{"id":1627,"date":"2026-10-20T10:45:54","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T09:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/?p=1627"},"modified":"2026-10-15T10:52:47","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T09:52:47","slug":"teaching-critical-thinking-beyond-strengths-and-limitations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/2026\/10\/20\/teaching-critical-thinking-beyond-strengths-and-limitations\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Critical Thinking: Beyond Strengths and Limitations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blog post by Yu Shuang Gan (Department of Psychology) following his Teaching Development Fund Seed project<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One challenge I have encountered in teaching and marking undergraduate psychology essays is helping students move beyond describing research and identifying the strengths and limitations of individual studies, as typically expected for a 2:1. While students can often evaluate individual studies, they often struggle to synthesise these evaluations into a coherent answer to the essay question. This led me to consider how we might teach critical thinking more explicitly, particularly how to connect evidence to develop a broader argument.<\/p>\n

With support from the Seed Teaching Development Fund, I developed a series of six workshops for first-year psychology students, centred on their essay question: \u201cTo what extent can contemporary psychology be argued to have a complete understanding of happiness?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Across the workshops, we explored a series of questions about happiness: what it means, how it can be measured, who is happier, where and when we experience happiness, and why we pursue it. I encouraged students to begin with their own experiences and ideas, before bringing these into discussion with research evidence. Through a combination of open discussions, small-group activities and guided questions, we considered not only what existing research tells us, but also how different perspectives might complement or challenge one another.<\/p>\n

I encouraged students to consider what their evaluations meant for our understanding of happiness. For example, self-report measures capture personal experiences but can be difficult to standardise, while brain imaging provides quantitative data that can be difficult to interpret in relation to subjective happiness. Beyond identifying these limitations, we asked: how do our methods shape what psychology can claim to know about happiness?<\/em> This was the step I wanted students to practise: moving beyond evaluating individual studies to synthesising evidence and considering its implications for the essay question as a whole.<\/p>\n

In the final workshop, we explored how to translate this synthesis into a thesis statement and a coherent line of argument. Rather than presenting separate evaluations, students could use evidence to develop an argument around a broader issue, such as the challenges of studying a subjective experience through methods that seek to measure and quantify it. The aim was to help students see essay writing not simply as presenting what they had read, but as using evidence to develop and communicate their own understanding of a question.<\/p>\n

The student feedback was encouraging, with many reporting that the workshops helped them feel more confident about their critical thinking and essay writing. Reflecting on the project, I believe there is value in making the process of critical thinking more explicit in our teaching. Students need opportunities not only to evaluate evidence, but also to consider how that evaluation changes their understanding and how different pieces of evidence can be brought together to answer a question.<\/p>\n

Overall, I highlight three takeaways for teaching practitioners:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Teach critical thinking through an assessed piece of work.<\/strong> Using a real assessment gives students a concrete focus for practising critical thinking and helps them see how these skills can be applied to answering a specific question.<\/li>\n
  2. Give students opportunities to practise critical thinking with you.<\/strong> Work through examples of critical thinking together. Discussions, small-group activities and guided questions can help students practise evaluating evidence and connecting ideas.<\/li>\n
  3. Keep asking, \u201cSo what?\u201d.<\/strong> Encourage students to go beyond identifying the strengths and limitations of research and consider what these mean for our understanding of the topic. This can help them move from evaluating individual studies to synthesising evidence and developing a coherent argument.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Blog post by Yu Shuang Gan (Department of Psychology) following his Teaching Development Fund Seed project   One challenge I have encountered in teaching and marking undergraduate psychology essays is helping students move beyond describing research and identifying the strengths...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1780,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[90,20,11,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation","category-learning-and-teaching","category-teaching","category-teaching-development"],"acf":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd4Piw-qf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1780"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/clt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}