This is a brief set of criteria for critical thinking -- a skill often demanded of students, but rarely defined as clearly as it is here. Internal links direct you to adaptations of the rubric by teachers of physics, history, and agriculture.

Each year the science website Edge.org asks leaders in various fields to address a particular question. The question for 2003 asks the writer to assume the persona of an applicant to be scientific adviser to the President, asked as an “audition” to write a memo on the following question: "What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?"

John Bean's Engaging Ideas has a tremendous wealth of materials that integrate exploratory and formal writing activities. This particular activity allows students to prepare for an exam through informal writing throughout the semester.

One of the main points in Bean's excellent book Engaging Ideas is that we need to model active learning behaviors for our students through emphasizing specific problems and questions that they can solve. Here is a means to model the skills needed to produce a strong research paper in any discipline -- skills which trained academics often take for granted.

This collection of brief writing-to-learn activities emerged from a 1984 workshop series conducted by Richard E. Young and Joann Sipple at Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh. It is available online at the WAC Clearinghouse (see the URL above) in HTML and PDF format. Richard Young encourages readers of the collection to contribute their own "small genre" activities to the document.

This technique teaches critical thinking by asking students to recursively ask questions about texts, lectures, or discussion, hypothesize possible answers to these questions, and then ask new questions based on what they have already written.

This page briefly summarizes a number of quick (3-15 minutes' writing time) techniques for using informal expository writing to help students develop critical mastery of the material in any discipline. It includes descriptions and examples of prompts for freewriting, one-minute papers, scenarios, logbooks, and microthemes, as well as general advice on writing-to-learn strategies. Several of the techniques are adapted from John Bean's excellent Engaging Ideas.

Dr. Makedon, who teaches Computer Science, requires her students to turn in an abstract of their argument with each of their formal papers; by doing so, the students create a tool with which to examine the structure and logic of their own work.