What if Education Focused on Critical Thinking and other Disciplinary Skills?

For many years educational standards were more like a checklist of to do items.

• Learn the 50 states and their capitals…check

• Know the timeline of the early United States…check

In recent years all subject areas (not just social studies) have moved towards skills that build upon each other. Skills that are interchangeable in various subject areas. Skills that will be useful no matter your career path.

For example in the Nevada Academic Content Standards for Social Studies we see these disciplinary skills in every grade level. Each grade level building on the previous so that by the end of their k-12 experience, students are truly critical thinkers, who use evidence to base their decisions upon.

Disciplinary Skills 

• Constructing compelling questions 

• Creating supporting questions 

• Gathering and evaluating sources 

• Developing claims and using evidence 

• Communicating and critiquing conclusions 

• Taking informed action 

The shift we are seeing is moving towards rote memorization (times tables anyone) to a focus on skills where no matter the topic students are able to tackle the problem at hand. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”

The Nevada Center for Civic Engagement is proud that the programs we support (We the People, National History Day, and Project Citizen) are all skills based programs that encourage critical thinking, research, communication, and provide authentic assessment opportunities. They encourage students to get involved in their communities and provide ample opportunities for students to use those disciplinary skills in multiple grade levels.

Learn more about the skills our programs develop on our “Empowering Education” page