Mgt350 Week 1 Assignment - Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking

Brent Sierck

MGT/350

June 22, 2010

Jesse Rentfrow

CRITICAL THINKING

Critical thinking is an important part of everyone’s lives. Critical thinking is used every day and helps people make important and sometimes the smallest of decisions. Critical thinking does not just have to be used in a person’s personal life but also in a person’s work environment. A person can use critical thinking to make a big decision in their personal life, as in, buying a house or buying a car. A person will also use critical thinking at work, as in, making a decision on how to move the company forward or which software program to upgrade their system with. This paper will discuss what critical thinking is, the steps that make up the critical thinking process, critical thinking that helped make a work place decision, and the importance and benefits of critical thinking in the decision-making process.

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action (National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking). In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness (National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking).

A well cultivated critical thinker: raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely; gathers and assesses relevant information, using abstract ideas to

interpret it effectively comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards; thinks...