Critical Thinking Skills from the Man of the House

As requested by me so I can implement them in homeschool.

Ten reasoning abilities and habits of mind necessary for critical thinking:

1. Consciously raising the questions: what, how do we know?, why do we accept or believe?, what is the evidence for?
2. Being clearly or explicitly aware of gaps in available information.
3. Discriminating between observation and inference, between established fact and subsequent conjecture.
4. Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas no the ideas themselves.
5. Probing for assumptions (particularly the implicit, unarticulated) assumptions behind a line of reasoning.
6. Drawing inferences from data, observations, or other evidence and recognizing when firm inferences cannot be drawn.
7. Performing hypothetico-deductive reasoning; that is given a particular situation, applying relevant knowledge of principles and constraints and visualizing, in the abstract, the plausible outcomes that might result from various changes one can imagine to be imposed on the system.
8. Discriminating between inductive and deductive reasoning; that is, being aware when an argument is being made from the particular to the general or from the general to the particular.
9. Testing one’s own line of reasoning and conclusions for internal consistency and thus developing intellectual self-reliance.
10. Developing self-consciousness concerning one’s own thinking and reasoning processes