Staff
Supporting Students to Develop Criticality
A guide to Study Development resources for teaching staff.
Criticality is here divided into 4 skills areas: Active Reading, Critical Reading, Critical Writing, and Forming Arguments.
These skills may be employed sequentially, in the process of learning about a topic or producing an assignment. They may also map onto a progression in the development of criticality, with greater emphasis on the foundational skills of Active Reading at Level 4, and more consistent expectation that students will move towards Forming Arguments at Level 6.
Each section of this page highlights a range of skills in each area. We outline the resources and workshops that Study Development offers, as well as providing some examples of the activities we use in our sessions. Please fill in our Study Development Workshop Request Form if you would like us to work with your students. We also offer 30- or 45-minute individual tutorials: under ‘Feedback’, we include links and suggested wording you can use to signpost students to us.
At university, students learn to think critically and reach expert judgments in ways that are specific to their disciplines or professional fields. Study Development aims to help develop these disciplinary modes of criticality. However, articulating the transferable nature of critical skills is also beneficial to encourage lateral thinking and support employability.
Jump to a section of the page to find out more:
1) Active reading: observing criticality in your discipline
Reading skills are often overlooked, but our students don’t arrive at university with the same skills and habits, so we need to demystify and encourage academic reading. Academic reading requires a wide range of skills, and students need to learn when to deploy each of these. Building familiarity with the different kinds of text characteristic of your discipline is also essential. For instance, do your students know what a journal article is? How is it structured to make an argument/present a case?
Skills
Skills include:
- Summarising.
- Selecting for relevance.
- Identifying key words and concepts.
- Understanding the structure of an argument (reasons, evidence, conclusions).
Resources
View resources on the Skills guides page.
Resources include:
- Active Reading Chart.
- Guide to Making Notes.
- Finding and Including Evidence.
- Critical Paragraphing Examples.
- Visual Glossary Template.
- Written Glossary Template.
We encourage students to explore how they read best. For example, does it help to use coloured overlays, cover text or use a ruler?
See the Technology and reading page for suggestions of how to work with assistive technology like Read&Write. We ask students to think about how they focus (e.g. does listening to music help or hinder?), considering especially when to use print and digital formats. Further information on how to focus and manage your time can be found on the Technology, planning and organisation page. If needed, students can register for the Library’s Accessibility Service. Many students read on their phones, but this has disadvantages.
Workshops
Active Reading workshop.
We find this works best at Level 3 or 4. We will use a text that your students have been assigned to read for their studies on this module or programme, and expect them to have read it in advance. We will also bring some short supplementary texts appropriate to your discipline, or you can provide these.
Activities
- Active Reading worksheet: note down 3 questions, then find the answers. Write a summary of your findings and any questions you have.
- Skim reading techniques: first sentences of each paragraph or first paragraphs of each chapter.
- Scanning and speed-reading (suitable for some students).
- Context for clues: cover, contents, year and blurb.
- Comprehension and key words: create a glossary.
- Summarising in the margins.
- Reading critical paragraphs: how is evidence introduced, used, and commented on?
- Text mapping and text scrolling.
- Argument mapping.
- Reading book reviews or responses to understand a debate.
- Articulating a response to the argument in debate or free-writing.
- Students identify a section they don’t understand, and swap to explain to each other.
These kinds of activities can be introduced throughout a module, with key texts, perhaps as a 10 to 15 minute activity within a seminar or lecture.
Feel free to use these comments to signpost students to Study Development for further support.
Although you are engaging with key texts, you do not give a full account of their arguments/do not seem aware of all the main points. If you’d like support with effective academic reading, you can book a Study Development tutorial.
This work shows an over-reliance on (lengthy or irrelevant) quotations. Try to summarise instead: this demonstrates your understanding more effectively. The Finding and Including Evidence factsheet on our Skills guides page has some tips on how to do this.
Talk to us
What reading skills are required (and texts used) in your discipline? How might you adapt these resources and activities to help your students develop the skills they need? We’d be happy to work with you on discipline-specific versions, or we’d love to see how you are adapting these guides – please get in touch with us at studydevelopment@yorksj.ac.uk.
2) Critical reading: practising critical thinking skills
Students often worry ‘How can I critique the reading? I learned everything I know about this topic from the reading!’ As they build up their expertise in the subject area, we can boost their confidence by introducing certain habits of mind, and modelling a questioning approach to reading.
Skills
Skills include:
- Assessing reasoning.
- Identifying biases and assumptions.
- Evaluating evidence and methods.
- Considering the purposes and implications of an idea.
Resources
View resources on the Skills guides page.
Resources include:
- Finding and Including Evidence.
- Critical Thinking Questions.
- Critical Analysis Checklist.
- Critical Thinking Exercise.
- Descriptive vs Critical Writing.
You’ll also be developing these skills with your students in seminars and lectures, and by asking them to respond to other media, such as videos. However, we believe it’s worth recognising the authority of the academic written text, which means that a) students may feel reluctant to critique it and b) it provides the model upon which they will develop their own arguments. For these reasons, it’s often important to build student confidence and practice in critical reading specifically.
Workshops
Critical Thinking workshop; Critical Reading workshop; Literature Reviews workshop.
These are suitable at Levels 5, 6, and 7, but we will try to make the sessions as discipline-specific as possible. We will use a text that your students have been assigned to read for their studies on this module or programme, and expect them to have read it in advance. We will also bring some short supplementary texts appropriate to your discipline.
Activities
- Generating questions about an image or headline.
- Identifying assumptions.
- Flawed reasoning and logical fallacies (practise spotting these).
- Tools and checklists (may be discipline-specific tools).
- Three Domains of Critical Reading (Validity, Synthesis, Relevance).
- What’s missing?
- Whose perspective?
- Collaborative reading exercises: Academic Reading Circles.
Talking explicitly about critical reading and questioning will help students recognise how they already do this. As earlier educational contexts may have placed value primarily on knowledge, we stress the value of asking questions as a critical skill and a demonstration of expertise.
Feel free to use these comments to signpost students to Study Development for further support.
You are effectively selecting relevant evidence and quotations, but you now need to add your own comments. Can you quote a key word or phrase, and embed it in your own sentence? You can book a Study Development tutorial to work on this aspect of your writing.
Try to avoid becoming too descriptive when you discuss what you have read. You can use the Critical Analysis Checklist on our Skills guides page to help you think beyond the surface of what you are reading.
Talk to us
What kind of critical questions are asked in your discipline? If you use specific evaluation tools (for example, to assess a research study), please send them to us at studydevelopment@yorksj.ac.uk. We are building our knowledge of the range of approaches used across York St John, so that we can support students more effectively.
3) Critical writing: applying critical insights to disciplinary problems
Continued active reading provides models for what critical writing looks like in your discipline. At a sentence or paragraph level, we use structures and prompts to scaffold the development of critical writing. It also helps to have an imagined reader in mind, with an understanding of their level of expertise. Students who are in the process of developing these skills will start to add critical comments in their writing, but may not yet have developed a coherent critical viewpoint.
Skills
Skills include:
- Considering the purposes and implications of an idea.
- Connecting theory and practice (or ideas and real-life examples).
- Comparing and synthesising texts.
- Synthesising, generalising, and transferring knowledge to new contexts.
Resources
View resources on the Skills guides page.
Resources include:
- Critical Signposting.
- Writing Skills: Paragraphs.
- Manchester Academic Phrasebank.
- Descriptive Writing vs Critical Writing.
Students from different educational and cultural backgrounds may have different approaches to ‘critique’ and to challenging authorities, and may express critical comments in different ways. This is worth remembering when planning teaching activities. Some students find ‘debate’-style approaches useful, but it’s worth including a range of critical tasks.
Workshops
Critical Writing and Literature Reviews workshops
These workshops are most effective when students have a specific assignment to work on. We will work with you to create a session tailored to different assessment types, such as reports or annotated bibliographies.
Activities
- PEE paragraphs.
- Speed-write a paragraph and peer review.
- Sentence starters and critical signposting (signalling agreement and disagreement).
- Applying theory to examples.
- Answering in the persona of different theorists.
- Applying ideas to practical situations.
- Analogies.
- Give advice based on evidence.
- Students read different texts or research different topics and share findings to solve a problem.
- ‘Says/does’ test for each paragraph.
We encourage students to think of writing as a game of 2 halves: writing for yourself, and then writing for your reader. Sometimes students need a prompt to elaborate: so what? Others need to slow down and spell out their thought processes: why have you juxtaposed these 2 ideas? What does this evidence suggest?
Feel free to use these comments to signpost students to Study Development for further support.
Some sections of this work are overly descriptive (telling us what happened/what a scholar says, e.g....). Whenever you present some evidence, can you add your own comments on how this links to the question, or how it relates to theory or another scholar’s work? You can book a Study Development tutorial to work on integrating critical comments into your writing.
You can use the Descriptive vs Critical Writing table on our Skills guides page to identify where your writing is too descriptive, and understand how to make it more critical.
Talk to us
What do your students struggle with in developing their critical writing? Get in touch with us at studydevelopment@yorksj.ac.uk to let us know.
4) Forming arguments: developing and presenting critical viewpoints
Presenting a rigorous and reasoned argument, judgement, or decision requires a number of high-level critical skills. For this reason, we work with students on process and planning, and also on revising and editing. Evaluating your own position is also a behaviour, which requires an openness to reflection and ‘thinking about thinking’, or metacognition.
Skills
Skills include:
- Understanding how details and evidence fit into a larger framework or theory.
- Forming coherent arguments, well-reasoned judgements, and justified decisions.
- Evaluating and reflecting on our own reasoning and pre-conceptions (including by seeking and evaluating alternative perspectives).
- Considering competing theories and developing your own.
Resources
View resources on the Skills guides page.
Resources include:
- Critical Signposting.
- Guide to Essay Writing.
- Assignment Outline Builder.
- Forthcoming resources on Planning
The ability to develop, test, and refine an argument relies not just on skills and knowledge but also disposition: a willingness to identify weaknesses and change ideas in the light of new evidence and challenges (Thomas and Lok, 2015). It therefore requires a considerable amount of confidence on the part of the student, and an atmosphere that recognises mistakes as part of the learning process.
Workshops
Essay Survival Kit; workshops on specific assignments.
We are developing workshops on planning and structuring. Get in touch with us to discuss what would work best in your programme.
Activities
- What’s the best answer to the prompt?
- Mind-mapping sub-questions.
- Quick fire or group essay planning
- Devil’s advocate.
- Debates.
- Problem-based learning.
- Identify the ‘golden thread’ or common pattern.
- Identifying and avoiding confirmation bias.
- Reverse outlining.
- Drip-feeding evidence and changing decisions.
- Put the argument in order.
- Peer review and self-assessment.
Critical viewpoints look very different depending on the discipline and genre or format. Whether your students are justifying professional decisions, designing a programme of work, or intervening in an academic debate, they will need to be able to demonstrate how their reasoning is underpinned by specific values and theories, that it comes from a place of expertise, and that they have anticipated problems and counter-arguments.
In a Study Development tutorial, a higher-level student occupies the position of subject expert. This role can give them a confidence boost and encourage them to explain their reasoning step-by-step. Feel free to use these comments to signpost students to Study Development for further support.
Your argument is sometimes difficult to follow. It may not be in the most logical order, or there may be logical leaps. You can book a Study Development tutorial to work on this aspect of your writing.
This piece of work does not have a clear message throughout. Did you plan it in detail before you began writing? You can book a Study Development tutorial to work on your planning skills.
Talk to us
How do you model disciplinary modes of argumentation to your students? Get in touch with us at studydevelopment@yorksj.ac.uk to let us know.
Bibliography
Black, B., Chislett, J., Thomson, A., Thwaites, G. and Thwaites, J. (2008) ‘Critical Thinking – a definition and taxonomy for Cambridge Assessment’, Research Matters, 6 (2008), 30-35.
Brookfield, S. (2015) ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Teaching Critical Thinking in the Critical Theory Tradition’, in Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 529-543
Thomas, K. and Lok, B. (2015) ‘Teaching Critical Thinking: An Operational Framework’, in Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 93-105
