Critical thinking and science education

It is widely held that developing critical thinking is one of the goals of science education. Although there is much valuable work in the area, the field lacks a coherent and defensible conception of critical thinking. As a result, many efforts to foster critical thinking in science rest on misconceptions about the nature of critical thinking. This paper examines some of the misconceptions, in particular the characterization of critical thinking in terms of processes or skills and the separation of critical thinking and knowledge. It offers a more philosophically sound and justifiable conception of critical thinking, and demonstrates how this conception could be used to ground science education practice. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.