an opportunity to expand our vocabulary and approach to thinking about thinking in the classroom. In particular, the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which has done so much to shake up economics, can also knock some dust off approaches to education. In particular, Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow identifies ways that humans think and the shortcuts we use in thinking (heuristics), which sometimes get us into trouble. Having a better sense of these heuristics and how judgment can be deceived can be very useful in the classroom. Thinking explicitly about the anchoring effect, which reflects our use of even irrelevant reference points, can make instructors more aware of what reference points we’re providing and also give us the opportunity to teach students about other biases. Teaching students how to reason and judge well is enhanced by having a better understanding of how human judgment works.

Together Kahneman and Tversky have contributed a great deal to our understanding of human understanding. Professors from many different fields should be reading their work, because all of our fields involve understanding. Another introduction to their work and their working relationship is available in Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project , which offers a more narrative approach and also highlights the role of collaboration in the advancement of knowledge. Kahneman and Tversky’s continuous experimentation and reflection is a helpful example.

Another recent work that has insights for the liberal arts project is Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World , by performance expert David Epstein. The book itself is a strong argument for the liberal arts. The “general education” of a liberal arts degree is, in a sense, the broad sampling period that so many high performers benefit from having and helps create the kind of generalists that can succeed in various fields. Range explicitly takes on the subject of thinking, emphasizing the importance of thinking with analogies and the ability to think outside of a single discipline. It also explicitly takes on the subject of student learning, drawing on various studies to emphasize the importance of student struggle in comprehension and the ways that teachers can accidently circumvent that struggle. A book like Range is not about teaching, but it can help us reinvigorate our approaches to sharing material in the classroom by reminding us what leads to excellence in outcomes. 

Another way that new insights from psychology and performance studies can enhance our approach to education is through making us reconsider the contexts for learning that we create. Are our classrooms settings that truly encourage critical thinking or do they reward simple recall? Do our syllabi and assignments point people toward the outcomes we hope to achieve? A book like Nudge , by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, can help us think through these things. Nudge borrows from the insights of Kahneman and Tversky to recommend use of heuristics and patterns in human judgment, like the availability bias, to “nudge” people in the right direction. The authors argue that things can be structured in such a way as to make people more likely to default to better choices. Professors already do some things like this—like requiring a first draft so that people turn in better final work—and we can all be encouraged to think more about how our coursework and classrooms already “nudge” people in certain directions. Once we identify more of what we are doing, we can make more conscious choices about where we want to go.

A very tangible way to integrate some of these insights from psychology and other fields is to consider something we almost all work with: learning outcomes. Learning outcomes help tell students what courses are about and they help satisfy accreditation requirements. They are also often quite dry. Students will learn how to “assess” something or “identify” or “distinguish” or “demonstrate competence,” etc., and these outcomes will be measured through “quizzes, tests, written assignments, a presentation,” etc. But learning outcomes are also an opportunity for us to engage and require critical thinking in more direct ways.

Learning outcomes are tied explicitly to subject matter, but they can also be used to integrate critical thinking goals which are implicitly associated with the liberal arts subjects. As faculty formulate the assignments that are used to measure learning outcomes, they can keep in mind aspects of critical thinking or even specific heuristics. For example, history students already need to be aware of hindsight bias in order to succeed in the discipline, but professors can do more to make that an aspect of assignments. Again, these things are already happening, but not often enough in ways that faculty openly describe and discuss. If faculty are more conscious and communicative of how we integrate critical thinking, we can improve our approaches.

Those who love the liberal arts are fully aware of their benefits outside specific knowledge, but we are not often specific enough about how those benefits are achieved in explaining our disciplines to the rest of the world. We know that classrooms are somewhat organic spaces and that critical thinking is not achieved through a formulaic set of learning outcomes. But failure to talk about method can lead to failure to think enough about method. Thinking through these things not only helps us communicate better with others, it helps us consider what it is we may want to integrate.

Thinking about what will be implicit in our teaching approaches is not about forwarding agendas, but about educating the whole person. In a 2011 New York Times op-ed , David Brooks wrote that the “unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place.” In that essay, Brooks advocated a healthy reunion of reason and emotion, arguing that society had become over reliant on reason and therefore was often at the mercy of undereducated emotions. Instead, he suggested that we educate our emotions and integrate them well into decision-making, emphasizing qualities like attunement, equipoise, metis, sympathy, and limerence. These are also things worth considering. How do our classrooms portray the relationship between reason and emotion?

In truth, whatever ways we are teaching are already encouraging certain ways of thinking and discouraging others. Investigating new research about thinking and making our own approaches more intentional can be of great benefit. Have we crafted assignments that reward critical thinking or those that reward mimesis and recall? Have we created a classroom environment that fosters reasoning or one which fosters shallow thinking? If the liberal arts is, in part, about critical thinking, having a conscious approach to it is essential. We can all benefit from new ways to think about thinking when we’re teaching.

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Our Concept and Definition of Critical Thinking

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A Primer on Critical Thinking and Business Ethics

ISBN : 978-1-83753-309-1 , eISBN : 978-1-83753-308-4

Publication date: 27 July 2023

Executive Summary

In this chapter, we introduce the history of critical thinking briefly, starting from Socrates to contemporary contributions. Based on this history, we derive several modules for training in critical thinking via practical exercises in critical thinking. Three classic critical thinking models are introduced: Socratic questioning method, Cartesian doubting method, and Baconian empirical method. We discuss their potential for critical thinking as foundational methods. The material in this chapter is distributed in three parts. In Part I, we provide a brief history of critical thinking. In Part II, we design models of critical thinking based on its classic history. In Part III, we list some models of critical thinking based on its history, from the Renaissance period to the current times. In the last section, we also discuss critical thinking in the context of business ethics, by delineating its normative domain, assessing its characteristics, and reviewing its processes.

Mascarenhas, O.A.J. , Thakur, M. and Kumar, P. (2023), "History of Critical Thinking and Some Models of Critical Thinking", A Primer on Critical Thinking and Business Ethics , Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 41-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-308-420231003

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023 Oswald A. J. Mascarenhas, Munish Thakur and Payal Kumar. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited

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