Critical Thinking Exercises
The following exercises were taken from Gerald Nosich’s book, Learning to
Think Things Through. Learning to think critically requires one to first develop the skills
of asking good questions, reasoning your way through them, and believing in your
conclusions. Secondly, using the skills learned.
According to Nosich, spending ten intense, focused minutes per day on practicing
applying the critical-thinking concepts to your life and learning will be more effective
than spending the same number of minutes all crowded into a single day.
1. Engage with questions. Spend some time noticing questions: those you ask, those
asked by others, questions in-print or on TV. Get a feel for where questions are
asked and the kinds of questions they ask. Notice also where questions should
have been asked but were not; questions that could have made a difference. Write
information in a journal.
2. Engage with reasoning. In your journal, write down examples of good reasoning,
bad reasoning and non-reasoning that you come across. Listen to self, other
people, in ads or on tv. The goal is to start using the concept of reasoning in the
way you naturally observe what’s around you.
3. Engage with believing the results. Spend time noticing and recording examples
where people (including you) don’t believe the results of their reasoning. This
will be most apparent when an individual’s actions are at odds with what he/she
says they believe.
4. Spend a day on an element. Keep a log. Pick one element and spend your day
looking for examples. After a few days, choose another element. Continue until
all elements have been practiced.
5. Utilize the elements. Take some point of view you deeply disagree with:
communism, capitalism, atheism, religion, liberalism, conservatism, etc. Analyze
it. Go around the circle of elements. Be sure to analyze it in a fair-minded way,
whereby, a person holding that position should be able to say, “Yes, you have
captured it well.”