How often are thinking skills described as methods, approaches or something else?

This collection of flower plots represents the balance of six common suffixes that are appended to each term.

Each of these terms is used in many ways. However, there are some clear differences in the kinds of things that they generally describe. For example, critical thinking is most often referred to as a 'skill', whereas systems thinking is most often referred to as an 'approach'. The combined view shows that none of these terms is most often appended with suffixes such as 'method' or 'process'.

The pop-ups provide illustrative definitions for each thinking skill. However, note that definitions vary (and some are contested). As such, these specific definitions cannot correspond to those used in all the documents analysed here.

The flower plots are normalised so that each term has the same total 'score' across the six most common suffixes, but what variation is there in whether any of these suffixes are used?

This Marimekko plot represents how often any of the six common suffixes are appended to each term.

The height of each bar indicates how often the use of a term includes any of the six common suffixes. The pop-ups provide the sum of suffix uses as a percentage of all term uses. For example, note that creative thinking, critical thinking and visual thinking are often followed by one or more of these suffixes, but this is less common for systems thinking or logical thinking.

For each term, the relative prevalence of each suffix is indicated by the width of each sub-bar. The pop-ups provide these suffix uses as a percentage of all term uses. Because some terms are only rarely appended with these suffixes, their height on this plot would be invisible compared to the others. For this reason, it is useful to view them separately (e.g. those where the sum of suffix uses is less than 15% of total uses).

The data presented on this page are more fully reported in a bibliometric analysis, the details of which can be found on the About page.