Important aspects of critical thinking are synthesizing, applying, and evaluating. These skills are important because in order to think critically you need to be able to come up with a wide array of ideas and then apply them to whatever problem or scenario is at hand and finally evaluate which one is the best. Evaluation is the most important of these three because it is what leads to the final result. It is easy to come up with a lot of ideas, they just will probably not all be good ideas. Evaluating which one is the best idea, without bias, will give the best result.
Another crucial part of critical thinking that the readings mentioned is that it has to be self driven and self disciplined. There is no point in knowing how to think critically if you don't force yourself do it and make sure you do it at the utmost quality. For really smart people, from my experience, this is a problem because they're used to always being right and just trust themselves to be right all the time and so although they do know how to think critically they don't always practice it. Practicing critical thinking, and having the drive to do it is what we should probably be teaching students in college but as a student, I know checking my work is boring so I don't know how well that would be received.
I agree that one must be able to synthesize, apply, and evaluate. However, I think that very educated people actually practice critical thinking naturally, which is what leads to their higher level of intelligence and reputation. From my experience, those who are really smart tend to listen more to others and synthesize, apply, and evaluate information on the spot. Of course, everyone's different.
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