The Nature and Functions of Critical & Creative Thinking

While creativity and criticality may seem contrary to one another, they are in fact intimately interconnected. In The Nature and Functions of Critical and Creative Thinking, Richard Paul and Linda Elder promote the simultaneous teaching of different types of thinking and explore their interrelationships as essential understandings in learning. This guide serves a useful resource for teachers and school administrators at every level, especially as they integrate critical and creative thinking into existing curricula.

As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fairminded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.

Dr. Richard Paul was a leading proponent of critical thinking and, through his work and legacy, remains a distinguished thinker in the field. He founded the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University in 1980, followed by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. He developed concepts, principles, and theory essential to a robust and fairminded conception of critical thinking. Paul authored or coauthored more than two hundred articles and seven books on the critical thinking. He presented workshops to hundreds of thousands of educators over his 35-year career as a leader in the critical thinking movement. Dr. Linda Elder is an educational psychologist and internationally recognized authority on critical thinking who has taught both psychology and critical thinking at the college level. She has been president of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the executive director of the Center for Critical Thinking for 25 years. She has a special interest in the relation of thought and emotion, as well as the cognitive and affective and has developed an original theory of the stages of critical thinking development. Elder has coauthored four books on critical thinking, as well as all 23 titles found in the Thinker’s Guide Library.