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Introduction

One of the main aims of higher education is to create students who are independent, critical thinkers. You develop your skills and dispositions as critical thinkers during most of the activities that you have to do as students at university - reading, listening, note-taking, discussing, debating, reflecting and writing. Barnett (1997) cited in Dunne (2014) states "the underlying purpose of education and educators is to ‘develop the capacities to think critically... to understand oneself critically and to act critically. Thereby forming critical persons who are not subjects to the world. But are able to act autonomously and positively within it’ (Dunne,2014). Suggesting that criticality is a way of bringing about personal growth and understanding.

Critical thinking is a complex set of thinking processes and cannot be covered in a few web pages. These pages will concentrate on the following aspects of critical thinking:

Critical thinking workshops

The Skills Team run the following relevant workshops:

Critical thinking 1
Critical thinking 2
Speed reading

To book onto our workshops please visit the Skills workshops page.

And specifically https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/criticalwriting/workshop

Top Tips Printable Guide

Our single page guide on critical thinking - covering the essentials elements of critical reading and critical writing.

Click the image to download the PDF.

Related books and eBooks available from our libraries

These are just a selection, please see the library catalogue for more.

Critical thinking: an appeal to reason (eBook) by Peg Tittle
Critical thinking: a concise guide (eBook) by Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp
An Introduction to Critical thinking by Joe Kau
Critical thinking and analysis by Mary Deane