Toolkit resource
A Community Discussion Guide for Evaluating Claims
A ninety-minute facilitation guide for running a claim-evaluation discussion in a library, congregation, or community group without it becoming an argument.
Learn
Critical Thinking
Separating what is observed, what is inferred, what is assumed, and how confident to be.
Critical thinking here means a small set of habits you can apply to any claim. Name the claim precisely. Ask what evidence would support it and what evidence would undercut it. Distinguish an observation from an interpretation. Notice which assumptions are doing the work. Then hold a level of confidence that matches what you actually have.
This page collects everything published under critical thinking: 4 lessons, 4 practice exercises, and 4 printable resources, alongside any articles and reports that draw on it.
Start with these
Think Lab
What Would Change Your Mind?
Practice naming the specific observation that would reduce your confidence, which is the fastest route out of a stuck disagreement.
Think Lab
Analyze a Headline
Practice reading three headlines for what they establish, what they imply, and what they leave for the article to prove.
Everything on critical thinking
Showing all 14 items.
Toolkit resource
A Community Discussion Guide for Evaluating Claims
A ninety-minute facilitation guide for running a claim-evaluation discussion in a library, congregation, or community group without it becoming an argument.
Article
How Confident Should You Be?
Confidence language, what it should be based on, and how to say what you believe in a way that can be checked later.
Think Lab
What Would Change Your Mind?
Practice naming the specific observation that would reduce your confidence, which is the fastest route out of a stuck disagreement.
Toolkit resource
Assumption Audit Worksheet: Finding the Load-Bearing Premise
A five-step worksheet for locating the assumption a conclusion cannot survive without, rather than listing every assumption it makes.
Think Lab
Test Your Assumptions
Find the load-bearing assumption in two everyday organizational conclusions, and see why the obvious candidate is often not it.
Think Lab
Analyze a Headline
Practice reading three headlines for what they establish, what they imply, and what they leave for the article to prove.
Lesson
How to Read a News Story Critically
A repeatable six-pass method for reading a news story: claim, sourcing, evidence, framing, omissions, and confidence.
Toolkit resource
News Story Reading Checklist: Six Passes
A printable card summarizing the six-pass method for reading a news story, with the question each pass asks.
Article
What Else Could Explain This?
A structured way to generate alternative explanations before settling on one, adapted from analysis of competing hypotheses for everyday use.
Lesson
Understanding Confirmation Bias
What confirmation bias is, the three distinct behaviours it covers, and the small number of countermeasures that survive contact with real evidence.
Toolkit resource
Claim Sorting Worksheet: Observation, Inference, Judgment
A four-column worksheet for taking apart a paragraph of argument and locating where a disagreement actually sits.
Think Lab
Fact or Inference
Sort three statements about the same event into observation, inference, assumption, and value judgment.
Lesson
Fact, Inference, and Opinion
How to tell an observation from an interpretation from a value judgment, and why mixing them is the most common reasoning error in public argument.
Lesson
Correlation Is Not Causation
Four specific reasons two things can move together without one causing the other, and the questions that tell them apart in practice.
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Related subject areas
- Media Literacy: How news and media are produced, and what that means for the way you read them.
- Digital Literacy: How platforms, feeds, and search results decide what reaches you in the first place.
- AI Literacy: What changes, and what does not, when content is produced or altered by AI systems.
- Information Manipulation: The recurring techniques used to mislead audiences, and how to name them.
- Information resilience: calibrating confidence and updating on new evidence.
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