Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions

Learning Outcome: Demonstrate effective critical thinking skills and dispositions.

Critical thinking is, from many varied viewpoints, the measure of a liberal education. Critical thinking serves as the foundation for all intellectual activity, including problem solving, inquiry, and decision-making. Opportunities to acquire and develop the cognitive skills and affective dispositions necessary for critical thinking need to pervade the educational experience.

Competencies: By way of example, Loyola graduates should be able to:

• Comprehend, paraphrase, summarize, and contextualize the meaning of varying forms of communication, including, but not limited to: written work (fiction and nonfiction), speech, film, visual art, multimedia, and music.
• Analyze relationships among statements, questions, concepts, descriptions, or other forms of representation intended to express beliefs, judgments, experience, reasons, information, or opinions.
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of varying points of view.
• Generate new ideas, hypotheses, opinions, theories, questions, and proposals; and develop strategies for seeking and synthesizing information to support an argument, make a decision, or resolve a problem.
• Construct cases, adapted to appropriate audiences, contexts, fora, and media, in support of reasoned judgments, and to engage in a process of argument and counterargument in order to express and test those judgments.
• Monitor individual thinking or behavior in order to question, confirm, validate, or correct it.