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Posted: Thursday, May 14, 2009Faculty Author: Gerald Nosich
The third time will likely be a charm—on an international scale—for the newest edition of Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking across the Curriculum, by Gerald Nosich, professor of philosophy and humanities. That’s because publisher Prentice Hall’s decision to offer a third edition is based on demand from universities around the globe. The book has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish.
Nosich is regarded as an expert in the study of critical thinking and has studied the discipline since the late 1970s. He regularly presents workshops on critical thinking across campus andaround the world.
Nosich hopes all students, through critical thinking, can better appreciate the disciplines they are studying and see their connections to everyday life.
“My intent is to help people think through things instead of using memorization or re-forming existing information,” he said. “It’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. For example, there are lots of facts one needs to learn when taking a course in biology, but the central question of the course to keep in mind is ‘How does life work?’”
The third edition of Learning to Think Things Throughincludes a new section on critical writing. Before writers begin to write, Nosich said, they should think more deeply about where they came up with an idea for a topic.
He also incorporates the SEE-I model for the first time in this edition. Nosich thinks SEE-I—which stands for “state, elaborate, exemplify, illustrate”—is a strong way to truly understand a topic.
A fourth edition of the book is already in the works, Nosich said. He plans to gear it more toward teachers by including a section on how to assess critical thinking. As each edition grows, however, he said it is becoming more difficult to decide which parts to cut.
Nosich wrote Reasons and Arguments in 1982 and published the first edition of Learning to Think Things Through in 2000. He said he has also considered writing a book about intellectual traits—or what he calls “knowing your biases and knowing what you don’t know.”
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