WSJ: Schools, Businesses Focus on Critical Thinking

By MARISA TAYLOR

The ability to think critically is, well, critical in the workplace, employers say. But many of the young college graduates they hire seem to lack this skill, a problem both businesses and universities are trying to fix.

When asked which skills new college graduates needed to improve most, nearly 30% of the 479 respondents to The Wall Street Journal's survey of college recruiters named some combination of critical thinking, problem solving skills and the ability to think independently.

When asked which skills new college graduates needed to improve most, about one-third of the 479 respondents to The Wall Street Journal's survey of college recruiters named some combination of critical thinking, problem solving skills and the ability to think independently.

Sara Holoubek, chief executive of Luminary Labs, a boutique consulting firm in New York, says the recent graduate analysts she hires, though "extremely smart," can't seem to turn their isolated observations about a client's business into a strategy—despite the fact that they are often better observers than their superiors.

This inability to assert an opinion holds young employees back in client presentations, she adds.

Many employers say they are trying to help new hires develop these skills. Ms. Holoubek, for example, recently signed up an employee for external training. Other companies make it a point for managers to spend extra time developing independent and critical thinking skills in their new hires.

The Business Roundtable—a network of company chief executives—has launched the Springboard Project to find ways to bridge the gaps. Chaired by Accenture PLC Chairman and Chief Executive William D. Green, the group's latest effort is a free online video series called JobSTART101, which aims to teach what Mr. Green dubs the "dot-connecting skills." Subjects include how to articulate a point of view.

"We need to raise the water table by improving the analytical skills, the critical thinking skills, the communication skills that are necessary for really almost every job in today's economy," said Mr. Green. The videos will be released in the fall to college career centers and social networking sites.

Whether today's young graduates are less able to think critically than their forbears, or if it's that the current pace of the workplace requires more independent thinking than it did in the past, is up for debate. Some experts speculate that online search engines and peer-generated information from social-networking sites have dulled young people's research skills.

Todd Davis, executive director of recruitment at Burbank, Calif.-based Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. says he sees increasing numbers of his recent college graduate hires relying on such sources when creating strategies.

That means many don't understand the reasons why a strategy might—or might not—work. Many take search engine results as fact, he says.

"We have individuals who are making assumptions without doing any significant research," says Mr. Davis, who oversees hiring of about 200 new graduates a year. "They think they understand what they're saying…but they don't have an understanding of why."

Meanwhile, a number of colleges and universities are also working to address the problem. The new core curriculum at George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences will focus on developing reasoning and critical thinking. Beginning in 2011, for example, freshmen will no longer simply complete a science class and get credit for a required course. They'll have to prove proficiency in scientific reasoning to pass. To measure that, professors are designing evaluation standards and assignments to test students on their reasoning skills.

Other schools are reformatting classes to shorten lectures and include peer teaching. Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur first pushed the concept in the 1990s when he began using a short lecture that ends with a problem that students discuss with peers, instead of spending an hour lecturing. The student-to-student aspect helps cement understanding of the concepts, say experts.

The model has been adopted in other science and math courses at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at San Francisco, among others. Similarly, in the last few years, the National Center for Academic Transformation has led the redesign of large lecture courses at dozens of colleges to ramp up the time students spend working on problems in small groups or in guided learning labs.

Villanova University's School of Business is taking another approach, recently combining its introductory accounting and finance courses and its introductory management and marketing courses to form co-taught, cross-disciplinary classes more aligned with what students will encounter on the job.

The idea, says marketing professor James Glasgow , who co-teaches the marketing and management course for sophomores, is to "take the concept… and then [show] the application of that knowledge so the student comes up with a better understanding."

Write to Marisa Taylor at marisa.taylor@dowjones.com