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Class 11 Thinking: cheat sheet
CBSE Psychology. Concepts and images, steps in problem solving and its obstacles, deductive and inductive reasoning, decision-making, creative thinking and its stages, and language and thought.
Key ideas
- Thinking manipulates mental representations, images and concepts; concepts group things that share properties.
- Problem solving moves from identifying and representing the problem to planning, choosing and checking a solution.
- Mental set and functional fixedness block problem solving, as do low motivation and low persistence.
- Deductive reasoning goes from a general rule to a case; inductive reasoning goes from cases to a general rule.
- Convergent thinking seeks one right answer; divergent (lateral) thinking produces many varied ideas.
- The creative process runs through preparation, incubation, illumination and verification; brainstorming separates producing ideas from judging them.
- Whorf held that language shapes thought (linguistic relativity); Piaget held that thought comes first.
Remember
| Divergent thinking abilities | fluency (how many ideas), flexibility (how many kinds), originality (rare ideas), elaboration (details) |
| Creative process | preparation → incubation → illumination (“Aha!”) → verification |
| Obstacles | mental set (same old steps); functional fixedness (only the usual use) |
| Decision-making | choices already known; weigh costs and benefits |
| Language stages | cooing → babbling (about 6 months) → one word (about 1 year) → two words (18–20 months) |
| Lateral vs vertical | digging in a new place vs digging the same hole deeper (de Bono) |
Watch out
- Mixing up fluency and flexibility: fluency counts ideas, flexibility counts different kinds of ideas.
- Swapping deductive and inductive reasoning: deductive starts from the general rule.
- Confusing mental set (repeating a method) with functional fixedness (seeing only an object’s usual use).
Worked example
Suppose a student lists 14 uses of a newspaper, falling into 7 different kinds of use. Which numbers show fluency and flexibility? What would make an answer original?
Working: count of ideas; count of categories
Answer: Fluency 14 (the number of ideas); flexibility 7 (the variety of kinds); an original answer is a rare, unusual use
Practise Thinking
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