Students typically find critical analysis the trickiest of all skills to master, for good reason: it’s tricky. Really, really tricky.
Critical analysis requires you to apply critical thinking. It means pushing beyond the surface; going beyond description; further than memorising; and even further than demonstrating an understanding. It’s about pulling things apart and turning them around and examining them really, really closely.
In education speak, we might call this using higher order thinking, and one of the best ways to understand different levels of thinking is by looking at Bloom’s taxonomy.
Bloom’s taxonomy
Without going into a great big definition of Bloom’s (I recommend Wikipedia for that), I want to draw your attention to one of the three domains of Bloom’s taxonomy: the cognitive domain. In the cognitive domain, Bloom’s deals with ways of thinking. There are six categories in the cognitive domain: remember; understand; apply; analyze; evaluate; and create. The first three are lower order thinking categories, and the second three are higher order thinking categories. The idea is that you need to attain the lower order thinking skills to get to the higher order skills.
At a Masters level, we expect you to be working at the higher order thinking skills level.
How Bloom’s can help you with critical reflection
In this unit, you will decide on your own topic for some of your critical reflection posts. To write a good critical reflection, you need a good foundation. And the best foundation you can have is one or more questions that promote higher order thinking skills.
In the table below you’ll find a whole bunch of prompt questions for the different levels of thinking. To set yourself up for a good critical reflection, write yourself some questions, drawing on the prompts in the higher order thinking skills column.
Lower order thinking skills |
Higher order thinking skills |
1. Remember
|
4. Analyze
|
2. Understand
|
5. Evaluate
|
3. Apply
|
6. Create
|
From: Bloom’s Critical Thinking Cue Questions
You can see how these questions push you to go beyond description and understanding, and into the realms of analysis, evaluation, and creation. Push yourself by aiming to write critical reflections that demonstrate these skills and you’ll do a great job of your first assignment.