Critical Thinking Ability and Teacher Effectiveness

Abstract

Research on teacher thinking in the last fifteen years supports the hypothesis that being an effective critical thinker (as defined by Ennis) would make a major contribution to being an effective teacher. Ennis’ conception of critical thinking incorporates various dispositions and abilities, while his Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X provides a measure of four crucial abilites. The teacher thinking research suggests that each of these four abilities is central to effective teaching. The four abilities are: (1) inductive thinking; (2) judging credibility of observation reports; (3) deductive thinking; and (4) assumption identification. Research findings about teacher thinking fall into three main categories: (a) implicit theories; (b) planning and reflection; and (c) dilemmas and uncertainty. The first half of the paper shows how a teacher's performance and capacity to deal effectively with (a)‐(c) depend significantly on using the abilities (1)‐(4). If this is so then highly effective teachers should score significantly better on Ennis’ Cornell Critical Thinking Test (Level X) than do teachers as a whole. Hence scores on this test for a large sample of vocational teachers were compared with the scores of vocational teachers whose teaching performance has been judged as excellent by their teacher educators. The second half of the paper reports and discusses the results of testing the hypothesis and the implications for teacher education.