A piece on why "objective assessment" of a construct like "critical
thinking" is probably a chimera:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/05/griffin
Here's a taste:
"...if we were measuring gravity, we could probably rely upon gravity
existing and acting the same way regardless of whether it is being
investigated by a physicist in Indiana or a physicist in India.
Furthermore, it seems likely that gravity would carry on, dragging every
bouncy thing back to earth, even if the human race were wiped out by
aliens.
"Could the same thing be said of critical thinking? If there were no
humans to think, would critical thinking exist? (Please don’t bring up
chimpanzees — that’s different.) Critical thinking probably exists only
as we humans think it up, and it is therefore socially constructed,
highly dependent upon specific social, historical, and cultural
contexts, and doomed forever to evolve as the people who use it evolve.
Definitions of critical thinking have meaning to the persons who use
them communally in everyday discourse, thereby developing common
understandings of them based in real-life situations over time, but the
definitions are not portable from Indiana to India in the same way
gravity is."
Chris
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-2100 ex. 66164
[email protected]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
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