What are Critical and Computational Thinking?

Introduction

Critical thinking skills play an important role in STEM-based science education. Computational thinking is a newer concept that describes the skills needed to program computers. How do these two concepts apply to education? How do they overlap, and how do they differ? This article takes a look at both thinking types and how they compare.

Descriptions

Critical Thinking

John Dewey developed the term around 1910 to describe the set of habits and attitudes that a person would employ when applying critical thinking to solving a problem or achieving a goal that doesn’t have a clear path.  He also referred to it as ‘reflective thinkinge felt it needed to be taught in schools as part of the learning process.

The definition of critical thinking has been reworked many times since Dewey coined it. Here is his original definition along with two later interpretations:

John Dewey (1910):  “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends.”

Joanne Kurfiss (1988):  “an investigation whose purpose is to explore a situation, phenomenon, question, or problem to arrive at a hypothesis or conclusion about it that integrates all available information and that can therefore be convincingly justified. In critical thinking, all assumptions are open to question, divergent views are aggressively sought, and the inquiry is not biased in favor of a particular outcome.”

Robert Ennis(1996):  ‘reflective and reasonable thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do’.

Computational Thinking

Jeanette M. Wing  developed the term ‘Computational Thinking’.  She first used it in 2006 as the title of a journal article she wrote for Communications of the ACM . The article describes what she saw as the thought patterns and attitudes of a person utilizing skills to solve a problem using computer code. She felt that these skills have a much wider range of applications than just computer programming, and since the paper’s publication, research into how computational thinking applies to different fields of study has continued. In 2011, a computer scientist named Valerie Barr published an article discussing the benefits of bringing computational thinking skills to other disciplines in education.

How they apply to education

Critical Thinking

Basic science education involves talking about previous discoveries and redoing known experiments. Science education standards have changed to also focus on helping students deal with deeper skills like analyzing problems, recognizing patterns, and developing theories. These skills are all part of critical thinking

Computational Thinking

As computers became more common and we became more reliant on computerized devices, the need for students to understand how to use computer applications and program devices became more important. Standards for teaching these skills are still in development, but the need is obvious.

Features of Each

The idea of computational thinking came on the scene almost 100 years after critical thinking, a period of time when we moved from an industrial society into an information age. A lot of the difference in the definitions of these two concepts is the time during which each was written.

Using either of these thinking types  require that a person:

• Asks questions;
• Researches the topic to collect information
• Considesr different styles of evaluating the problem (e.g., deductive reasoning, brainstorming, abstract thinking) and creating a solution;
• Communicates their work effectively when required.

When skills are defined for either of these thinking styles they include some or all of the following:

Critical thinking

• Defining a problem or goal
• Identifying possible solutions
• Developing a hypothesis
• Logical reasoning (examining evidence and avoiding emotional decisions)
• Testing possible solutions

Computational Thinking

• Logical reasoning
• Algorithmic thinking (algorithm design)
• Abstraction (generalization)
• Pattern recognition and matching
• Decomposition
• Evaluation

 

These two thinking styles have a lot of overlap. Their differences exist mostly because Critical Thinking was developed well before computer science became a need in K-12 education. Computational Thinking was originally developed to specifically address how someone thinks when writing code, then it became so much more. These two terms may not be entirely interchangeable, but they have a lot in common.