Course In Critical Thinking Research Articles

An evaluation of argument mapping as a method of enhancing critical thinking performance in e-learning environments

The current research examined the effects of a critical thinking (CT) e-learning course taught through argument mapping (AM) on measures of CT ability. Seventy-four undergraduate psychology students were allocated to either an AM-infused CT e-learning course or a no instruction control group and were tested both before and after an 8-week intervention period on CT ability using the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment. Results revealed that participation in the AM-infused CT course significantly enhanced overall CT ability and all CT sub-scale abilities from pre- to post-testing and that post-test performance was positively correlated with motivation towards learning and dispositional need for cognition. In addition, AM-infused CT course participants exhibited a significantly larger gain in both overall CT and in argument analysis (a CT subscale) than controls. There were no effects of training on either motivation for learning or need for cognition. However, both the latter variables were correlated with CT ability at post-testing. Results are discussed in light of research and theory on the best practices of providing CT instruction through argument mapping and e-learning environments.

THE DIRTY WORD

For the first two years of my daughter's life, I was scheduled to teach an Introductory Logic course. While I had taught Critical Thinking courses in the past, having to steep myself in categorical and propositional logic left a lasting impression on my own thinking. More importantly, though, these courses influenced my speech-habits during the early years of my child's development. By no means do I intend to assert that my child somehow gained some cognitive benefit from my communication with her during these early stages of her life. Rather, it seems that she acquired the particular virtue of tolerating her father's habit of voicing strangely worded utterances. As she has passed the three and half year mark, her own communication skills and means of expression are well on their way towards developing into her own distinct styles. This I know because we talk a lot. Often times these dialogues are about day care, her friends, or princesses and lots of pink stuff. But sometimes a gem of an argument develops.

Critical Thinking in Groups

It gladdened my heart when the faculty of organizational leadership at my university agreed to require a course in critical thinking. The evidence had been mounting that one way we could prepare students to participate in leadership without knowing precisely what they would be asked to do in the workplace was to develop their powers of critical thinking. No matter what the world might throw at them, these graduates could cope when the situation turned volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And, coping when others could not, they were more likely to lead. This was the reasoning behind our decision to require critical thinking. Ricketts (2005) explored the relationship between leadership development and critical thinking skills. He concluded that leadership educators should teach critical thinking. The following essay suggests that leadership educators build upon this conclusion and consider critical thinking as a group or collaborative activity. By “collaboration” I paraphrase Schrage (1995) to refer to the process of two or more individuals creating a common understanding about a given problem they share. Here is why I believe critical thinking should be collaborative: • First, in most venues critical thinking already is a collaborative activity, so

Lessons from Students in a Critical Thinking Course: A Case for the Third Pedagogy

There have been many calls for strengthening the level of critical thinking among dental students and faculty members, but few analyses of how such curricular experiences actually affect them. This report provides a rich, multifaceted description of eight years' experience teaching a course in critical thinking. Among the data analyzed were a) course materials and learning experiences, b) student products demonstrating critical thinking, c) tests of subject matter knowledge, d) content analysis of what students and faculty members find problematic, e) a test of critical thinking aptitude, f) two personality inventories, g) measures of didactic and clinical performance, and h) student comments and evaluation of instruction. These data support the view that critical thinking involves more than knowledge and application of skills relative to science and research that can be taught using traditional didactic methods. Personality factors emerged as predictive of both critical thinking and clinical performance, and students' approaches to learning appeared to be influenced by their practical considerations of what is needed to practice, rather than by the logic of good science. This analysis argues for designing curricula on the full concept of competency (knowledge, skills, and values needed to function as a dental practitioner) and for exploring a third pedagogy of reflective practice to supplement the traditional ones of didactic and skill teaching in dental education.

Censoring Voices Too Critical of Critical Thinking Courses, Collegiality, Civility, and the General War Against Negativity

Citizen cynicism is a corrosive asset of democracy. If citizens don't turn on government, government is going to turn on them, because government has become a pawn of big business.- Ralph NaderThis essay was prompted by an application requirement to write on contributions to collegiality in an educational setting for a position as English and Critical Thinking instructor at Mendocino College in California, and submitted to College English, O[double dagger]cial Journal of the College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English, which rejected it without comment. Its premise is quite simply and logically that something profoundly fraudulent must exist in the framework of the bulk of Critical Thinking courses taught throughout the nation in the context of English Department programs because if real critical thought-rigorous logic, and questioning and challenging of all things-were being taught, learned and encouraged, professors would be successfully, though perhaps indirectly, teaching students a lifetime of chronic unemployment, if not incarceration, due to ineluctable conflict with, among others, employers, chairpersons, deans, university presidents, politicians, and police o[double dagger]cers.Critical thinking must imply individual thinking, as opposed to current in-vogue team thinking. It must imply the ability to cut through conformist doctrine, politically-correct orthodoxy, and anything else that might impair the perception of truth. Clearly, it must conflict with conformity, which often demands no thinking at all. Unfortunately, the large majority of college graduates, for the sake of the economy and wealthy class, have been trained to conform, not educated to think critically. They have been trained to fit into corporate, public sector, and educationist functionary roles. Their very professors, for the most part, have been trained as conformists, rarely if ever questioning and challenging the superfluous rituals, traditions, and meetings, as well as jargon for the sake of jargon, and overall sameness of programs and courses pervading academe nationwide today.Real critical thinking must imply a certain degree of negativity (i.e., pessimism, cynicism, and skepticism), commonly designated as a non-desirable behavioral trait. Our society teaches through constant blather of television commercials, politicians, college and university leaders, corporate managers, and any number of other adversaries of negativity, that good citizens should wear happy-face smiles whenever possible. One foreign journalist labeled this seeming American phenomenon as happy-face fascism. The general populace has indeed been taught to equate optimism as a positive behavioral trait and pessimism a negative one. Calling a person a pessimist or cynic is normally not a compliment. Bill Clinton lambasted cynicism, though he was partly responsible for it. So did George Bush. In America, a veritable war, sometimes overt, often covert, is being waged against the demon negativity and for good reason. But for those successfully indoctrinated in the nation's schools and colleges, by the media and rules of supposed good citizenship and civility, the reason will evidently not be obvious.Negativity comprises a variety of pertinent human behaviors proscribed by the Bible, including judging one's neighbors, colleagues, boss, friends, or whomever. It also comprises criticizing the establishment, including one's country, politicians, academics, literary icons, the police, and others. Interestingly, criticism in itself is generally perceived as negative and uncollegial behavior. The editor of Bookpage noted, for example, in Poet's Market 200i: All Bookpage reviews are positive because we don't run negative reviews; it's essential that your review be and genuine. Curiously, the editor implies that a negative review cannot be heartfelt and genuine. Despite the perception and general trend of positivism in reviews of blurbed-to-death books and movies, the term criticism according to dictionaries does not exclude negative commentary. …

Critical Analysis of Psychological Research: Rationale and Design for a Proposed Course for the Undergraduate Psychology Curriculum

Critical thinking about psychological research appears seldom to be taught to an advanced level on UK psychology degrees, or to be allocated a substantial amount of learning/teaching time at any level. It is likely that students may graduate with an inaccurate and passive uncritical view of discipline knowledge unless the relevant skills needed to appraise that knowledge are acquired. A common assumption seems to be that this is implicitly recognised in traditional research methods teaching, and the skills are therefore emergent from conventional lectures, practicals and research projects. Since the manifold pressures on students and teachers combine to increase the reliance on secondary sources, the explicit provision of a course in critical thinking about research should be considered. It is argued that this is best offered at a relatively late stage in a psychology degree programme. Since psychology graduates are more likely to become research users than research producers, it is argued that skills training for critical analysis of research reports will be professionally advantageous. A framework for a critical analysis course is described to enable students to undertake a comprehensive critical appraisal of a research article. This is based on a long-established final-year course that treats critical analysis, of published research papers, as the vehicle for training students to treat the literature with more circumspection, and the respect it deserves.

Why Percy can't think: A response to Bailin

In "The Problem with Percy: Epistemology, Understanding and Critical Thinking," Sharon Bailin argues that critical thinking skills do not generalize because students do not understand the larger epistemological picture in which to situate the importance of arguments and reasons. More plausible explanations are: (I) instructors across the disciplines do not give assignments requiring critical thinking (CT) skills, (2) single courses in CT have little effect, (3) pragmatic arguments showing the effectiveness of CT are more effective than epistemological arguments with the average student. So to achieve the generalization of the logical skills and intellectual dispositions inherent in CT courses, CT thinking cannot be departmentalized.

Ritual at the Birth of Kitsch

THE COMPAKATIST RITUAL AT THE BIRTH OF KITSCH Cälin-Andrei Mihäilescu Modernity has a condition, an aU too human one, that accompanies it Uke a sweet innuendo and a sour noise: kitsch. Not only is kitsch generaUy regarded as confined to the post-French Revolution realm of modernity, but modernity itself seems to have found in kitsch its proper realm of the famüiar and the inauthentic—its temptation. Subscribing to the common place ofmodern criticism that deplores media's inabflity to provide "authentic, Uved experiences," GuIo Dorfles writes that: Mass culture, being as it is at the root ofthe new distribution oftime, has killed all ability to distinguish between art and life; all trace ofa "rite" in the handing out ofcultural and aesthetic nourishment by the mass media . . . has been lost, and this lack ofthe ritual element has brought about an indifference in the onlooker when he is faced with the different kinds of transmissions and manifestations which are forced upon him. (30) There is no secret that kitsch is born with(in) mass culture; also, there is no secret that mass culture is made in the image and likeness of the media—in the "age of the world picture" everything might eventuaUy succumb to the McLuhanite tautology, "the medium is the message"— although such a disclosure may easüy put the mind to rest on the bedrock ofthe mythical opposition between formless matter (mass) and form (media). However, mass culture should not be reduced to the media, and kitsch should not be reduced to mass culture. "Kitsch" is a term that initiaUy—in the 1860s—denoted "bad taste": first in Bavaria, then in the whole of Central Europe, France, England, and the rest. A short, trenchant word (whose most probable etymon is the German verb kitschen, "to play with and smooth out the mud"), "kitsch" has rapidly won the competition with its Spanish and Russian counterparts, "cursi' (Gómez de la Serna) and "poshlost" (Nabokov 6374 ), and now is coextensive with bad taste everywhere, and not everywhere with a twist. A Central-European affair for most of its course in critical thinking, kitsch has been usuaUy associated, or even identified (Giesz), with the massification of culture in the nineteenth century and beyond. However, bad taste's is a tentacular empire, and "kitsch" evolved from a mere resentful label into more deUcate re-source of meaning. The sociological explanation ofthe genesis ofkitsch dweUs on the widespread corruption oftaste to status-seeking and display. "[P]lutocrats, nouveaux riches, the petty bourgeois imitating the old aristocracy" (Calinescu 225), the petty bourgeois that today form the general class in a classless universe , are the purveyors and conveyors of kitsch. Their gardens are adorned with Uttle white Popes and Kennedys surrounded by Ught Vol. 21 (1997): 49 RITUAL AT THE BIRTH OF HTSCH bulbs, leading up to steps guarded by two gypsum Uons. Omnivolent, anonymous nani digiardino look on and don't seem to regret anything: the owner is chez soi. From a cold distance that rephcates the Benjaminian distance separating us from the aura oforiginal artwork, kitsch, the "rear-guard" that accompanies the avant-gardes of modernity, is seen as a product ofthe industrial revolution which urbanized the masses ofWestern Europe and America and established what it is called universal literacy . . . [Kitsch is an] ersatz culture . . . destined for those who, insensible to the values ofgenuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture ofsome sort can provide. Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra ofgenuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source ofits profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes with styles but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome ofall that is spurious in the life ofour times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time. (Greenberg 10). More than 50 years later, one feels the need to oppose a sharper dialectics of "ritual" and "showing" (see below) to Greenberg's heavyhanded explaining away of kitsch as decayed high culture and an unfortunate side effect of the EnUghtenment. According to such a procedure...

Teaching Critical Thinking: Focusing on Metacognitive Skills and Problem Solving

To become a better critical thinker, one not only must develop expert thinking skills but also become an expert at choosing the best skills for the particular situation. These two components of critical thinking can be described as maximizing the efficiency and accuracy of one's cognitive and metacognitive skills for successful actions. The development of students' cognitive and metacognitive skills was the approach taken to teach a required critical-thinking course. Students assessed different aspects of their own thinking and problem-solving skills before and after a module on problem solving and decision making. Comparisons between above-average and below-average students indicated that students learn to choose general approaches to their problems and learn more specific strategies for successfully resolving their problems. Factor analyses of the students' self-assessments and changes in factor structures indicated that students improved their critical-thinking skills and were aware of their improvements.

Using Critical-Thinking Principles as a Guide to College-Level Instruction

In this article, I establish the need for educational programs that teach the processes needed for critical thinking. Thinking processes are conceptualized as being either primarily incidental (nonconscious and effortless) or deliberate (conscious and effortful). Instruction that is designed to help students improve their ability to think must be based on deliberate instruction on the processes that underlie complex, reasoned thought. Separate critical-thinking courses based on these principles show considerable improvement in students' critical-thinking abilities, and these abilities spontaneously transfer to novel settings. I urge all colleges to offer courses designed to improve how students think.

Performance technology goes to college (or, “how to apply performance technology to a college course in critical thinking”)

Performance technology goes to college (or, “how to apply performance technology to a college course in critical thinking”)

Critical Thinking, A Deflated Defense: A Critical Study of John E. McPeck's Teaching Critical Thinking: Dialogue and Dialectic

A critical study of McPeck's recent book, in which he strengthens and develops his arguments against teaching critical thinking (CT). Accepting McPeck's basic claim that there is no unitary skill of reasoning or thinking, I argue that his strictures on CT courses or programs do not follow. I set out what I consider the proper justification that programs in CT have to meet, and argue both that McPeck demands much more than is required, and also that it is plausible that this deflated justification can be met. Specitically, I argue that it is reasonable to expect transfer of learning for basic logical skills. Additional topics covered include: the relation ofliberal education to critical thinking, argument analysis, testing for CT, and the value of conceptual or linguistic analysis.

Thirty Great Ways to Mess Up a Critical Thinking Test

Finals week already! At Michigan State in 1967 the general education course was called' 'Logic. In 1989 at California State University Fullerton we call it Logic. Although I would now describe my goal in both cases as teaching critical thinking (CT), so much is different: my conceptualization of CT and its relationship to logic has changed, my curricular and pedagogical ideas about how CT is best taught, and even my sense of why it is important to teach CT. Yet one thing remains: then and now at MSU and at CSUF we give final exams. And exams are what this paper is about. Specifically CT exams. Like anyone's, my CT course boldly assumes (1) CT can be learned, (2) CT can be assessed, and (3) CT can be taught. I sleep easier these days knowing that (1) is probably true in spite of anything I might do in the classroom. I pray (3) is true, and I most certainly conduct myself on campus as if it were. Imagine the budgetary bloodshed should the campus curriculum committee demand empirical evidence! And, I worry about how to defend (3). One sure fire defense would show how much students have improved in CT as a result of taking my course. But that leads right to assumption (2)-that CT can be assessed. This little paper is a tongue-in-cheek look at the practical aspects of framing a CT assessment tool-a chore each of us undertakes whenever we prepare a final examination. If you follow the advice given here-advice hard won through personal experience, trial and error, especially erroryou will be able to construct a truly dreadful CT test. Make no mistakes. This abysmal goal, I'm confident, is achievable. I know because I've hit pay dirt a few times myself. Having elsewhere defended multiple-choice CT assessment strategies, this venerable mode of assessment will come in for special attention in a moment, but let's start with basic seven rules which apply to both essay testing (ET) and multiple-choice testing (MCT).

Trends in Geometry

The reason given for teaching plane geometry in high school has usually been its value as a course in critical thinking. This is a most desirable objective and, if established as pedagogically feasible, makes a strong case for the subject. In the twenties many writers stated that nothing else approached geometry in this phase of the work, that nowhere else, except in pure logic, did the pupil marshal his facts in such strict order and present them with such precision of statement. Further, geometry was thought to be superior to pure logic because it had in it figures that illustrated the things that were said and done. “If geometry is not taught to give a training in deductive logic, in the power to prove one's own statements, or if it does not do both, then it is not worth teaching.”