Building Critical Thinking: a key to success on the SAT®
What is critical thinking? Critical thinking is a framework to guide one's thought process, where an individual is able to analyze, conceptualize, judge, and apply information and knowledge through following a disciplined process that breaks that information down. Individuals with strong critical thinking skills tend to be self-aware of their own thought process and when they need to change it to solve a problem. They also know how to find objectivity in arguments based on evidence. Critical thinkers know how to take information and find deeper-level questions to help them extract more information. They also know how to compare and contrast differing viewpoints and come to conclusions based on these differences. For many students, this is what presents the largest barrier to their progression on the SAT®. This is to no fault of their own in many cases. K-12 education frequently does not emphasize building skills relevant to critical thinking, favoring cramming information and evaluating a student’s ability to recall this knowledge. Students are not frequently asked to apply their knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios and use reasoning and analysis to determine how to use what they know.
The good news is that it is never too late to build critical thinking skills, and for any student trying to find a starting point in their SAT® journey, building specific skills and habits early on will be one of the most beneficial things a student can do in the long run. Here are a list of specific skills and strategies I think any student should focus on:
Understand the role knowledge of content plays: While memorization is not a core component of learning the SAT®, a student should be able to evaluate when a gap in their knowledge was the reason they were unable to correctly answer a question. Would I have been able to answer this math question correctly if I remembered the slope formula? Did I miss this grammar question because I don’t know the difference between a finite and non-finite verb? Rather than learning every bit of content that could apply to the test, a student should be able to identify when what they don’t know is holding them back and when the reason is something else.
Be able to give any question an identification: Every question on both sections is an identifiable question type. Every question type has its own set of skills and strategies that work best for it. If a student is able to identify each question and know what steps and strategies are useful for that type of question, they will be able to more reliably work through that problem even when the question feels more difficult.
Learn how to break a problem into a series of steps: For students that fail to find a starting point in a question or who get stuck halfway through, it is often partially a result of not planning out steps first. What these steps can be is flexible and something that the student develops themselves, but getting into a habit of approaching every question with this framework will greatly aid a student in their consistency and confidence with knowing how to approach a problem even when it feels like an unfamiliar scenario initially.
Learn to look for patterns: I learned through hundreds of hours of reviewing content and questions with students that there are many patterns in all types of SAT® questions. These patterns are present in the structure of reading passages, in the ways questions are written, in answer choices, and more. Students should focus early on identifying these patterns as they are practicing and learning more content and different types of questions.
Learn to make predictions: Just because the questions are mostly multiple choice doesn’t mean the answer choices are always needed to find the correct solution. If a student understands the type of question and how to approach it, they can often more easily predict where the question is going. Additionally, answer choices can often be as difficult to interpret as the question itself and can even be designed as traps, and predicting the answer in advance can help simplify the process of parsing through the answer choices.
Get into the habit of eliminating wrong answers, and use your knowledge of patterns and question types to cross off wrong choices: Answers can be wrong for various reasons (unsupported, off-topic, contradicted by information in the question, etc.). The way a student evaluates the question determines what information in the answer choices is correct or relevant and what information isn’t, and any component of an answer that is wrong means the whole answer is wrong. Remember that only one choice is 100% correct and an answer that is 90% correct is still wrong.
Learn how to identify and evaluate specific forms of thought - cause and effect, logic, and inference:
Cause-and-effect thinking refers to the ability to connect events and actions to their outcomes. Identification of this can range from single words, to structuring of passages, to even math problems. Information in a cause and effect format is often important to answering the question and good to look out for.
Employing logic means evaluating information without using any personal experience, prior knowledge, intuition, or “common sense”. While some types of questions are exceptions, most can be answered with only the information provided within the question itself.
Know when you can and when you can’t apply inference. Inference refers to the ability to connect stated information to implied information. Sometimes you will need to “read between the lines” to answer a question, but always pair this with logic. If a student’s logic is not supporting their inference, they should question it.
Whether it’s about the big picture or certain details, the evidence matters: Students will often tell me after reading a passage that the text does or doesn’t “feel” like it conveys something, but they are unable to identify specific evidence in the text to support their initial analysis. Every question has evidence, and it is a student’s job to extract whatever evidence is relevant to answering the question based on what the question is asking and what the question type is.
Be able to distinguish between facts and opinions when evaluating information: Many questions and the answer choices for those questions will have a combination of facts and opinions within them. It is essential to distinguish between them to be able to analyze information accurately. Facts are things like data, statistics, and observations, while opinions are things like interpretations, claims, and recommendations.
Do not initially worry about speed: Students will sometimes protest against focusing on these skills because they worry that approaching questions like this will make the questions take too long. This is fair, as each section on the test does have a strict time limit. My counter to students, though, is that even if they finish every section in time, they will likely miss many more questions without applying these strategies. Like any other skill, building it starts with slow practice and ramps up over time as a student gets more comfortable. Students will build strong fundamental skills that will become more intuitive over time by starting with untimed practice that is reflective, focused, and disciplined.
Try some study strategies that may feel unconventional: Practicing critical thinking is not the same as aimlessly going through practice questions or trying to memorize information. In many ways, a critical thinker is evaluating “how” they are thinking while they are in the process of thinking. A student should try journaling every time they practice. With each question they practice, they write down their steps to go through a problem, their reasoning for the steps they took, and explanations for why they picked the answer they did. Writing out their thought process from start to finish will not only create a log of their thinking that they can track, but it will also make it easier to identify flaws in their thought process that are causing them to miss a question.
Conclusion: The process of building critical thinking is not easy, but it is far more productive compared to other methods I’ve seen students try to conquer the SAT®. Remember that consistency is king. A student does not need to spend hours a day to build these skills, but if they are able to dedicate even a little time each day, the benefits will accumulate and snowball over time. Lastly, note that beyond the SAT®, these are skills that a student will continue to take advantage of in college and beyond. While they are a key to success on the SAT®, they will also help students mold themselves into leaders and problem solvers that will be better equipped to face the world’s challenges in the future. Happy studying!
