Problem-Solving Skills
in Education and Life
Thinking Skills: Creative and Critical
An important goal of education is helping students learn how to think more productively by combining creative thinking (to generate ideas) and critical thinking (to evaluate ideas). Both modes of thinking are essential for a well-rounded productive thinker, according to scholars in both fields:
Richard Paul (a prominent advocate of CRITICAL THINKING) says, "Alternative solutions are often not given, they must be generated or thought-up. Critical thinkers must be creative thinkers as well, generating possible solutions in order to find the best one. Very often a problem persists, not because we can't tell which available solution is best, but because the best solution has not yet been made available — no one has thought of it yet." {source}
Patrick Hillis & Gerard Puccio (who focus on CREATIVE THINKING) describe the combining of divergent generation and convergent evaluation in a strategy of Creative Problem Solving that "contains many tools which can be used interchangeably within any of the stages. These tools are selected according to the needs of the task and are either divergent (i.e., used to generate options) or convergent (i.e., used to evaluate options)." {source}
Craig Rusbult describes how Productive Thinking is a result of combining knowledge with creative/critical thinking.
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