From the Director

Step 2: Initiating the Campus Writing Center’s Critical Thinking Institute.

t has been long understood by Campus Writing Center staff that the high-stakes writing (as well as non-writing) initiatives with which students seem to struggle most – mastering study skills and information learning techniques, making successful transitions from remedial to credit-bearing coursework, performing well in gateway and cornerstone courses across curricula, demonstrating information literacy, constructing term papers, understanding and successfully applying the CPE Exam skill sets, and forging a language for self-reflection on the student learning continuum – share a certain non-instructional, foundational commonality: the ability to think critically, and to apply those critical thinking skills in appropriate contexts to differing tasks.

We know, for example, that an ability to understand and demonstrate inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, analysis, inference, and evaluation are the basic building blocks for “learning” – the acquisition and application of new and difficult information. We also know that these are the “invisible skills” – the non-curricular skills, assumed to be in place prior to students’ engaging the content of their coursework. And we know that just as there are intellectual standards the College and the workplace apply to measure students’ abilities to master and demonstrate benchmark tasks, so too is there a concomitant responsibility on the part of the institution to provide students with the preparatory toolkit of skills inherent in becoming a well cultivated critical thinker, upon which these intellectual standards get imposed.

• raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely;
• gathers and assesses relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it;
• effectively comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant
criteria and standards;
• thinks open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need
be, his/her assumptions, implications, and practical consequences; and
• communicates effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems.

In response to what the Campus Writing Center sees as a second area of emerging student need, we propose initiating the CWC “Critical Thinking Institute”. This Critical Thinking Institute would be designed to do two things:

• research and implement current critical thinking methodologies and assessment instruments, and

• collaborate with curricular learning academies - piloting its 07-08 activities with the Technology Academy - to implement a critical thinking workshop experience for Tech Academy students concomitant with their cornerstone course, so as to facilitate their ability to demonstrate, via e-Portfolios, an appropriate level of proficiency in the Academy’s umbrella competencies.