A Beginner’s Guide to Critical and Creative Thinking

Develop your creative and critical thinking skills with New Scientist

Critical thinking and creativity are key skills needed to improve decision-making, whether in a personal context or in the workplace.

This three-week course will help sharpen your ability to analyse information and increase your capacity to problem solve creatively.

Learn from experts in cognitive science and creative problem solving

Guided by Dr Denise Cummins, Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and Professor Gerard Puccio from Buffalo State, you’ll explore various models of thinking in different contexts.

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to approach problems more logically, rationally, scientifically, and creatively.

Refine your decision-making process using logical and rational thinking

There are a variety of cognitive biases that can hinder decision-making.

On this course, you’ll examine them in detail, as well as learning to recognise red herrings, false dichotomies, ad hominem attacks, and motivated reasoning.

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to spot flaws and fallacies in others’ arguments and avoid biases in your own thinking. This will strengthen your own arguments and help justify your decisions.

Explore critical and creative problem solving techniques

By strengthening both your analytical reasoning and your creative thinking, you’ll have the tools necessary to solve problems in any situation.

You’ll bring together your critical and creative thinking skills to analyse the differences between convergent and divergent thinking and apply them appropriately.

By the end of this course, you’ll have learned key models of creative and critical thinking, as well as the factors that can impact decisions. Having learned how to combine creative and critical thinking, you’ll be able to supercharge brainstorming sessions and problem solving tasks.

This course is designed for learners at all levels with an interest in evaluating information and increasing their capacity for creative thinking.

It is particularly useful for professionals who want to improve their problem solving and decision-making in the workplace.

• Introducing critical and creative thinking
• Welcome to the course
• Why critical and creative thinking matters
• Three pillars of critical thinking
• Critical thinking: How to think logically
• Bringing it all together
• Critical thinking: How to think rationally and scientifically
• Critical thinking: How to think rationally
• Critical Thinking: How to think scientifically
• Bringing it all together
• How to think creatively
• Developing our innate creativity
• Cognitive rigidity and the creative cliff illusion
• Strategies for creative thinking
• Creative Problem Solving: The Thinking Skills Model
• Bringing it all together