I have two reproductions of great art on my desk. One is an inexpensive copy of Auguste Rodin's imponderable masterpiece, the Thinker, hunched over in his familiar pose that portrays ‘every man’ who is ‘lost in thought’. The other ‘objet d'art’ is an inflatable replica of Edvard Munch's depiction of mental anguish in his renowned painting ‘The Scream’. As I think about the task of integrating and classifying the last 50 years of theory and research in critical thinking, these two images come to mind and merge. In my mind's eye, I can see Rodin's inscrutable Thinker contort his face into that of the one depicted in ‘The Scream’ when the thoughtful, and presumably silent, Thinker is faced with organising and evaluating the literature on thinking skills. Fortunately, for those of us who care about improving how students think, we can all save our voices from the possible harm caused by a shrill scream because of the excellent work toward creating an organising taxonomy of thinking skills presented in Frameworks for Thinking : A Handbook for Teaching and Learning.

David Moseley and his able band of co-authors have boldly sorted through a mountain of literature to create a thinking skills taxonomy, so that we can identify what, when, and how well different methods and theories work to develop students' critical thinking abilities.