Essay 200-300 words

Using Critical Thinking in the Classroom

Over the years, our fellow educators in various disciplines—business management, criminal justice, nursing, psychology, biology, and others—have repeatedly said how important it is for students in their classes to have strong critical thinking skills. Our colleagues are apparently in good company, according to a 1994 report by the Foundation for Critical Thinking (www.criticalthinking.org). In a survey of faculty at 38 public and 28 private California universities, nearly 90% of respondents claimed that critical thinking constitutes a primary objective of their teaching. Yet only a small minority (9%) clearly taught critical thinking skills on any given day. The first statistic shows just how important critical thinking is in the eyes of instructors, but the second indicates that you must acquire those vital skills before you get to the discipline-based courses.

Why do professors consider these skills—the most essential of which are taught in this text—so important to students in their disciplines? One reason is that in college you are expected not only to learn more advanced material than you learned in high school, but also to do things with that material that are more cognitively sophisticated and demanding than what has been expected of you up to this point. From elementary school through high school, your learning has focused on basic information such as the main characters and events in American history, the structure of a grammatically correct sentence, the proper procedures for a chemistry experiment, the rudiments of speaking another language, and so on. All of this is important knowledge. In college, however, you must go far beyond these basics both in content and in what you are asked to do with the information you learn. This is shown in a well-known pyramid of cognitive activities known as Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Of course, in college you still must demonstrate knowledge and comprehension of subjects. However, you are also expected to employ Bloom’s higher-order cognitive skills of application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. So instead of merely memorizing pertinent information to repeat back on exams or in written work, you must dismantle the parts, apply them in new ways and to new problems, and determine what works well and what doesn’t. That is, you must use higher-order cognitive skills. For example, if your Economics instructor asks you, “Is Adam Smith’s argument for the ‘invisible hand’ that guides economic interaction convincing or not?” he or she is asking you to utilize a higher-order cognitive skill—namely, evaluation. For such an assignment, you cannot simply recite the information provided to you, but instead must assess its worth. The major critical thinking skills taught in this book—recognizing, analyzing, evaluating, and constructing arguments—are all higher-order cognitive skills.

Critical thinking skills are useful in college courses for yet another reason. As you learn more about a subject, you move beyond the material everyone in the discipline accepts to ideas, theses, and formulations that experts in the field disagree about. For example, because you have been exposed to American history throughout your education, it might appear that all the “facts” about American history have already been discovered and agreed upon. But historians argue, sometimes vehemently, over the credibility of eye-witness testimony, the usefulness of recently acquired documents or artifacts, and the value of innovative research methods. In your college history courses, you are expected to analyze and evaluate these kinds of arguments.

Consider, for example, a debate between historians and a psychoanalyst over whether to accept an eye-witness report of an uprising of prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. The historians argued that the woman’s testimony was useless because she remembered four chimneys exploding, but only one chimney had been destroyed. The psychoanalyst who had interviewed her disagreed. Her testimony was valuable because it affirmed what had previously been thought impossible—that Jewish armed resistance had in fact occurred. How should we understand such disagreements? Strong critical thinking skills can help you understand what’s at issue in controversies like these, understand the strengths and flaws in each side’s reasoning, and reach your own conclusion.

Argumentation plays an important part in other disciplines, too. For example, public policy programs often must prepare students to choose a course of action by determining which of two opposing causal explanations is the more powerful. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina provides one such example. According to a 2005 article from the Washington Post, two different agencies—the Army Corps of Engineers and the Louisiana State University (LSU) Hurricane Center—disagreed on the cause of the breaching of the flood walls that resulted in extensive damage to the city. The army blamed the flooding on surges that were too massive for the flood-protection system. However, the LSU Hurricane Center provided evidence that the storm surges never overtopped the flood-protection system. LSU placed the blame for flooding on poor design and/or construction of the flood walls. Students studying to become public policy analysts have to determine which argument is stronger in order to prevent future disasters.

For courses in all disciplines—whether history, sociology, biology, business, or anything else—arguments play a large role in the college classroom. Having information, especially in the Internet era, is not sufficient in your advanced courses. You must be able to use that information as never before by applying it in novel situations and critically appraising the results of others doing the same. That is, you must be able to recognize, analyze, evaluate, and construct arguments in a variety of disciplines.

Using Critical Thinking in the Workplace

Each year, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) asks employers which abilities they want college graduates to possess. At or near the top of that list each year is “analytical reasoning,” the kind of critical thinking skills taught in this text. Yet accounting majors might ask, “Aren’t mathematical and business skills more important for a career as an accountant?” Likewise, nursing majors might suggest that knowledge of medicine is more important for them. Although accountants and nurses obviously need these skills, they must also have a full complement of higher-order thinking skills. People in these kinds of careers must be prepared to solve difficult problems by applying their knowledge to new situations. In addition, they must be able to decide which new ideas they should accept or reject and be able to justify their decisions. On any given day, people in these careers, and most of the careers you may be considering after college, must be able to effectively use critical thinking skills.

For example, suppose, at work, one of your employees asks to take a week off the following month and you respond like this:

A week off next month? Do you think that work is just somewhere to drop in once in a while? Some other employee will have to do your work in addition to his or her own, and that’s certainly not fair. Sorry. Forget it!

Does this seem like a reasoned response to the employee’s request? Notice how you have distorted the request. Instead of objecting to the person being gone for a week, you have presented his or her position as thinking that “work is just somewhere to drop in once in a while.” Is that a fair appraisal of the request? We don’t think so.

Here is a more balanced response you can give:

A week off next month? I’m afraid that’s not going to work out. February is our busiest month due to Valentine’s Day, and we already have two people who will be gone for medical reasons. I’m afraid it will have to wait.

Even though you have still turned down the request, by giving a fair and honest justification for your response, you have shown the employee both courtesy and respect.

Using Critical Thinking Skills in Civic Life

Not only are critical thinking skills useful in the classroom and workplace, but also they will serve you well as a consumer in the marketplace. Advertisements are notorious sources of nonrational means of persuasion.

Although most of us may be naturally wary whenever someone is trying to sell us a product, much advertising can be quite persuasive—perhaps at our expense. Good critical reasoning skills can prevent us from succumbing to persuasive appeals that are neither rational nor reasonable. People are emotional creatures, and descriptions of cozy fireplaces, sounds of sizzling steaks, and images of frosty beer mugs all tug at our minds powerfully. Sadly, the result is too often the purchase of a product that we don’t really need, with a luster that fades all too quickly. With polished reasoning skills, such as the ability to detect fallacious reasoning, we are better able to assess the reasons we have been given to buy a particular product.

Let’s look at an example of an ad you might encounter. Suppose you read this:

Why spend years earning a college degree? With AcademicDegree.com, you can earn a degree in as little as three months and begin earning the good salary you deserve. Visit our website to begin your new life today.

At first glance, this might sound very appealing. After all, college is hard work, and it takes a long time. That’s especially true these days when costs have risen and the majority of students have to hold down one or two part-time jobs in addition to their classes. Of course, it is tempting to think that you could get your degree in a much shorter time. But notice the qualifier “in as little as three months.” What does this tell us? It will take three months, at the minimum, but it certainly could be much longer. Also, the ad mentions the good salary “you deserve.” So everybody that reads this ad deserves this good salary? That’s unlikely. The ad also doesn’t mention the cost of this great education or the percentage of AcademicDegree.com graduates obtaining these “good” salaries. Finally, when you think about it, what can you learn in such a short time that will really be of use to you? You might be provided with some information, but you certainly will not have the time to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that employers demand.

The world of politics also tries to grab your attention, your support, and your dollars. In many cases, it might seem wiser to let your favorite political party decide for you about whether or not health-care reform, bank regulation, or additional money for a war is a good idea. However, if you want to think for yourself and make your own decisions about who and what warrant your support, you need to have critical thinking skills. With so very much at stake, politicians and partisans of all stripes will use whatever they can to persuade you to support them and their causes. However, to make a smart decision, you really must insist on looking at the evidence and making your own judgments.

One of the most celebrated critical thinkers in history is Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher. He was executed because he questioned the wisdom of the authorities. Socrates famously declared at his trial, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, Apology 38a). The kind of life Socrates was advocating by this claim is one built on a sound foundation of knowledge, principles, and good habits. Rather than merely accepting what everyone else did and said, Socrates carefully examined the basis for his society’s beliefs and practices. Although we hope that you never face the same fate as Socrates, we believe his life offers an important lesson: Critical thinking is essential for living in a democratic society. You are responsible for making decisions that affect both your own life and the lives of your fellow citizens, and you need to be able to think carefully about arguments so that you can make better choices.

Developing Critical Thinking Skills

We hope that the evidence we’ve presented here has left you ready to begin improving your critical thinking abilities. However, you may wonder exactly how you will acquire these skills. In this book, you will learn to think critically about arguments by developing the skills of argument recognition, analysis, evaluation, and construction. Those four skills are composed of many narrower skills, and you will learn them one step at a time. As you work through this book, you can use the flowchart featured on the inside front cover of the book to see where you are in the process.

Acquiring skills is not like acquiring information. Rather, skill building is a matter of forming good habits. For example, if you want to master a musical instrument, a sport, or a new language, you must practice scales, drills, or conjugations. You must repeat the same skills until they become second nature. Think about a time you watched someone who is extraordinarily good at something. His or her performance seemed effortless, but we know that it was not. It took hours and hours of practice to get to that point. You learn critical thinking skills the same way you learn any other skill. To become a better thinker, you will need to commit yourself to a practice regimen.

Fortunately, you’re not alone. With the help of your instructor, we will coach you through this process. Because this book is devoted entirely to helping you develop critical thinking skills in a progressive fashion, it includes the following features:

· A step-by-step explanation of each skill.

· Plenty of examples to demonstrate how you apply each skill.

· “Your Turn!” exercises, which provide opportunities for you to reflect on and apply a skill or concept immediately after it’s described and explained.

· Lots and lots of exercises for you to practice on, progressing from easier to more challenging ones.

· Comprehensive exercises, “Putting It All Together,” aimed at incorporating the acquired critical thinking skills into your writing.

· “One Step Further” activities at the end of each chapter to provide you more challenging, real-world applications of critical thinking skills.

· Answers to selected problems at the back of the book so that you can check your progress along the way.

Chapter 2. Recognizing Arguments

Identifying Claims

Accurately recognizing arguments requires knowing when a passage satisfies the definition of an argument, so it is to that definition we now turn. The definition makes clear that an argument must be a set of claims. Therefore, our first step in learning to recognize arguments is detecting when a passage contains a set of claims. A passage that does not contain a set of claims is not an argument. But before counting claims, we need to understand what a claim is so that we know what we are counting.

A claim is a statement that has truth-value; that is, it can be either true or false. Some examples of claims include the following:

The state of California is bordered on one side by the Pacific Ocean.

The sun is in orbit around Earth.

Marilyn Monroe liked to eat persimmons.

Most Americans, at least, would recognize the claim in the first sentence as obviously true. Hopefully, everyone understands that the second claim is false. And it is unlikely that anyone reading this book knows whether or not the third claim is true. All three of these statements, however, are claims regardless of whether they are true, whether they are false, or whether you know their truth-value (their truth or falsity).

Although claims are expressed in sentences, not every sentence is a claim. For example, questions, commands, exclamations, and greetings are not claims. To illustrate, none of the following sentences is a claim because none of them could be true or false.

Counting Claims

Now that we have defined what a claim is, we can focus on what the definition means by a set of claims. In this context, a setof claims is at least two claims. Thus, by definition, an argument must contain a minimum of two claims. So, to determine whether a passage contains an argument, you must first count its claims: If it contains fewer than two claims, it is not an argument.

When counting claims, you must keep four considerations in mind. First, a single claim can be represented by more than one sentence. This is because sentences can express the same meaning in different ways. Arguers will often present the conclusion at the beginning and at the end of the argument. Notice this technique in the following example.

You should vote against Proposition 8. It violates the equal protection rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California. Therefore, this proposition should be opposed.

You may notice that each sentence in the above paragraph expresses a claim. How many claims are there in total? Although there are three sentences, there are only two claims. The sentences “You should vote against Proposition 8” and “Therefore, this proposition should be opposed” express the same claim. That is, they mean the same thing, and thus count as only one claim.

Looking for Reasons

When determining whether a passage contains an argument, you can classify any passages with fewer than two claims as nonarguments. But it doesn’t follow that every passage containing a set of claims is an argument. The definition of argument has a further requirement. An argument, remember, is a set of claims that offers reasons as evidence for the truth of one of its claims.

So the second step in recognizing arguments is to see whether one of the claims offers a reason for another claim. Accurately making this determination can be challenging, but fortunately, many arguers utilize inference indicators—those words or phrases discussed above that signal that one claim is offered as a reason for another claim. Some inference indicators, such as the word because, signal that the claim following them is a reason. Other inference indicators, such as the word therefore, signal that a claim preceding them is a reason. (See the table below for commonly used inference indicators.)

As discussed in the previous section, these terms sometimes are used with alternative meanings, as when the word since is used to indicate time. However, when they are being used as inference indicators, they make clear not only that the passage contains more than one claim, but also that one of the claims offers a reason for another.

Let’s look at a few examples to see how inference indicators can help us find reasons. Consider this one.

The auto parts store was burglarized because the employees forgot to lock the back door.

Notice that although there is only one sentence, there are two claims, which are combined with the word because. The inference indicator because signals that the claim following it is a reason.

The claim “The employees forgot to lock the back door” provides a reason for the claim “The auto parts store was burglarized.”

Next, consider this one.

The burglar is armed, so he’s dangerous.

Again, notice that although there is only one sentence, there are two claims, which are combined with the word so. As you can see from the table above, so is a synonym for therefore; it signals that the claim preceding it is a reason.

The claim “The burglar is armed” provides a reason for the claim “The burglar is dangerous.”

Let’s consider one more example.

A 9mm casing was found at the scene of the crime, and 9mm bullets are used only in pistols. Therefore, a pistol was the weapon used by the gunman.

How many claims does this passage contain? Although there are two sentences, there are three claims presented. The inference indicator therefore signals that the two claims preceding it (separated by and) are both reasons. “A 9mm casing was found at the scene of the crime” and “9mm bullets are used only in pistols” provide reasons for the claim “A pistol was the weapon used by the gunman.”