Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Student Success - Softcover

Newman, Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635767954 ISBN 13: 9781635767957

Verlag: Radius Book Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Radius Book Group

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Louis E. Newman is the former Dean of Academic Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. During his six years at Stanford, he grew the advising program, promoted a holistic approach to academic advising, and advocated for liberal education.

He is also the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus, at Carleton College, where he taught for thirty-three years. During his tenure at Carleton, he also served as Associate Dean of the College and as Director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching. In this role he functioned as the informal mentor to the faculty at Carleton, which is consistently rated by US News & World Report as #1 for undergraduate teaching.

Throughout his career, hundreds of students and colleagues have attested to the profound impact he had on their learning and their lives—as a gifted teacher and as a trusted advisor and mentor.

Louis Newman lives with his wife, Rabbi Amy Eilberg, in Los Altos, California.

For more information, visit ThinkingCritically.us

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The Structure of the Book
 
This book is structured to guide you through the main skills and habits of mind that you’ll need to succeed in college. Part I will introduce you to the basic skills you need to think in the ways your professors expect you to, to make sense of new subjects, and to tackle your assignments productively.
Chapter 1 focuses on what psychologists call “metacognition,” that is, thinking about how we think. When you reflect on your learning process, you notice how your own learning happens, and you can think about how to become a more efficient, powerful learner.
Chapter 2 introduces the basic elements of critical thinking: exploring context, considering alternatives, weighing evidence, and identifying implications and new applications. These are the intellectual moves that college work routinely asks you to make, and having a good command of these skills will prepare you to understand everything more deeply and
thoroughly.
Chapter 3 introduces you to academic disciplines. It explains how to orient yourself to a new subject so you can focus on what matters—the questions that scholars in this field ask, the methods they employ, the kind of evidence they appeal to, and the issues they still argue about.
Chapter 4 provides examples of actual college assignments and decodes them, making sure that you really understand what the professor is asking you to do. As you’ll discover, the critical-thinking skills covered in chapter 2 are often embedded in the words of assignments, but not always in ways that are immediately obvious. You’ll also discover that even though the assignments you get in history will look quite different from those in biology, the same basic critical-thinking skills are utilized across disciplines.
After covering these basics, part II of the book applies these critical-thinking skills to the work of reading (chapter 5), writing (chapter 6), and quantitative reasoning (chapter 7). It might seem odd to review such basic skills, but in college you will need to hone and apply these skills in more demanding contexts—to read and analyze more challenging material, to use writing as a means of fostering your critical thinking and then learning to convey your conclusions effectively, and to reason about data, especially in relation to experimental results and statistical analyses.
Chapter 8, finally, explains how to conduct research. At some point in your college career, you will need not only to understand the knowledge that others have created but to create new knowledge yourself. Conducting your own research will require that you practice the skills you have learned throughout the book—choosing a question to investigate, gathering the evidence you need to answer it, considering alternative ways of understanding that evidence, and spelling out the implications for others interested in your topic. Engaging in your own research can be among the most rewarding experiences you have in college.
Interspersed between the chapters are “Advice for the Road Ahead” mini-essays that highlight the key habits of mind you should cultivate throughout college. They are based on my own experience working with students for forty years. Getting the most from your college adventure depends not only on sharpening your intellectual skills but also on approaching your journey with an attitude of openness and curiosity.
In the conclusion, I invite you to consider the ways in which learning to think like a college student is a lifelong pursuit and to reflect on all the reasons why it is worth the effort. Apart from preparing you for a career, college will also give you the tools you need throughout your life to think about complex issues and work to resolve them.
While the structure of the book moves intentionally from introducing basic skills to their application, it is not necessary to read the chapters sequentially. The outlines at the beginning of each chapter enable you to quickly locate the specific skills you want to focus on. Feel free to allow your individual needs and interests to guide you to the parts of the book that are most relevant. Also, because many of the key ideas come up multiple times and are developed differently in different sections of the book, I have indicated when a particular skill mentioned in one place is discussed in greater detail elsewhere. At the end of the book, you’ll find a list of additional resources for deeper dives into particular skills.
 
Here’s the bottom line: learning to think like a college student is all about learning how to learn even more effectively than you already do. Top college students observe their own thinking and discover how to make their learning more efficient, more strategic, and more incisive. This means identifying the skills you need to acquire, to improve, and eventually, to master.
So I encourage you to keep this book close at hand as you set off on your intellectual journey and to let it be your guide in unfamiliar and sometime challenging terrain. College will be daunting at times and exhilarating at others. The one thing it doesn’t need to be is mystifying or frustrating. I hope that this book can be your academic GPS, enabling you to navigate college with greater confidence.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Radius Book Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1635767954
• ISBN 13: 9781635767957
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande