I’m sure you’ve heard of critical thinking, but do you have a good understanding of what it is and how you can benefit from developing this intellectual skill? By definition, critical thinking is “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” (Michael Scriven & Richard Paul).

In other words, critical thinking is a rather complex process of gathering information, sorting it, analyzing it, and then drawing logical conclusions based on what you’ve learned during your research. We use critical thinking in our daily lives when we choose the best health care plan to sign up for, decluttering our closet, or deciding what work project to focus on next. We rely on this important skill anytime there’s an important decision to be made that involves a lot of different factors or large amounts of information. Continue reading →

We live in the information age. We get bombarded with more news, data, emails, texts, and various other forms of information and media than ever before. As a result, we have to get better at sorting and making sense of all this data. The process we use to do that is critical thinking. It’s no surprise then that this particular intellectual skill is becoming more important than ever in all aspects of our lives.

Without the ability to analyze and process all the information we’re exposed to at home, at work, through media, and even when it comes to leisure time, it’s easy to get lost in it. Heck, some days it becomes challenging to choose what to watch on Netflix or TV with hundreds and hundreds of options available to us. Continue reading →