Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 101

The Challenge of Evaluating and Testing Critical Thinking in Potential Intelligence Analysts
information may put millennials and
Gen Zs at the lower end of Bloom’s taxonomy.
Simply defined, critical or analytic
thinking means being able to use
the higher end of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy
or higher-order thinking skills
(HOTS), as illustrated in Figure 1. For
readers interested in more research
about millennials’ and Gen Z’s critical
thinking skills, I refer them to my articles,
Teaching the Millennial Intelligence
Analyst, published in the Global Security
and Intelligence Studies Journal in
January 2017, and the December 2016
SIGNAL magazine article Mind the Millennial
Training Gap.
Figure 1: The scaffolding and development of cognition (thinkingmaps.com).
What Is Critical Thinking
and Can It Be Taught?
According to Professor William
Growley of Georgetown University,
critical thinking is “An
open-minded but focused inquiry that
seeks out relevant evidence to help analyze
a question or hypothesis” (Manville
2017). IAs, in particular, have to
be able to ask tough questions based on
evidence and analysis, to consider and
reconsider their cognitive assumptions
and biases, and to scaffold what they
know from a historic backdrop for forecasting.
Additionally, critical thinking
goes hand-in-hand with creative thinking
and both need to be leveraged for
problem solving. For example, one IA
explains, “An IA must possess an inquisitive
nature. Puzzle solving is another
excellent quality found in IAs. Whether
you choose crosswords, sudoku, pattern
analysis, word search, jigsaw or any
type of other puzzles, an IA must grow
their mind in order to understand the
problem sets that they will work” (Doe
2019.) Professor Jan Goldman concurs.
“The best analysts read science fiction”
(Goldman 2019).
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