4.5 Chapter Activities

Chapter Takeaways

  • Your ability to think critically and creatively is a key to your success in university and in life. You should develop and practice these skills.
  • Bloom’s taxonomy provides a framework to describe the many kinds of thinking we need to do. Up to this point, you probably have practiced most of the lower-level thinking skills but have not had much experience with the higher-level skills (critical thinking and creative thinking).
  • Critical thinking involves evaluating the strength of ideas or concepts by asking questions about them. Critical thinking will also allow you to identify and weed out logical fallacies that weaken the value of an idea.
  • Creative thinking is the process of generating new ideas, concepts, or solutions. This often involves adapting existing ideas or combining them in new ways to create a new solution.
  • Problem solving is effectively achieved by applying both critical thinking and creative thinking to generate viable solutions and decisions.

Chapter Review

  1. List the six levels of thinking described in Bloom’s taxonomy.

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  2. Which thinking skill is most important for short answer quizzes? Why?

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  3. List five verbs that describe the application level of thought.

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  4. What thinking skills are you using if you are blogging? How do you use each one?

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  5. What is critical thinking?

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  6. Why is it important to pose some questions about the source of the material you read? What kinds of questions should you ask?

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  7. What is a logical fallacy? Give an example of two types.

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  8. List six words that signal a broad generalization and a recommended alternative that would resolve that problem of each.

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  9. What are some ways in which you can feed your curiosity?

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  10. Why is brainstorming more effective at generating new ideas than individual work?

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

  11. List the four steps of problem solving.

    1. ___________________________________________________
    2. ___________________________________________________
    3. ___________________________________________________
    4. ___________________________________________________
  12. How do you use critical thinking and creative thinking in solving problems?

    __________________________________________________________________

    __________________________________________________________________

Make an Action List

Two things I will do to practice Action By when I expect to take the action The expected results of that action
My critical thinking 1.
2.
My creative thinking 1.
2.
My problem solving 1.
2.

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

University Success Copyright © 2016 by University of Saskatchewan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.