By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 18, 2008; B02

Jessica Mattson said she hears a lot about "critical thinking" from her English teachers at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda. To the 18-year-old senior, the term refers to the skill of "reading deeper into what is written."

It means more to Walter Johnson history teacher Nathan Schwartz. When Schwartz teaches about the rise of the samurai in Japan, he works with students not simply to memorize facts related to it but also to understand why it happened by employing the thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, application and reflection.

But at the University of Virginia, Daniel T. Willingham, a psychology professor, has a different view of critical thinking skills:

"There is no such thing."

Critical thinking.

The phrase has become a mantra among educators from pre-kindergarten through graduate school who call it a central learning goal, as well as among industry leaders who say they are worried that U.S. schools are not producing enough critical thinkers to meet the needs of the 21st-century economy.

Institutes, foundations, councils and centers are devoted to thinking about critical thinking. Conferences are held on it, papers are written and books are published. Standardized tests are given to assess it, and educational programs are sold with a proposed path to the promised critical-thinking land.

Yet there is no agreed-upon definition of what critical thinking is or how it can be developed.

"It's like [former Supreme Court justice] Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: You know it when you see it," said Robert J. Sternberg, dean of Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences and a leading researcher on thinking styles and higher mental functions.

"One of the problems with the term 'critical thinking' is that it is a catchall term for a million different things," Schwartz said.

It might, in fact, be easier to say what critical thinking is not. It is not simply being critical or asking a lot of questions, or being analytical or logical. There is more involved, as is suggested by the phrase's Greek roots: "kriticos," or discerning judgment, and "kriterion," or standards.

According to the educational nonprofit group Foundation for Critical Thinking, a practiced critical thinker will:

¿ Raise vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely.

¿ Gather and assess relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret effectively.

¿ Reach well-reasoned conclusions and solutions and test them against relevant criteria and standards.

¿ Think open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought.

¿ Communicate effectively with others to solve complex problems.

The question for educators is how to foster critical thinking.

Some experts say the skills involved can be taught to students at all levels. But opportunities must then be provided for students to practice those skills so they can become ingrained and transferred from situation to situation, subject to subject.

Other cognitive psychologists question how effectively critical-thinking skills can be transferred from one subject area to another. They say such skills are developed, in large part, in relation to the content area in which they are acquired.

"You can't do it without the content knowledge," said Robin Lanzi, assistant professor in the Department of Human Science at Georgetown University.

"You may have these fabulous critical-thinking skills, but you don't know when they are appropriate," Willingham said.

"If you think of thought as having two components, you have factual knowledge that you know and the processes that manipulate those facts," he added. "Everyone understands that half is no good when that half is knowledge. People don't seem to understand that it works the other way. Having processes alone doesn't work, either. You can't acquire these processes in the absence of facts."

Willingham said he questions the value of educational programs that offer a way to teach critical thinking -- sometimes through exercises and brainteasers -- that are not rooted in any particular subject.

"To understand the structure and the nature of poetry, you need to read a lot of poems," he said. "It's the same thing with mathematics and science."

Many elementary and secondary educators today say the federal No Child Left Behind education law, with its emphasis on standardized tests, has forced schools to focus exclusively on content.

Said Barbara Radner, director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University in Chicago: "The K-12 schools have focused on tests that actually do require critical thinking, but they haven't aligned the curriculum with it, and extracurricular activities that used to develop it -- chess and debate -- have been replaced in many schools by test-preparation programs."

What teachers and parents should do, experts say, is make sure students know the difference between memorizing material and understanding it, that students are open to different ways of thinking and that they learn as much as they can about as much as they can.

"The easiest way to encourage critical thinking is to force [students] to question everything," said Michael Tabachnick, professor of physics at Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pa., who teaches a course in it.

"Question me, question their parents, their pastor, everything," he said. "It doesn't mean you can't believe, but you must question. Is it true? Is it opinion? Is it justified by fact? . . . Students eventually learn to analyze. Some will do it better than others, but you can always get them to at least question."