Critical Thinking and Reading Strategies

Reading Comprehension

• Reading comprehension involves blending literal content with prior knowledge, intuition, and imagination to make hypotheses or conjecture.
• It requires readers to see relationships among ideas and go beyond what is explicitly stated.

Critical Thinking and Reading Strategies

• Critical thinking involves making reasoned judgments, assessing thinking, and solving problems effectively through a series of complex thought processes.
• Critical thinking is a self-directed process that involves deliberate steps to think at the highest level of quality.
• It involves analyzing and assessing knowledge rather than accepting it at face value.

Types of Comprehension

• Literal comprehension is the foundation of all levels of comprehension and involves locating directly stated information from a text.
• Literal comprehension questions are the "how, what, who, when, where" types of questions.
• Inferential comprehension involves "reading between the lines" and searching for meaning that is implied but not explicitly stated.

Critical Evaluation

• Critical evaluation occurs after readers have understood the ideas and information presented by the writer.
• It requires readers to use external criteria from their own experience to evaluate the quality, values, and reasoning of the writing.

Reading Process

• Reading is a cognitive process of decoding symbols to derive meaning from a text.
• It is an interaction between the text and the reader.
• Reading purposes include academic, personal, and professional purposes.
• The reading process involves motivation, activating schema or prior knowledge, prereading, while-reading, re-reading, and post-reading.

Critical Thinking Keywords

• discuss, explain, compare and contrast, describe, define, enumerate, illustrate, interpret, identify, outline, prove, justify, relate, summarize, trace, critique, evaluate.