Critical Thinking

"...purposeful, reasoned and goal directed..."
Halpern, Diane F. Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking. 199

"Critical thinking is careful and deliberate determination of whether to accept, reject, or suspend judgment."
Moore and Parker, 1994.


"...to achieve understanding, evaluate view points, and solve problems...questioning or inquiry we engage in when we seek to understand, evaluate, or resolve."
Maiorana, Victor P. Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: Building the Analytical Classroom. 1992.

"...reason, intellectual honesty, and open-mindedness...considering all possibilities; relying on reason rather than emotion; being precise; considering a variety of possible viewpoints and explanations; weighing the effects of motives and biases; being concerned more with finding the truth than with being right; not rejecting unpopular views out of hand; being aware of one's own prejudices and biases, and not allowing them to sway one's judgment."
Kurland, Daniel J. I Know What It Says . . . What does it Mean? 1995.

"Critical thinking is "the art of thinking about your thinking while you are thinking in order to make your thinking better: more clear, more accurate, or more defensible."
Paul, Binker, Adamson, and Martin (1989)



The opinion and viewpoints examined in these definitions of critical thinking relate to my project in a few ways. The first one is the idea of approaching something new and foreign with an open mind. For me this means looking at the lives of a low wage group - migrant agricultural workers - in an open way. I have been suspending all judgement in my research thus far. It means I take the facts and opinions expressed in my sources and compile them and extrapolate in a non judgmental way. I also use the idea of thinking about my thinking in the writing process. I usually tend to write without thinking about where I'm going, but in this project I have forced myself to think about the result before beginning the writing process. It has been very helpful. Another way of using critical thinking is making sure that my project has a very direct purpose. I tend to be very general but with this project I have had to take a more direct and immediate standpoint.