"Critical thinking" is a name given to a subject which consists mostly of applied elementary logic, some philosophy and perhaps with some probability thrown in and such.<p>That kind of reasoning is useful in any area in which you have to work out whether some propositions are true or false, or have to perform a thorough analysis of the cases that may occur.<p>It won't help you solve, say, a spatial problem ("can this cabinet be carried down this stairwell?"). That's a proposition with a truth value; if we already know that truth value, we can reason critically across that, and some related truth values that we also know.<p>The value in critical thinking is that students learn to avoid making inferential mistakes when working with facts and claims, not that they are gaining some powerful tool in a context-independent way that will make them more productive in any domain.