Fundamental Critical Thinking Competencies 

Essential critical thinking competence appropriate for university-level work includes ability to:

--identify issues of belief, empirical truth, and logic

--evaluate credibility of sources of information and opinion

--identify necessary or probable assumptions and presuppositions

--recognize the difference between normative and non-normative claims

--identify relevant and irrelevant claims in a given context

--recognize misleading uses of language

--determine when additional information is needed for a given purpose

--construct deductive and inductive arguments

--identify valid and invalid arguments, including fallacies of deduction and induction

--recognize logical conflict, compatibility, and equivalence

--critique and construct analogical arguments and explanations

--understand and evaluate causal arguments and explanations

--assess common types of statistical information, generalizations, and reasoning

Both in theory and in practice, these competencies partially overlap each other. Each item in the list can serve as a worthwhile focus of instruction and merits appropriately designed assessment. It is reasonable to expect that just as these items lend themselves to different modes of instruction that contribute in their particular ways to a student's general education, so also different modes of assessment will return various kinds of usable information. Rigid reliance on any single mode of instruction risks an adverse effect on ability to construe novel situations, and narrowly focused assessment strategies risk skewing the inductive inferences that constitute assessment proper.

This handout is an excerpt from California State-Chico’s Critical Thinking Assessment Project, where you can find more detailed description and information.