Ethan – Bachelor of Engineering (Honours)/Master of Biomedical Engineering

So a definition of critical thinking is being able to analyse the evidence you have at hand, and then from that analysis of the evidence, be able to draw out upon a judgment or a choice. For Engineering, critical thinking is what I just said, right? Being able to analyse evidence and draw out a solution or a justification from it. But I think the biggest difference or what sets it out from other faculties such as business or for example, math, is that it’s much more driven by logic. So more often than not, yes, there might be a lot of evidence, but they will always often point towards a single or a similar solution. So there might not always be more than one solution, but there can be a lot different reasons why that solution is correct. So a day to day experience with critical thinking for me as an Engineering student is, for example, I would do a project or something and I find that I do all the steps but one thing is wrong. Right. So in order to understand and see what’s wrong, I have to critically think about it and definitely I have to review all my sources, gather evidence, analyse it, see which evidence is or what step might have gone wrong. And once I’ve identified it, I must test to see what’s wrong, why it’s wrong, and then from that, draw a solution from it. So there’s a very logical, very sequential sequence to it. So especially at a university level, critical thinking is so important because the type of content and material that is delivered to you during class is typically not the most digestible in its base form. And definitely you’re going to critically think and see which parts is the most important and then be able to draw out the most important bits from it to properly further your understanding, right? And being able to analyse why you’re learning it and how it’s important to your learning definitely also brings about a lot of motivation in actually learning about your content. So how critical thinking translates to careers or opportunities beyond university is definitely very apparent. So being able to understand your workplace or maybe the amount of work that is required for you to do and being able to analyse the most important bits allows you to properly prioritise the task and basically be able to do your task very well. So critical thinking is a very multifaceted process and it isn’t something that’s typically learnt overnight. So the best way to improve the critical thinking is following the five P’s. Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. And being able to properly put your critical thinking skills in practice and have the opportunity to use them really helps you improve. 

Daphne – Bachelor of Psychology (Honours)

So in Psychology, critical thinking requires a lot of evaluating different research papers. So when researchers conduct their research and they bring out empirical evidence it’s all about looking at that evidence and saying, “Is this reliable? Are the methods that are used valid?” So that requires a lot of what Psychology likes to call healthy skepticism. So having a healthy amount of skepticism is looking at things through a very objective lens and saying, “This is like a great study,” “but are there ways to improve it?” “Are there any alternative explanation for these results” “that could better explain the findings of this study?” In my degree, Psychology, critical thinking just means that whenever I look at literature, so for an assignment where II need to review different parts of literature looking to see if there are any gaps in the literature. So a gap in the literature is just something that maybe the researchers hadn’t thought about and could be an avenue for further research. In Psychology and especially when you’re writing for different assignments, that’s really important because that’s the foundation of where new ideas are generated. So in terms of my degree, that’s kind of where I use critical thinking the most. In high school, I feel like I didn’t engage in a lot of critical thinking if I’m going to be honest, because even though I had to write like essays and come up with my arguments and things like that, the calibre feels a lot smaller, and the stakes feel a lot smaller in high school then at university, because at university you might be dealing with like real life papers or you know, you might be working with actual data sets from researchers. So the stakes do feel a lot higher and I do feel like I have to sort of up my critical thinking skills. And that just means, you know, asking a lot more questions, maybe going to, you know, people who like my academics or my tutors for extra help. Critical thinking is significant to university level study because when you eventually go into the workforce, you’re going to be doing with maybe a lot of different people and a lot of different problems that might be completely novel to you in terms of high school or university. So when you approach these new and challenging problems, that’s when critical thinking works best because it allows you to take these ideas you’ve learnt during your study and actually apply them to real life scenarios where you can actually, you know, make a difference in the world or, you know, help a lot of people so that’s why I think it’s really important to develop those critical thinking skills in university. So you’re prepared to approach any new challenges like that later in life. One tip I have for incoming students to develop their own critical thinking skills is not just to apply it in a study and university context, try to apply it through your daily life as well. So, for example, even like going on social media or reading news articles like that. Looking at things with a more objective lens and trying not to take everything at face value. I know in social media nowadays there’s a lot of misinformation and things like that.

Audrey – Bachelor of Science (Pathology)

So my understanding of critical thinking as a Science student, is mainly using different processes to formulate a different experiment or something you want to learn about. So, it’s kind of like being creative, analytical, being wise, using common sense as well, especially when you’re in the lab and just overall, using these three to create a hypothesis about something, or just creating an experiment about something as a whole and just going through the different kind of processes of finding out the solution or the answer to that thing that you want to learn about. It’s very, very important to use critical thinking especially when you’re trying to you find something for a hypothesis. So, if you’re trying to explore what something is or how something changes over time because of something, you should really use critical thinking to think about the different kind of aspects of that, or the different factors like, “Okay, why is this turning this way?” “What’s happening to it?” When I was in high school, there wasn’t really a big emphasis on using critical thinking. It was mainly just get the assignment done and try to, try to ask as many questions, but you don’t really know what questions to ask. And I feel like that’s definitely changed in uni when you’re doing like a scientific report about something, or when you’re doing an experiment trying to prove something, you have to ask all these questions because these are all major factors in whether your experiment turns out successful or if it fails, or if you find something that you weren’t supposed to find or you find something that you weren’t even looking for, and it doesn’t answer what your question was at all. So, I feel like critical thinking, you use it a lot especially in uni when you’re doing an experiment or when you’re trying to find something out. So, like when you’re doing Anatomy or something, you’ll try to figure out why the cells are changing this way and what is happening to the cells. For that reason, you have to ask all these different questions. So, like, “What’s happening to the cell?” “Why is it changing in this way?” “What kind of processes do you think relating to this?” And so, you use all these questions. You have to ask all these questions to yourself and you have to figure out what the answer is. And if the answer is like inflammation or something, you’re like, “Okay, sweet. I found the answer.” But then you have to find out why the inflammation is happening as well. It kind of just helps you dig a bit deeper than, I guess, you would have in high school because in high school the answer probably would have just ended at inflammation. You have to kind of find the extra knowledge behind why this is happening especially if you’re going to go and do something like this in the future, because then you have to ask the deeper questions as well, because you can’t just give like a half answer to someone, especially if you want to go into like, like the medical careers. So you have to tell someone, “You have, like, acute inflammation in something”. But then they’re going to be like “Why do I have that?” And so you have to research a bit more, find out why they have that acute inflammation. So, I feel like critical thinking is really important to use at a university level because you’re trying to figure out the deeper meaning behind something. So, even if you’re not in Science, if you’re doing something like Philosophy, you probably use this a lot more because kind of like the Socratic method of things like that. It’s kind of like you’re thinking deeper into everything around you. And it’s kind of like that for Science as well. You’re thinking deeper into the thing that you’ve just found there. So like the example I used before. I used acute inflammation. So, it’s kind of like you’re figuring out why that acute inflammation is there, why it looks like that as well at a cellular level, at a macroscopic level. It’s kind of just all these different things and you have to use them especially in uni, because you have to find the deeper meaning of everything because you’re going to use this in the future as well. So one tip I have for first years who are coming to learn or to develop their critical thinking skills, I think one tip to use is to just be that annoying kid. Just keep asking why. Why, why, why, why, why, why is this happening? Why is that happening? And then just once you find the answer to those, ask why that’s happening again. So, you found the reason why this is happening, but why is that causing that? So, just keep asking those questions and no matter how much the term annoys you, just keep doing it. And you’ll find the answer to everything that you need for that kind of experiment or for that question.

Eamonn – Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) (Software)

As an Engineering student, I think critical thinking comes into my degree a lot because it’s all about the idea of engineers are the ones that go and solve problems, right? We’re the ones creating solutions to all of these things. So it’s the constant idea of problem solving. Critical thinking is really, really important to my degree of Engineering, because engineering is all about problem solving. It’s all about being able to go and build solutions. How it’s being applied might differ from discipline to discipline. For me, it’s always been about programming, about knowing what sort of techniques, what sort of patterns I should be doing in some particular context. For high school students, I think it’s important to go and understand that critical thinking isn’t just all about the problem solving, about being academically focused, but it’s more about being able to go and look at some sort of topic and understand how it works and how you can go and actually make it better. So critical thinking, I think, really extends into sort of self-improvement of being able to go and look at yourself, maybe go and look at things and to go understand how you can improve all of them and to just have a fundamental understanding of how everything just kind of clicks together.

Julian – Bachelor of Psychology

So, as a Psychology student, my understanding of critical thinking is more broadly, it’s just thinking about you know, why something occurred or what is the sort of mechanism behind something, I suppose, so a lot of the time in psychology you’re learning about really particular methods, or you really have to clearly explain what someone is doing to, you know, properly make sure that everything’s being done correctly. So I find myself constantly looking through news articles or videos or things like that, and you always hear those articles of scientists found this or scientists found that. And I always find myself looking at it from a perspective of, “Okay but did they sample these people correctly?” “Or did they do this or that correctly?” And it’s it’s a really cool skill set to have where it’s almost subconscious, where I’m just looking through things and really asking lots of questions. “Okay, why did they find that?” “Is there another explanation for this rather than what they gave you?” And I think thinking critically with Psychology is particularly important because it’s such a tricky field of research. Whereas in something like Biology, you can objectively measure you know, someone’s blood pressure or something. But with Psychology, you’re trying to measure people’s thoughts in a scientific way, which is really tricky. So you’re constantly having to ask a lot of very interesting and very creative questions about, “Okay, how am I going to solve this problem?” So, it sort of comes into it in terms of evaluating what other people have said, but also creating your own ideas or you know, adding a new idea to something else that someone suggested. I think the way I developed critical thinking skills throughout my degree is that it just as up in the air as it sounds, it just sort of happens in the sense that I remember coming into university and they constantly talk about critical thinking and you almost come in with this feeling of like, “Okay, I need to learn how to think critically.” And you’ll sort of think of ways of how do I intentionally do this? And that can often be a point of stress or something that’s on people’s minds of how do I develop this skill? But I think the way that university courses teach you naturally eases you into that without you even realising it. You know, an assignment might have you evaluate pieces of research or they might have discussion questions and tutorials about why did this happen or why do you think this happened? And before you know it, you’re just at the end of your first year or your first term, and you’re already using these skills like just like a muscle that you’re training. They teach you in a very natural way, and you’ll just sort of notice yourself building up these skills without even realising it until you know, you’re reading through an article and suddenly you’re thinking about all these different things. So it just it really just happens as you’re going through your degree.