 Hello everybody, welcome to CDU. Today we are going to talk about critical thinking, an essential skill at university. We will discuss what it is, what is important at university and future work, and what we should do in order to apply critical thinking in our learning. At any point, you would like to have a closer look at the exercise or content, please pause the video. Now let's get started by looking at these four statements and decide whether you think the information here is reliable or not. At this stage, probably you may need to pause the video and have a look at these four statements and then we will discuss what you think. Have you finished? Great. Now let's analyze together. What do you think about the first example? You can see that in the first example, the information is not reliable because there is no evidence. In the second example, it is a little bit better because we have the evidence here, 55 students at the university in Melbourne, but it's still not reliable because the sample is poor. In the third example, there is a poor assumption. Now let's look at the last example. Pay attention to the citation here. What do you think? This is not an academic source and also the evidence that they provided is not relevant. So what we have done is we question the information that we read from these four statements. So the first step in critical thinking is questioning. The suggestion is we should not trust only information we read and we should not gain the information from only one source. But in order to question, we have to rely on our knowledge about the topic, our experience, our cultural schema or cultural background and many other factors. Now let's talk about the definition of critical thinking. Critical thinking is a kind of thinking in which you question, analyze, evaluate and make a judgment about what you read. Here say alright. Now let's have a look at this image. You can see that critical thinking involves different steps. For example, questioning, analyzing, creating, evaluating, clarifying and identifying. Now I'm going to talk about identifying, analyzing and evaluating a little bit more through an example of a journal article. So for example, we read this particular paper for our assignment. So the first thing we have to do is we have to identify what the main argument is or what the author is trying to say in this particular paper. Also we have to look at the evidence of the paper and decide whether we think the evidence is current, reliable, relevant or valid etc. And also don't forget to evaluate. That is identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. So critical thinking is broad. Today we are going to focus on how to apply critical thinking in selecting, evaluating and integrating the resources for our assessment. First, in selecting the sources, how can we apply critical thinking? For example, we are given a research essay question and the requirement is we have to find at least 10 references. Our job is to search the databases and find the relevant and important sources. That is, what sources are relevant to my research questions, my focus or my task instructions. Also, it is very useful to apply these tests in order to identify whether the paper is relevant. For example, is the information current and recent? Is it reliable? Who are the authors? What is the purpose and part of it represented in the paper? We have to read the source and apply this critical thinking process. We try to aim at not just describing or summarizing what the paper is about, but also analyzing and synthesizing different sources. We also need to evaluate and reflect. For example, ask ourselves whether we agree or disagree with these ideas and whether these ideas agree or disagree with others. This means we have to read a lot of resources to see the connections among them. In other words, evaluating resources include identifying the strengths, weaknesses, similarities and differences across different papers that we read. Now let's move on to integrating the sources into our writing. There are a few citations here in the writing. However, it does look like a shopping list because there is no synthesis, no analysis and the connection across different sources here is not very clear. So it is not an example of applying critical thinking in integrating the sources into the writing. Now let's look at the revised version. What do you think? Is it better? Does it demonstrate a critical thinking very clearly? I think the answer is yes. Because you can see the multiple authors citation here, it demonstrates the synthesis of different sources. They also use the words like however, both, while, that demonstrate a student has compared and contrasted and made connection across different authors. It is a strong evidence of analysis and synthesis, therefore critical thinking in integrating the sources into their writing. Okay, so we have just talked about what critical thinking is and how to apply it in particularly selecting, evaluating and integrating the resources. Now we will talk about the importance of critical thinking at university and at work. If we have a look at the learning outcomes in our unit, you can see critical thinking is emphasized. Critical thinking is also a required component in our assessment task. So it would be good to have a look at your learning outcomes and your unit assessments to see the importance or the representation of critical thinking in our unit. Now what about our future work? Is critical thinking emphasized and required? What do you think? The answer is yes. And let me give you some examples. We have to critical reflect on our personal professional practice because that helps us to improve our practice in our profession. In some careers, we are required to analyze data and that requires our critical thinking because we have to identify what is significant, the trends, etc. We need to be open to new ideas and perspectives and we have to bring a critical eye, for example, to business plans, new proposal design changes in policy, etc. So at work, critical thinking is crucial. So we have just together explored critical thinking. We talk about what it is, why is it important and how we can apply critical thinking in our learning. If you have any questions, it would be good to ask your lecturers, ask your peers and also access a lot of support and resources through our library website. Thank you everyone. Own the best with your study and enjoy your time at CDU.