Critical thinking: How it can help your study

When you first get back to a learning environment it can be easy to fall back into old habits of just regurgitating what you’ve been taught. At school, or early levels of learning, knowing the facts and techniques by name is important to show you’ve learnt the practical knowledge, but as you go through to more in depth learning particularly at level five, you start needing to demonstrate you actual understand their application, rather than just what they mean. 

To help you understand the difference, critical thinking techniques can be key. Below we’ve highlighted some things you should know to help you understand the difference between describing and applying what you’ve learnt. 

Tutors want to see understanding 

When you are learning, it’s easy just to repeat back what you’ve learnt like some kind of memory game. But, if you’re just rephrasing what your tutor, an employer, or a study book told you you’ve probably not actually learnt anything, other than the name of the technique or process you’re talking about. 

To really take your learning to the next level you need to apply and understand the techniques, tutors want learners to be able to succeed in their qualifications, and by truly understanding the why, the how, the what behind something. This is where critical thinking comes in; it’s a way of taking everything you’ve learnt and applying it in a more practical way to take back to your day job. 

Read deeper to solve problems 

Learning how to understand things like data can be a key point of some higher levels of qualifications. Maybe you need to know repairs levels, cost per unit pricing for maintenance, satisfaction levels of customers. Whatever it might be that you are learning, reading it is one thing, but understanding and applying it is a whole other ball game.  

Critical thinking is about seeing it, understanding it and then questioning it. That’s when you’ll finally be able to apply your learning to your day job. 

For example, you have a data point telling your repairs are up, but another point saying customer satisfaction is down – great news, your team is being more productive but bad news, customers still aren’t happy. In silo understanding these numbers is one thing but using critical thinking to question the whole report and wider process, you may be able to see that although your team are being more productive, in practice this may mean the work quality is being rushed which is making your customers unhappy. Something you can then work to fix. 

Learn to ask why 

One of the key foundations of critical thinking is about questioning everything. Children are good at this – remember back to being a child (or having them) and those times when you kept saying ‘But, why’ after everything you heard? As young adults, we learn to do what we’re told, rather than questioning our (possibly new) employers – but as you advance in your career you need to start bringing back that inquisitive nature to question why things are done. This is the same when you get back to studying, you need to relearn how to ask why to see the issues to be solved. 

Look for patterns in what you hear 

Going back to the reading deeper point, critical thinking should help you spot patterns between things. The example of the repairs and satisfaction data implied a reverse pattern of success vs failure that your critical thinking skills can help understand the correlation between.

By learning how to spot these patterns you can start to better understand what you’re studying to better apply it to your assignments.  

Apply technical to the practical 

You’ll see a key theme running through all these points – doing a housing qualification is more than just taking in the names of the techniques, it’s about understanding and applying them back to your practical day job.  

Critical thinking skills can help you ensure you apply all the theory you’re learning back to the very practical sector we work in. There’re not many roles in housing where just understanding the process will be of help, but as a very hands-on sector every role needs to understand how those processes impact on the lives of customers and the day-to-day work.  

Critical thinking application in assignment writing 

This applies to your assignment writing, but also when you’re back at your desk writing reports for board or employers. Move away from just stating the fact and extend your sentences with phrases like ‘whereas’, ‘consequently’, ‘due to’, ‘this means’, ‘because of’ to get yourself thinking about the why. 

After each paragraph or section go back to re-read what you wrote and if you can’t answer the ‘So what?’ question about it, then you’ve probably not analysed it enough. 

You can also use critical thinking to better analyse and understand the question being asked of you. You can decode the language used to find out what you should be discussing, for example being asked to: 

• Describe is about providing the facts/process 
• Explain is about showing the how of the process 
• Analyse is about breaking it down and showing how and why things are 
• Evaluate is about making judgements and asking those ‘why’ questions. 

If you’re considering going back to learning with a housing qualification make sure you understand what level of learning might be required, and whether you’re ready for the techniques taught at level three or the analysis found in levels four and level five qualifications.