Re:Almost (Score 1)

I currently attend a "good" school (though not Ivy League). I agree with your generalization, though not with your why. "Critical thinking" of the variety described by the summary (making cohesive arguments, assessing quality of evidence in documents, interpreting tables) is precisely the sort of critical thinking measured by graduate admissions tests like the GRE and GMAT. Supposedly, these tests measure your skill in these areas because universities demand these skills in their applicants and have found these skills to be critical to success in graduate school. Making arguments and assessing evidence quality in particular are measured by written essays, and seeing what passes for a 4 out of 6 on the GRE written essay, the bar is evidently not set very high. Roughly half of the syllabi for my classes have listed among the learning outcomes for the class "enhanced critical thinking and reasoning skills" or other some such similar wording. Really, I ought to be an expert critical thinker, given the frequency with which I'm supposedly encountering it in my classes. I once took a history class. History represents a wonderful opportunity to develop critical thinking abilities--you can start at it with as little as two sources that disagree with each other and have students ponder the details. Rather, what I got in that class was a grading policy whereby you were expected to write down the professor's very well thought-out analysis of the who-what-why verbatim, and regurgitate it during the exam. The less your answer resembled the "official" answer, the worse your score was. We were also given key words and understood that failure to use the key words meant a poor grade would be the consequence. The height of this charade took place one day when the professor gave us a 20 minute speech about how her entire purpose for standing there and teaching us was to help us develop an ability to think critically, then she had an evaluation form handed out to everyone that asked if the class helped us learn to think critically. Sadly, I have been in other classes where the entire purpose of the class is to develop critical thinking skills of the sort described by the summary, and the instructors make a genuine effort to encourage development in this area, but it is the students who completely fail. One class I took was "Engineering Communication," a speech (and writing) class which required developing, supporting, and refuting arguments, as well as observation of "both sides" of a number of controversial engineering topics. The instructor never gave a "correct" answer, and he would try to encourage students to think critically by asking all sorts of questions about provided information that clearly the students were not asking themselves and should have been. I suspect that the problem is that it's much easier to teach the first way, as my history professor did. Teaching the second way is much slower going if your students aren't already competent critical thinkers, and so the problem perpetuates itself and is exacerbated by the fact that there is a lot of material to teach and not much time to do it. My peers expect to be asked a question and to receive a correct answer shortly after, and are very skilled at blurting out an answer to a question without thinking about it, then reanswering as needed based on the body language and reaction of the instructor. So I am in agreement, colleges are teaching students "what" to think and not "how" to think. Students adjust their learning styles accordingly and never pick up the skill. I suspect that my critical thinking would be evaluated on the higher end of whatever spectrum this exam has, but I really probably picked that up more from years of reading pessimistic, skeptical Slashdot commentary while I was growing up than anything. I would be very surprised if my ability to analyze/form arguments or read charts has improved any amount by attending university. I am learning a great deal, but these are not the skills that are emphasized in my education.