What is Critical Thinking?

My definition of critial thinking is to think hard about something, to think about a certian subject in not just your own point of views, but also in the views of others and how they may feel about that subject.  I have taken a critical thinking class at SCSU already, so I have heard it in class.  To an expert, by the name of Peter A. Facione, in his article titled, Critical Thinking: What Is it and why it counts,  critical thinking means, "We understood critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which reselts in interpretaion, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explaination of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgement is based."   I found that quote from the website https://mail.stcloudstate.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=91656436996e4968b11031b53be035a0&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.aacu.org%2fmeetings%2fpdfs%2fcriticalthinking.pdf.  The author goes into great detail about the different components one needs to know and understand it order to fully undetstand what critical thinking is.  The connection between critical thinking and our class is that we all need to think about what each author may be trying to convey when we are doing our research, to make sure what they are saying, and what we think they are saying is the same thing.