Canadian Network for Innovation in Education

At Athabasca University—Canada’s Open University—a multidisciplinary approach was adopted to conduct a series of webinars on critical thinking for graduate students over the past two years. Drawing on panelists’ experience with these webinars and their expertise in Interdisciplinary Studies, Information Literacy, Academic Writing and Learning Design, this presentation will address strategies to guide learners’ in developing critical thinking skills. Panelists will discuss and share reflections on designing, developing, facilitating and evaluating educational development activities to support post-secondary students’ critical skills in an online context.

The presentation will provide an overview of critical thinking and discuss the three schools that dominate current day practice: philosophical, psychological and generalist. The generalist approach is then discussed and critiqued in relation to Bloom’s original taxonomy of educational outcomes and its subsequent refinements.

Next, the connection between the research process and critical thinking is examined. Focusing on analysis, evaluation and synthesis, this section of the presentation provides a critical thinking approach and a set of strategies that can be employed across a variety of disciplines.

The connection between clear thinking and good writing in an academic setting is then addressed. Parallels between the writing process and a student’s ability to think, read and write critically will be examined, using Toulmin’s rhetorical model, and the ways students can refine and challenge their own thinking, using the drafting process, will also be discussed.

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists