The motivation to think in working and learning

✍ Scribed by Peter A. Facione; Noreen C. Facione; Carol Ann F. Giancarlo

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Weight: 839 KB
• Volume: 1996
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-0560
• DOI: 10.1002/he.36919969608

✦ Synopsis

How can we habituate learners and workers to engage in thoughtful, fairminded problem solving, decision making, and professional judgment? Demands for skillful and fair-minded thinkers arise today in every professional field and in our civic and personal lives. The pace of change accelerates, multiple sources of information saturate our senses, the rules are rewritten, and problems arise daily that deb predetermined solutions. At a minimum, to be effective learners and successful workers we must be willing and able to make mformed, fair-minded judgments in contexts of relative uncertainty about what to believe and what to do in a wide variety of situations. To go beyond the minimum, workers, learners, and citizens must be willing and able to critique intelligently and amend judiciously the methods, conceptualizations, contexts, evidence, and standards applied in any given problem situation. In short, we must habitually, not just skillfully, engage in critical thinking in a world that is so dynamic that today's verities are yesterdays misconceptions. Thus, the driving question is, how is the consistent internal motivation to think critically identified, measured, and nurtured?

CAROL ANN E GIANGUUO researches the relationship between critical thinking, academic success, and cultural variables through the Department of Psychology at Santa Clara University.