Critical Sociological Thinking and Higher-level Thinking: A Study of Sociologists’ Teaching Goals and Assignments

Abstract

We argue that the literature on critical thinking in sociology has conflated two different skill sets: critical sociological thinking and higher-level thinking. To begin to examine how sociologists weigh and cultivate these skill sets, we interviewed 20 sociology instructors and conducted a content analysis of 26 assignments. We found that while multiple interviewees considered critical thinking to be too obvious a goal to warrant discussion, it did emerge as a criterion for evaluating assignments. In addition, we created a spectrum of writing tasks and found that only a minority of assignments (5 of 26) could be classified as eliciting higher-level thinking. These were found exclusively in advanced courses, where they were still outnumbered by assignments eliciting lower-level thinking by nearly 2 to 1.