The method Critical Thinking with Rationale (CTwR) has been developed as a result of the initiative of the Australian Research Council that commissioned a four-year research project in 2001 on how to improve critical thinking skills.

This method has users now all over the world: see the list of users.

 

Critical Thinking in a Curriculum

Program managers/ lecturers/ deans that are responsible for the development of critical thinking skills of their students/pupils need a tool by which they can infuse their whole curriculum with the necessary exercises by which their students/pupils can develop these skills.

The aim of the developers of the method CTwR and of this site is to provide them with these tools.

 

Fundamentals of CTwR

♦ The first and vital starting point of CTwR is that you do not learn critical thinking by reading a book about it, but by practicing it.

♦ The second starting point (based on continually growing evidence) is that the visualization of arguments with the help of argument maps fosters the development of critical thinking skills.

♦ The third starting point is that students/pupils need to practice a lot; a single course in Critical Thinking won’t do enough ( BTW: expecting that critical thinking skills are being developed by infusing them in other subjects only and not addressing them separately too will not work: see the meta-analysis of Abrami e.a. on the Research pages.

 

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