Critical thinking can also be understood in context with general theories of learning.
Bloom (1956) and Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) developed and revised, respectively,
Bloom’s Taxonomy to map out levels of learning such as remembering (retrieving
knowledge from memory), understanding (drawing meaning from instruction), applying
(employing a procedure in both familiar and new situations), analyzing (breaking material
into parts, distinguishing among parts, and determining how they fit together), evaluating
(judging based on learned criteria) and creating (combining elements into new forms, or
into a coherent whole).