Footnotes

1   The quotation from John Chaffee is from Conversations with Critical Thinkers , John Esterle and Dan Clurman (Eds.). Whitman Institute. San Francisco, CA., 1993. BACK

2   The findings of expert consensus cited or reported in this essay are published in Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. Peter A. Facione, principle investigator, The California Academic Press, Millbrae, CA, 1990. (ERIC ED 315 423). In 1993/94 the Center for the Study of Higher Education at The Pennsylvania State University undertook a study of 200 policy-makers, employers, and faculty members from two-year and four-year colleges to determine what this group took to be the core critical thinking skills and habits of mind. The Pennsylvania State University Study, under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Jones, was funded by the US Department of Education Office of Educational Research and Instruction. The Penn State study findings, published in 1994, confirmed the expert consensus described in this paper. BACK

3   To learn more about this integrative model of thinking and about cognitive heuristics, which will be described next, you may wish to consult the references listed at the end of this essay. The material presented in this section is derived from these books and related publications by many of these same authors and others working to scientifically explain how humans actually make decisions. BACK

4   Henry Montgomery, “From cognition to action: The search for dominance in decision making.” In Process and Structure in Human Decision-Making, Montgomery H, Svenson O (Eds). John Wiley & Sons: Chichester, UK, 1989. BACK

5   Findings regarding the effectiveness of critical thinking instruction, and correlations with GPA and reading ability are reported in “Technical Report #1, Experimental Validation and Content Validity” (ERIC ED 327 549), “Technical Report #2, Factors Predictive of CT Skills” (ERIC ED 327 550), and “Gender, Ethnicity, Major, CT Self-Esteem, and the California Critical Thinking Skills Test” (ERIC ED 326 584). All by Peter A. Facione and published by the California Academic Press, Millbrae, CA, 1990. These reports are available as PDF files downloadable from www.insightassessment.com/articles3.html or from the author via e-mail attachments. BACK