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National Core Arts Standards (NCAS)
Arts Education Standards and 21
st
Century Skills - cont.
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Critical thinking is the essential, intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing,
analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information as a guide to belief and action. It is through critical
thinking and problem solving that students learn the higher-order thinking skills necessary to engage in
the artistic processes and, therefore, begin to achieve artistic literacy.
Standards-based arts educators encourage their students to apply critical thinking to the artifacts and
processes that they find most compelling ― the artwork of themselves, their peers, and the artists in the
wide world they are growing to understand.
Precisely because of the emotional connections that students make to and through works of art, the ap-
plication of critical thinking to understanding and evaluating those works leads to the development of
those structures or elements of thought implicit in all reasoning:
Critical thinking also builds contextual awareness as an indirect but fundamental aspect of artistic prac-
tice and appreciation. Regarding the process of problem-solving, students who actively study the arts
necessarily engage in and develop a disciplined, step-by-step approach to problems in creating, realizing,
or understanding art. The steps involved may vary from one arts discipline to another and the order of
steps in the process may change according to the personal ideas of the student artist, which in turn may
prompt multiple iterations of an artwork. But the underlying discipline is always present.
Purpose, problem, or question-at-issue
Assumptions; concepts; empirical grounding
Reasoning leading to conclusions
Implications and consequences
Objections from alternative viewpoints; and frame of reference