Comprehension and critical thinking are so closely related, it’s fair to say you can’t fully comprehend without some type of critical thinking. As teachers try to meet curriculum objectives, they are concerned with their students’ comprehension skills. By identifying individual skills needed for comprehension, teachers can provide practice in critical thinking in order to develop these skills.
Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions
When reading a selection, students must make inferences and draw conclusions in order to determine what the author doesn’t state directly. The student must think critically while using clues in the text to arrive at a conclusion. Applying personal experience to the information presented by the author, students can infer what is happening. For example, if a passage states that a child dressed in a swimsuit is standing outside frantically licking an ice cream cone, the reader connects his own experiences with hot weather to conclude that the ice cream cone is melting in the heat.
Determining Cause and Effect
Students must employ critical thinking when determining cause and effect in a reading selection. To understand that each action has a reaction or consequence of some type, the student must make logical connections between events. If a character in a story mentions that the carpet is wet next to his window the morning after a storm, the critical thinker deduces that the character left his window open. In more advanced stages of learning, when students are required to analyze persuasive writing, they need to think critically in order to determine the difference between logical arguments and fallacies. This will prepare them to uncover the truth about the causes and effects in controversial issues.
When analyzing characters in literature selections, students need to think critically as they connect to characters through common human experiences. Students will determine a character’s traits through his words, actions and interactions with other characters. As literary characters face conflict, critical thinkers evaluate their motives and conduct. Instead of immediately judging a character’s behavior, a critical thinker determines why the character behaved that way. Understanding a character through careful analysis helps students make informed judgments concerning human reasoning and behavior.
Determining the Author's Purpose
Because a fiction writer doesn’t directly state the theme of his writing, students need to think critically in order to interpret the theme in a work of literature. Students need to consider the effect time and place have on the characters and how it influences human events. After understanding the historical and social context of the story, students connect more to characters and are more apt to identify a theme. The more critically a student thinks by analyzing the story elements and comparing them to his own experiences, the more complexities he will uncover through multiple themes. For instance, instead of identifying the theme as “friendship,” a critical thinker will be able to identify themes such as “true friendship requires self-sacrifice” and “adversity reveals true friends.”