The Meaning of Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking skills are essential skills for life, work, and function effectively in all aspects of life. Critical thinking has long been the ultimate goal in education since 1942. According Halpen (1996), critical thinking is empowering skills or cognitive strategies for goal setting. The process was passed after setting goals, consider, and refers directly to the target-is a form of thinking that needs to be developed in order to solve problems, formulate conclusions, collect various possibilities, and make a decision when to use all these skills effectively in the proper context and type. Critical thinking is also an activity-evaluate the conclusions that will be taken into account when determining the number of factors to support decision making. Critical thinking is also called directed thinking because thinking directly to the focus should be. The same opinion was expressed Anggelo (1995: 6), applying critical thinking is rational, high thinking activities, which include, activities analyze, synthesize, identify problems and solutions, summarize, and evaluate.
Emphasis on the process and stages of thought expressed also by Scriven, critical thinking is the intellectually active and full of skill in making sense or concept, applying, analyzing, making synthesis, and evaluation. All activities are based on observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, and communication, which will guide you in determining attitudes and actions (Walker, 2001: 1). The statement reiterated by Angelo (1995: 6), that critical thinking should meet the characteristics of the thinking include: analysis, synthesis, problem recognition and solving, conclusions, and judgment.
Matindas also revealed that many people are not so distinguish between critical thinking and logical thinking when there is a big difference between the two, namely that critical thinking was made to make a decision while thinking logically just needed to make a conclusion. Critical thinking involves logical thinking is also forwarded to the decision-making. From the opinions of the above can be said that the critical thinking that includes two major step which is doing the thinking process logic (reasoning) followed with decision making / problem solving (Deciding / problem solving). Thus it can also be interpreted that without adequate ability to think in terms of reasoning (deductive, inductive and reflective), one can not perform critical thinking processes correctly.