Peter Facione

He is a board member of the American Association of College's and University's Project on Health and Higher Education. In 2000, Peter served as a member of the American Council on Education's President's Task Force on Teacher Education. In 1999, he was the national president of the American Conference of Academic Deans.

Professor Facione maintains an active writing and research agenda, with over 100 publications including essays, books, articles, case studies, and testing tools. His latest work is on cognitive heuristics and building thinking leadership teams. Since 1986, he has been a Senior Research Associate and the CEO of the California Academic Press LLC.

Dr. Facione joined Santa Clara University in 1990, where he served for 12 years as Dean of the College of Artsand Sciences. At Santa Clara, he also served as Dean of the Graduate Division of Counseling Psychology and Education from 1996 to 2001. Dr. Facione was a Scholar of the University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics until his departure for Loyola in 2002. Dr. Facione earned his Ph.D. in 1971 from Michigan State University in philosophy.

Because of his work on decision-making, critical thinking, and collaborative leadership, Dr. Facione is frequently invited as a keynote speaker and to present workshops at national conferences and on university campuses. He has consulted with the U.S. Government, Los Alamos National Labs, education agencies of several states, private industry, and professional associations. Dr. Facione has presented workshops at scores of professional schools, liberal arts colleges, and comprehensive and research universities throughout the nation. His most frequently requested workshop and conversation topics include those on institutional decision-making, academic leadership, and ways of teaching for critical thinking.

Facione is nationally and internationally known for his work on the definition and measurement of those skills and habits of mind that are at the core of human decision making and professional judgment what academics often call critical thinking. His research on teaching and assessing reasoned judgment began in 1967. Just over 20 years later, Dr. Facione was the lead investigator on an international research project that articulated a cross-disciplinary expert consensus regarding the skills and habits of mind that constitute college level critical thinking. That research, which was sponsored by the American Philosophical Association, has formed the basis for numerous academic replication studies and government policy studies about critical thinking in the workplace, including research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.

Dr. Facione and his research colleagues have authored several research papers, books, and reasoning measurement tools for different educational and professional levels and purposes. Among these are the California Critical Thinking Skills Test, the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory, the Test of Everyday Reasoning, the California Measure of Mental Motivation, the Professional Judgment Rating Form, and the California Reasoning Appraisal. In collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team of colleagues, Dr. Facione is currently exploring the implications of cognitive heuristics for effective decision-making, leadership, and negotiation in individual and group contexts. Through the California Academic Press, the research team's ground-breaking theoretical and scientific work on the analysis, development, and measurement of the thinking habits of mind and cognitive skills continues with new teaching and testing tools for use in university, pre-college, and workplace settings.