This Skill Builder is designed to develop your critical thinking skills of Explanation, Inference, and Evaluation for use in ambiguous contexts. Ambiguity and uncertainty challenge our critical thinking. It becomes more difficult, but more important as well, to make good judgments about what to believe or what to do. Ambiguous contexts can also include elements of urgency and risk.

Engage the power of inductive, probabilistic reasoning to achieve the twin purposes of strong critical thinking: Deciding what to believe or what to do. Deciding what to believe includes finding the best explanation of events when certainty is not possible. Discover the power of disconfirmation to rule out faulty options and to overcome the risk of confirmation bias. Deciding what to do means making the best possible decisions when conditions are evolving and where information is incomplete. Emergency response situations demand this kind of good thinking.

When you complete this Skill Builder, you will receive onscreen your Personal Feedback – Overall score. And scores on three specific factors: Identifying Best Explanations, Evaluating Decisions, and Drawing Reasonable Inferences. You will be able to download a PDF copy of the feedback. It will includes a summary of key ideas, along with your scores in each area.

Skill Builders are interactive personal development tools. They include questions with debriefs, insights, exercises, thought experiments, and explanations. Use these short courses to strengthen your critical thinking, solve problems more effectively, and make better, more reflective, decisions.