My objective in this post is to consider learning outcomes for a course and design activities such that they promote and encourage students’ attainment of the outcomes.
An introductory course in critical thinking has several learning outcomes that are desirable. For example, successful students should:
- come to understand the structures of clear thought and argument;
- increase their discernment of reasonable argumentation; and
- be able to identify several common errors in reasoning.
Near the beginning of the course, there is an exercise requiring students to look over several cases–short, published arguments that show, to one degree or another, a clear conclusion and supporting premises. The task for students is to discern the conclusion and identify it, along with relevant premises.
While the exercises are good and help student sharpen their skills and develop confidence, I would like to extend the exercise by having students propose their own cases, either from print-based or online sources. These student-examples would also be short and as simple as possible, but they would encourage students to be both cognitively present in a less controlled environment practicing the same skills and receiving feedback on their efforts in a timely way.
Later on in the course, students are exposed to common reasoning errors, red-herrings, smoke-screens, slippery-slope, ad hominem, and so forth. They are given examples of the types of faulty reasoning and practice categorizing faulty arguments according to types provided. Again, this is a good exercise to build skills and confidence, but I would like to extend it into the realm where students are looking for their own example cases in their everyday life, reading, and discourse.
My reasoning behind these extended exercises is that I have found students lack propensity to take their university learning and apply it directly in their own lives. Since one major goal behind the course in critical thinking is to prepare students to engage more readily in careful examination of everyday reasoning across disciplines, I believe they need to have more practice in less-structured and less-selected situations.
As a final step in these extended exercises, I would have students journal their examples, their analysis, and some reflection on what they find compelling about their selections or how they might improve them to make them more reasonable. If they were to blog their journals, they could also interact with each other to enhance discourse within the learning context.