My university decided to give me very generous release time from teaching to work on creating web-based critical thinking units. I will be teaching only one course each semester so that I can devote the bulk of my time to the project. The long range plan, still tentative, is for these units to be assigned in courses across the curriculum so that each one of our 25,000 students will be assigned a short critical thinking unit to do every semester. The implementation of this is a long way off but for this year I have the job of creating eight critical thinking units and have them ready to deploy by next summer at this time. In the meanwhile I will use the units in the one course I am teaching--a section of Critical Thinking.
As I work on this I'd like to try out some ideas on the group and get some feedback. If you have some experience with teaching critical thinking that's great, but even if you don't your perspective as philosophers should be of value. I will provide a link to the webpages themselves so that you can look at them.
The general public and especially employers are asking colleges to do a better job teaching students to think. What I think meets the need most effectively is logic. The logic should be nonsymbolic and practical. I find that categorical logic is useful. I also find that simple sentence logic forms like modus ponens and disjunctive syllogism are good. I am still not completely satisfied with any of the usual approaches to inductive logic, but I do not want to stick wholly to deductive logic. Also I find that specific training in how to object to arguments is both necessary and valuable for students. (For example, asking: "is this an objection to the first premise of the argument or to the second premise?" is surprisingly challenging to ordinary students at first. But once they get used to it their thinking becomes much clearer and more focused.)
That's enough for now. If some of you are willing to help me on this, I will post regular topics for your feedback.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Critical thinking has always been one of my favorite classes to teach, but also one of the most challenging. I'm interested to see what you're doing, and I'll be more than happy to give you feedback on your project.
I have taught a course called "Reasoning," that in many respects is like a Critical Thinking course. I too would be very interested in hearing more about what you are doing and would be happy to share feedback as well.
Great. There was a time when a logic course was mostly a course in categorical logic. There would probably be additional material on fallacies and definitions, but basically that was the course. This lasted from the founding of the first universities in Europe until the middle of the 20th century. At that point two things happened. Logic teachers began abandoning categorical logic in favor of modern symbolic logic. Second, the highly structured curriculum of the universities was largely dismantled in favor of a cafeteria approach in which students no longer took many required courses but instead selected one course from a large list of options. The combination of these two factors lead us from a situation in which every student was required to get a solid grounding in categorical logic to one in which almost nobody took categorical logic, a few took symbolic logic, and most took some other course instead and got no logic at all. Call me old-fashioned but I think that this is when the thinking skills of college students started to decline. So when I teach critical thinking the course is patterned on these old-fashioned courses. I do categorical logic, simple sentential logic (modus ponens,etc.) definitions and fallacies. But I also teach them how to object to an argument (object to the first premise, object to the second premise or object to the inferential claim). I do this in ordinary English not in symbols and provide many examples with frequent short quizzes. The course winds up with analysis of longer argumentative passages and the final tests their ability to apply everything we have covered by having them read and answer questions on a dialogue in which examples of both good and bad reasoning are exhibited.
I'm adapting this general approach to the university wide project. but here I have to do all my teaching via the series of linked webpages. In practice this means short explanations of the inference patterns combined with questions and built in tutoring. That is to say, when they answer a question wrong it takes them to a screen which doesn't just tell them they are wrong but which explains briefly why they made the error. Part of the challenge is to build in lots of repetition without being repetitive.
That's the general outline. I'll get into specifics as we go along.
Post a Comment